[1] A work entitled _Proposals and Reasons for constituting a Council
of Trade in Scotland_ was published anonymously at Edinburgh in 1701.
It was republished at Glasgow in 1751 with Law's name attached; but
several references in the state papers of the time mention William
Paterson (1658-1719), founder of the Bank of England, as the author
of the plan therein propounded. Even if Law had nothing to do with
the composition of the work, he must have read it and been influenced
by it. This may explain how it contains the germs of many of the
developments of the "system." Certainly the suggestion of a central
board, to manage great commercial undertakings, to furnish occupation
for the poor, to encourage mining, fishing and manufactures, and to
bring about a reduction in the rate of interest, was largely realized
in the Mississippi scheme. See Bannister's Life of William Paterson
(ed. 1858), and _Writings of William Paterson_ (2nd ed., 3 vols.,
1859).
LAW, WILLIAM (1686-1761), English divine, was born at King's Cliffe,
Northamptonshire. In 1705 he entered as a sizar at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge; in 1711 he was elected fellow of his college and was
ordained. He resided at Cambridge, teaching and taking occasional duty
until the accession of George I., when his conscience forbade him to
take the oaths of allegiance to the new government and of abjuration of
the Stuarts. His Jacobitism had already been betrayed in a tripos speech
which brought him into trouble; and he was now deprived of his
fellowship and became a non-juror. For the next few years he is said to
have been a curate in London. By 1727 he was domiciled with Edward
Gibbon (1666-1736) at Putney as tutor to his son Edward, father of the
historian, who says that Law became "the much honoured friend and
spiritual director of the whole family." In the same year he accompanied
his pupil to Cambridge, and resided with him as governor, in term time,
for the next four years. His pupil then went abroad, but Law was left at
Putney, where he remained in Gibbon's house for more than ten years,
acting as a religious guide not only to the family but to a number of
earnest-minded folk who came to consult him. The most eminent of these
were the two brothers John and Charles Wesley, John Byrom the poet,
George Cheyne the physician and Archibald Hutcheson, M.P. for Hastings.
The household was dispersed in 1737. Law was parted from his friends,
and in 1740 retired to King's Cliffe, where he had inherited from his
father a house and a small property. There he was presently joined by
two ladies: Mrs Hutcheson, the rich widow of his old friend, who
recommended her on his death-bed to place herself under Law's spiritual
guidance, and Miss Hester Gibbon, sister to his late pupil. This curious
trio lived for twenty-one years a life wholly given to devotion, study
and charity, until the death of Law on the 9th of April 1761.