So he built ships of war, and made harbors for them, gave charters to East and West India Companies, planted colonies in India and America, decreed tariffs to protect infant manufactures, gave bounties to all kinds of artisans, encouraged manufacturing industry, and declared war on the whole brood of aristocratic peculators that absorbed the revenues of the kingdom.

Intellectually he stood at the head of the nation, and was a man of great integrity of character, as austere and upright as Guizot, having no toleration for freebooters and peculators.

[Fr.]; shoplifter. swindler, peculator; forger, coiner; fence, receiver of stolen goods, duffer; smasher. burglar, housebreaker; cracksman^, magsman [Slang]; Bill Sikes, Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild.

We have all heard of peculiar thefts from time to time, and the records of stolen stoves and other heavy articles seem to show that few things are sufficiently bulky to be absolutely secure from the peculator or kleptomaniac.

They were Public Peculators.

It was Ciampolo, a peculator in the service of the good Thiebault, king of Navarre.

The Galli, the Sacchetti, were great; so was the old trunk of the Calfucci; so was that of the peculators who now blush to hear of a measure of wheat; and the Sizii and the Arrigucci were drawn in pomp to their civic chairs.

They are appointed to guard the approaches to the public Treasury, and they occupy positions that expose them to all the temptations and seductions which the cupidity of peculators and fraudulent claimants can prompt them to employ.

The armadillo is equally secure of his prey with the hawk or leopard; and Sir Charles Bell mentions a class of thieves in India, who, having, through extreme patience and command of nerve, acquired the power of motion imperceptibly slow, are the most formidable of all peculators, and almost defy precaution.

The sufferers murmur, and complain; but the government appears to wink at the oppression for a time, and reserves its dreadful vengeance till the annual review, on the plains of Fez, where the collected spoils of the cruel peculator are seized, and himself deposed, imprisoned, and the whole fruit of his rapine transferred to the royal treasury.

There also was that terror of colonial peculators, the old ex-Intendant Morales, who, having quarrelled with every governor of Louisiana he ever saw, was now snarling at Casa Calvo from force of habit.

It was the constant policy of Rome to tolerate and patronize the various people in its provinces, to respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from the peculator.