One particular incident has a conspicuous place on the political side of Mr. Gladstone"s life. Among the elements in the scheme was the abolition of the practice of acquiring military rank by money purchase. Public opinion had been mainly roused by Mr. Trevelyan, who now first made his mark in that a.s.sembly where he was destined to do admirable work and achieve high eminence and popularity. An Act of George III. abolished selling of offices in other departments, but gave to the crown the discretion of retaining the practice in the army, if so it should seem fit. This discretion had been exercised by the issue of a warrant sanctioning and regulating that practice; commissions in the army were bought and sold for large sums of money, far in excess of the sums fixed by the royal warrant; and vested interests on a large scale grew up in consequence. The subst.i.tution, instead of this abusive system, of promotion by selection, was one of the first steps in army reform. No effective reorganisation was possible without it. As Mr. Gladstone put it, the nation must buy back its own army from its own officers. No other proceeding in the career of the ministry aroused a more determined and violent opposition. It offended a powerful profession with a host of parliamentary friends; the officers disliked liberal politics, they rather disdained a civilian master, and they fought with the vigour peculiar to irritated caste.
The first question before parliament depended upon the Commons voting the money to compensate officers who had acquired vested interests. If that were secure, there was nothing to hinder the crown, in the discretion committed to it by the statute, from cancelling the old warrant. Instead of this, ministers determined to abolish purchase by bill. Obstruction was long and sustained. The principle of the bill was debated and re-debated on every amendment in committee, and Mr. Gladstone reported that "during his whole parliamentary life, he had been accustomed to see cla.s.s interests of all kinds put themselves on their defence under the supposition of being a.s.sailed, yet he had never seen a case where the modes of operation adopted by the professing champions were calculated to leave such a painful impression on the mind." Credible whispers were heard of the open hostility of high military personages. In one of the debates of this time upon the army (Mar. 23, 1871), speakers freely implied that the influence of what was called the horse guards was actively adverse to reform. Mr. Gladstone, taking this point, laid it down that "military authorities without impairing in the slightest degree the general independence of their political opinions, should be in full harmony with the executive as to the military plans and measures which it might propose; and that only on this principle could the satisfactory working of our inst.i.tutions be secured."
The correspondence with the Queen was copious. In one letter, after mentioning that parliament had been persuaded to extend the tenure of the commander-in-chief"s office beyond five years, and to allow the patronage and discipline of the army to be vested in him, though the secretary of state was responsible, Mr. Gladstone proceeds:-
It would have been impossible to procure the acquiescence of parliament in these arrangements, unless they had been accompanied with the declaration of Mr. Cardwell, made in the name of the cabinet, and seen and approved by your Majesty, that "it is of course necessary for the commander-in-chief to be in harmony with the government of the day" (Feb. 21, 1871), and with a similar declaration of Mr. Gladstone on March 23, 1871, also reported to, and approved by your Majesty, that while all political action properly so called was entirely free, yet the military plans and measures of the government must always have the energetic co-operation of the military chiefs of the army.
(M117) The end was of course inevitable.(235) The bill at last pa.s.sed the Commons, and then an exciting stage began. In the Lords it was immediately confronted by a dilatory resolution. In view of some such proceeding, Mr.
Gladstone (July 15) wrote to the Queen as to the best course to pursue, and here he first mentioned the step that was to raise such clamour:-
As the government judge that the illegality of over-regulation prices cannot continue, and as they can only be extinguished by putting an end to purchase, what has been chiefly considered is how to proceed with the greatest certainty and the smallest shock, and how to secure as far as may be for the officers all that has. .h.i.therto been asked on their behalf. With this view, the government think the first step would be to abolish the warrant under which prices of commissions are fixed. As the resolution of the House of Lords states the unwillingness of the House to take part in abolishing purchase until certain things shall have been done, it would not be applicable to a case in which, without its interposition, purchase would have been already abolished.
