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716 NOTES TO VOLUME I.
was elected a member of the Diet for Sundswall. Here he opposed
a measure for the manufacture of salt, which had been granted by
the King to an English company, whereby he gained some renown .
In 1730, his work on political economy appeared, entitled Arcana
Economice et Commercii, which had all the defects and also the
excellencies of a self-taught man, being exceedingly prolix, and lacking
order and system, but containing in it some shrewd and brilliant
passages. On the strength of this work and his merits in general,
the House of Burghers, of which he was a member, sent a memorial
to the King, recommending Nordencrantz for an honourable position
in the State. He thereupon received the appointment of consul at
Lisbon, and was shortly afterwards promoted to the post of chargé
d’affaires of Sweden at the Court of Lisbon. By his own request
he was recalled to Sweden in 1736, when he married a rich wife,
and spent the next ten years of his life in the country, writing a work
on Spain, which was printed in 1743. In the same year he was
ennobled, when he changed his name from Backmansson to Norden
crantz. In 1747 he was appointed councillor of Commerce, but
resigned the office in 1762.
In the year 1755 a rise in the course of exchange excited the
attention of the whole country, and then arose those circumstances
which are described in the Introduction to Document 174, and which
on the one hand induced Nordencrantz to publish the work described
in the Introduction to Document 181, and on the other hand led
Swedenborg to compose Documents 174, 175, 176, and 177. Norden
crantz belonged to the party of the “caps," and Swedenborg was
more in favour of the “hats;". Nordencrantz sought the cause of
the rise of exchange in a combination of some of the leading
merchants of Stockholm and in the Swedish form of government,
of which Count A. J. von Höpken was the head. Swedenborg, in
Document 174, traced the effects to entirely different causes ; besides, he
stood up boldly for the existing form of Government in Sweden , and
defended Count Höpken and his colleagues against the attacks made
upon them by the party of the “ caps.” Swedenborg’s share in the
proceedings of the Diet of 1761 is described by Count Höpken in a
letter to General Tuxen (see Section X) in these words : “ The most solid
and best written memorials at the Diet of 1761, on matters of finance,
were presented by Swedenborg. In one of these he refuted a large
work in quarto on the same subject, quoting from it all the corre
sponding passages, and all this in less than a sheet." This was the
book published by Nordencrantz; and Swedenborg’s review of it
constitutes Document 181. The racy correspondence resulting thence
between Swedenborg and Nordencrantz is contained in Documents
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