Two days later (July 17) the Lords pa.s.sed what Sir Roundell Palmer called "their ill-advised resolution." On July 18 the cabinet met and resolved to recommend the cancelling of the old warrant regulating purchase, by a new warrant abolishing purchase. It has been said or implied that this proceeding was forced imperiously upon the Queen. I find no evidence of this. In the language of Lord Halifax, the minister in attendance, writing to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne (July 19, 1871), the Queen "made no sort of difficulty in signing the warrant" after the case had been explained. In the course of the day she sent to tell Lord Halifax, that as it was a strong exercise of her power in apparent opposition to the House of Lords, she should like to have some more formal expression of the advice of the cabinet than was contained in an ordinary letter from the prime minister, dealing with this among other matters. Ministers agreed that the Queen had a fair right to have their advice on such a point of executive action on her part, recorded in a formal and deliberate submission of their opinion.
The advice was at once clothed in the definite form of a minute.
On July 20 Mr. Gladstone announced to a crowded and anxious House the abolition of purchase by royal warrant. The government, he said, had no other object but simplicity and despatch, and the observance of const.i.tutional usage. Amid some disorderly interruptions, Mr. Disraeli taunted the government with resorting to the prerogative of the crown to get out of a difficulty of their own devising. Some radicals used the same ill-omened word. After a spell of obstruction on the ballot bill, the bitter discussion on purchase revived, and Mr. Disraeli said that what had occurred early in the evening was "disgraceful to the House of Commons,"
and denounced "the shameful and avowed conspiracy of the cabinet" against the House of Lords. The latter expression was noticed by the chairman of committee and withdrawn, though Mr. Gladstone himself thought it the more allowable of the two.
In a letter to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Gladstone vindicated this transaction as follows:-
_July 26, "71._-I should like to a.s.sure myself that you really have the points of the case before you. 1. Was it not for us an indispensable duty to extinguish a gross, wide-spread, and most mischievous illegality, of which the existence had become certain and notorious? 2. Was it not also our duty to extinguish it in the best manner? 3. Was not the best manner that which, (_a_) made the extinction final; (_b_) gave the best, _i.e._ a statutory, t.i.tle for regulation prices; (_c_) granted an indemnity to the officers; (_d_) secured for them compensation in respect of over-regulation prices? 4. Did not the vote of the House of Lords stop us in this best manner of proceeding? 5. Did it absolve us from the duty of putting an end to the illegality? 6. What method of putting an end to it remained to us, except that which we have adopted?
(M118) Sir Roundell Palmer wrote, "I have always thought and said that the issuing of such a warrant was within the undoubted power of the crown....
It did and does appear to me that the course which the government took was the least objectionable course that could be taken under the whole circ.u.mstances of the case."(236) I can find nothing more clearly and more forcibly said upon this case than the judgment of Freeman, the historian-a man who combined in so extraordinary a degree immense learning with precision in political thought and language, and added to both the true spirit of manly citizenship:-
I must certainly protest against the word "prerogative" being used, as it has so often been of late, to describe Mr. Gladstone"s conduct with regard to the abolition of purchase in the army. By prerogative I understand a power not necessarily contrary to law, but in some sort beyond law-a power whose source must be sought for somewhere else than in the terms of an act of parliament. But in abolishing purchase by a royal warrant Mr. Gladstone acted strictly within the terms of an act of parliament, an act so modern as the reign of George III. He in truth followed a course which that act not only allowed but rather suggested.... I am not one of those who condemn Mr. Gladstone"s conduct in this matter; still I grant that the thing had an ill look. The difference I take to be this. Mr. Gladstone had two courses before him: he might abolish purchase by a royal warrant-that is, by using the discretion which parliament had given to the crown; or he might bring a bill into parliament to abolish purchase.... What gave the thing an ill look was that, having chosen the second way and not being able to carry his point that way, he then fell back on the first way. I believe that it was better to get rid of a foul abuse in the way in which it was got rid of, than not to get rid of it at all, especially as the House of Commons had already decided against it. Still, the thing did not look well. It might seem that by electing to bring a bill into parliament Mr. Gladstone had waived his right to employ the royal power in the matter.... I believe that this is one of those cases in which a strictly conscientious man like Mr. Gladstone does things from which a less conscientious man would shrink. Such a man, fully convinced of his own integrity, often thinks less than it would be wise to think of mere appearances, and so lays himself open to the imputation of motives poles asunder from the real ones.(237)
These last words undoubtedly explain some acts and tendencies that gave a handle to foes and perplexed friends.
II
Next let us turn to reform in a different field. All the highest abstract arguments were against secret voting. To have a vote is to have power; as Burke said, "liberty is power, when men act in bodies"; but the secret vote is power without responsibility. The vote is a trust for the commonwealth; to permit secrecy makes it look like a right conferred for a man"s own benefit. You enjoin upon him to give his vote on public grounds; in the same voice you tell him not to let the public know how he gives it.
Secrecy saps the citizen"s courage, promotes evasion, tempts to downright lying. Remove publicity and its checks, then all the mean motives of mankind-their malice, petty rivalries, pique, the prejudices that men would be ashamed to put into words even to themselves-skulk to the polling booth under a disguising cloak. Secrecy, again, prevents the statesman from weighing or testing the forces in character, stability, persistency, of the men by whom a majority has been built up, and on whose fidelity his power of action must depend. This strain of argument was worked out by J.
S. Mill(238) and others, and drew from Mr. Bright, who belonged to a different school of liberals, the gruff saying, that the worst of great thinkers is that they so often think wrong.
Though the abstract reasoning might be unanswerable, the concrete case the other way was irresistible. Experience showed that without secrecy in its exercise the suffrage was not free. The farmer was afraid of his landlord, and the labourer was afraid of the farmer; the employer could tighten the screw on the workman, the shopkeeper feared the power of his best customers, the debtor quailed before his creditor, the priest wielded thunderbolts over the faithful. Not only was the open vote not free; it exposed its possessor to so much bullying, molestation, and persecution, that his possession came to be less of a boon than a nuisance.
(M119) For forty years this question had been fought. The ballot actually figured in a clause of an early draft of the Reform bill of 1832. Grote, inspired by James Mill whose vigorous pleas for the ballot in his well-known article in 1830 were the high landmark in the controversy, brought it before parliament in an annual motion. When that admirable man quitted parliament to finish his great history of Greece, the torch was still borne onwards by other hands. Ballot was one of the five points of the charter. At nearly every meeting for parliamentary reform between the Crimean war and Disraeli"s bill of 1867, the ballot was made a cardinal point. General opinion fluctuated from time to time, and in the sixties journals of repute formally dismissed it as a dead political idea. The extension of the franchise in 1867 brought it to life again, and Mr.
Bright led the van in the election of 1868 by declaring in his address that he regarded the ballot as of the first importance. "Whether I look,"
he said, "to the excessive cost of elections, or to the tumult which so often attends them, or to the unjust and cruel pressure which is so frequently brought to bear upon the less independent cla.s.s of voters, I am persuaded that the true interest of the public and of freedom will be served by the system of secret and free voting." J. S. Mill had argued that the voter should name his candidate in the polling booth, just as the judge does his duty in a court open to the public eye. No, replied Bright, the jury-room is as important as the judge"s bench, and yet the jury-room is treated as secret, and in some countries the verdict is formally given by ballot. Some scandals in the way of electoral intimidation did much to ripen public opinion. One parliamentary committee in 1868 brought evidence of this sort to light, and another committee recommended secret voting as the cure.
Among those most ardent for the change from open to secret voting, the prime minister was hardly to be included. "I am not aware," he wrote to Lord Shaftesbury (Dec. 11, 1871), "of having been at any time a vehement opponent of the ballot. I have not been accustomed to attach to it a vital importance, but at any time, I think, within the last twenty or twenty-five years I should have regarded it as the legitimate complement of the present suffrage."(239) In the first speech he made as prime minister at Greenwich (Dec. 21, 1868) be said that there were two subjects that could not be overlooked in connection with the representation of the people. "One of them is the security afforded by the present system for perfect freedom in the giving of the vote, which vote has been not only not conferred as a favour, but imposed as a duty by the legislature on the members of the community. I have at all times given my vote in favour of open voting, but I have done so before, and I do so now, with an important reservation, namely, that whether by open voting or by whatsoever means, free voting must be secured."
A bill providing for vote by ballot, abolishing public nominations and dealing with corrupt practices in parliamentary elections was introduced by Lord Hartington in 1870. Little progress was made with it, and it was eventually withdrawn. But the government were committed to the principle, and at the end of July Mr. Gladstone took the opportunity of explaining his change of opinion on this question, in the debate on the second reading of a Ballot bill brought in by a private member. Now that great numbers who depended for their bread upon their daily labour had acquired the vote, he said, their freedom was threatened from many quarters. The secret vote appeared to be required by the social conditions under which they lived, and therefore it had become a necessity and a duty to give effect to the principle.
(M120) Yet after the cabinet had decided to make the ballot a ministerial measure, the head of the cabinet makes a rather pensive entry in his diary: "_July 27, 1870._-H. of C. Spoke on ballot, and voted in 324-230 with mind satisfied, and as to feeling, a lingering reluctance." How far this reluctance was due to misgivings on the merits of the ballot, how far to the doubts that haunt every ministerial leader as to the possibilities of parliamentary time, we do not know. The bill, enlarged and reintroduced next year, was entrusted to the hands of Mr. Forster-himself, like Mr.
Gladstone, a latish convert to the principle of secret voting-and by Forster"s persistent force and capacity for hard and heavy labour, after some eighteen days in committee, it pa.s.sed through the House of Commons.
After obstruction had been at last broken down, other well-known resources of civilisation remained, and the Lords threw out the bill.(240) It was novel, they said; it was dangerous, it had not been considered by the country or parliament (after eighteen days of committee and forty years of public discussion), it was incoherent and contradictory, and to enact vote by ballot was inevitably to overthrow the monarchy. Even the mightiest of American orators had said as much. "Above all things," Daniel Webster had adjured Lord Shaftesbury, "resist to the very last the introduction of the ballot; for as a republican, I tell you that the ballot can never co-exist with monarchical inst.i.tutions."
The rejection by the Lords stimulated popular insistence. At Whitby in the autumn (Sept. 2), Mr. Gladstone said the people"s bill had been pa.s.sed by the people"s House, and when it was next presented at the door of the House of Lords, it would be with an authoritative knock. He told Lord Houghton that he was sorry to see the agitation apparently rising against the House of Lords, though he had a strong opinion about the imprudence of its conduct on the Army bill, and especially on the Ballot bill. "There is no Duke of Wellington in these days. His reputation as a domestic statesman seems to me to rest almost entirely on his leadership of the peers between 1832 and 1841."
The bill was again pa.s.sed through the Commons in 1872. Mr. Gladstone was prepared for strong measures. The cabinet decided that if the House of Lords should hold to what the prime minister styled "the strange provision for optional secrecy," the government would withdraw the bill and try an autumn session, and if the Lords still hardened their hearts, "there would remain nothing but the last alternative to consider,"-these words, I a.s.sume, meaning a dissolution. Perhaps the opposition thought that a dissolution on the ballot might give to the ministerial Antaeus fresh energy. This time the Lords gave way, satisfied that the Measure had now at last been more adequately discussed,-the said discussion really consisting in no more than an adequate amount of violent language out of doors against the principle of a hereditary legislature.(241)
The results of the general election two years later as they affected party, are an instructive comment on all this trepidation and alarm. In one only of the three kingdoms the ballot helped to make a truly vital difference; it dislodged the political power of the Irish landlord. In England its influence made for purity, freedom, and decency, but it developed no new sources of liberal strength. On this aspect of things the first parliamentary precursor of the ballot made remarks that are worth a few lines of digression. "You will feel great satisfaction," his wife said to Grote one morning at their breakfast, "at seeing your once favourite measure triumph over all obstacles." "Since the wide expansion of the voting element," the historian replied, "I confess that the value of the ballot has sunk in my estimation. I don"t, in fact, think the elections will be affected by it one way or another, as far as party interests are concerned." "Still," his interlocutor persisted, "you will at all events get at the genuine preference of the const.i.tuency." "No doubt; but then, again, I have come to perceive that the choice between one man and another among the English people, signifies less than I used formerly to think it did. The English mind is much of one pattern, take whatsoever cla.s.s you will. The same favourite prejudices, amiable and otherwise; the same antipathies, coupled with ill-regulated though benevolent efforts to eradicate human evils, are well-nigh universal. A House of Commons cannot afford to be above its own const.i.tuencies in intelligence, knowledge, or patriotism."(242) In all this the element of truth is profound enough. In every change of political machinery the reformer promises and expects a new heaven and a new earth; then standing forces of national tradition, character, and inst.i.tution a.s.sert their strength, our millennium lags, and the chilled enthusiast sighs. He is unreasonable, as are all those who expect more from life and the world than life and the world have to give.
Yet here at least the reformer has not failed. The efficacy of secret voting is negative if we will, but it averts obvious mischiefs alike from old privileged orders in states and churches and from new.
III
(M121) In finance the country looked for wonders. Ministers were called the cabinet of financiers. The cabinet did, in fact, contain as many as five men who were at one time or another chancellors of the exchequer, and its chief was recognised through Europe as the most successful financier of the age. No trailing cloud of glory, as in 1853 or 1860, attended the great ministry, but sound and substantial results were achieved, testifying to a thrifty and skilful management, such as might have satisfied the ambition of a generation of chancellors. The head of the new government promised retrenchment as soon as the government was formed. He told his const.i.tuents at Greenwich (Dec. 21, 1868) that he was himself responsible for having taken the earliest opportunity of directing the public mind to the subject of expenditure at an opening stage of the late election; for "although there may be times when the public mind may become comparatively relaxed in regard to the general principles of economy and thrift, it is the special duty of public men to watch the very beginnings of evil in that department. It is a very easy thing to notice these mischiefs when they have grown to a gigantic size; but it commonly happens that when financial error has arisen to those dimensions, the case has become too aggravated for a remedy." He reminded them of the addition that had been made to the standing charges of the country in the ordinary and steadily recurring annual estimates presented to parliament. He said that he knew no reason why three millions should have been added during the two years of tory government to the cost of our establishments:-
It is one thing, I am very well aware, to put on three millions; it is another thing to take them off. When you put three millions on to the public expenditure, you create a number of new relations, a number of new offices, a number of new claims, a number of new expectations. And you can"t, and what is more, you ought not to, destroy all these in a moment. And, therefore, the work of retrenchment must be a well-considered and a gradual work.
But I ask you to look at the names of the men who have been, placed in charge of the great spending departments of the country.
The study, the idea that has governed the formation of the present administration has been to place able and upright men in charge of the public purse-men of administrative experience, men of proved ability, men, lastly, holding their seats in the House of Commons, and, therefore, immediately responsible to the representatives of the people. It would not become me to promise what we can do; but this I can tell you, that my friends connected with the various departments most concerned in the public expenditure have, even before the early moment at which I speak, directed their very first attention to this subject, and that I, for one, shall be as deeply disappointed as you can be, if in the estimates which it will be our duty to present in February you do not already perceive some results of their opening labours.
One of Mr. Gladstone"s first letters to a colleague was addressed to Mr.
Lowe, containing such hints and instructions upon treasury administration as a veteran pilot might give about lights, buoys, channels, currents, to a new captain. "No man wants so much sympathy," he said, "as the chancellor of the exchequer, no man gets so little. Nor is there any position so lamentable for him as to be defeated in proposing some new charge on the public conceived or adopted by himself. He is like an ancient soldier wounded in the back. Whereas even defeat in resisting the raids of the House of Commons on the public purse is honourable, and always turns out well in the end." He sent Mr. Lowe a list of the subjects that he had tried in parliament without success, and of those that he had in his head but was not able to take in hand. They make a fine example of an active and reforming mind.(243) "What commonly happened, in cases of this kind, in my time, was as follows: The opposition waited for a development of discontent and resistance among some small fraction of liberal members. When this was compact in itself, or was at all stimulated by const.i.tuencies, they sent out habitually strong party whips, and either beat me, or forced me to withdraw in order to avoid beating, or exposing our men to local disadvantage. This game, I hope, will not be quite so easy now."
(M122) The first two of Mr. Lowe"s budgets were on the lines thus traced beforehand. The shilling duty on a quarter of corn was abolished-"an exceeding strong case," as Mr. Gladstone called it-taxes on conveyances were adjusted, and the duty on fire insurance was removed. The only notable contribution to the standing problem of widening the base of taxation was the proposal to put a tax on matches.(244) This was a notion borrowed from the United States, and much approved by Mr. Wells, the eminent free-trade financier of that country. In England it was greeted with violent disfavour. It was denounced as reactionary, as violating the first principles of fiscal administration, and as the very worst tax that had been proposed within recent memory, for is not a match a necessary of life, and to tax a necessary of life is to go against Adam Smith and the books. The money, it was said, ought to have been got either by raising the taxes on tea and sugar, or else by putting the shilling duty back on corn again, though for that matter, tea, sugar, and corn are quite as much necessaries of life as, say, two-thirds of the matches used.(245) No care, however, was given to serious argument; in fact, the tax was hardly argued at all. Some hundreds of poor women employed at a large match factory in the east end of London trooped to protest at Westminster, and the tax was quickly dropped. It was perhaps unlucky that the proposal happened to be a.s.sociated with Mr. Lowe, for his uncomplimentary criticisms on the working cla.s.s four or five years before were neither forgotten nor forgiven. A Latin pun that he meant to print on the proposed halfpenny match stamp, _ex luce lucellum_, "a little gain out of a little light,"
was good enough to divert a college common room, but it seemed flippant to people who expected to see the bread taken out of their mouths.
On the other side of the national account Mr. Gladstone was more successful. He fought with all his strength for a reduction of the public burdens, and in at least one of these persistent battles with colleagues of a less economising mind than himself, he came near to a breach within the walls of his cabinet. In this thankless region he was not always zealously seconded. On Dec. 14, 1871, he enters in his diary: "Cabinet, 3-7. For two and a half hours we discussed army estimates, mainly on reduction, and the chancellor of exchequer did not speak one word." The result is worth recording. When Mr. Gladstone was at the exchequer the charge on naval, military, and civil expenditure had been reduced between 1860 and 1865 from thirty-eight millions to thirty-one. Under the Derby-Disraeli government the figure rose in two or three years to thirty-four millions and three-quarters. By 1873 it had been brought down again to little more than thirty-two millions and a quarter.(246) That these great reductions were effected without any sacrifice of the necessary strength and efficiency of the forces, may be inferred from the fact that for ten years under successive administrations the charge on navy and army underwent no substantial augmentation. The process had been made easier, or made possible, by the necessity under which the German war laid France, then our only rival in naval force, to reduce her expenditure upon new ships. The number of seamen was maintained, but a reduction was effected in the inefficient vessels in the foreign squadrons; two costly and almost useless dockyards were suppressed (much to the disadvantage of Mr. Gladstone"s own const.i.tuents), and great abuses were remedied in the dockyards that were left. In the army reduction was made possible without lessening the requisite strength, by the withdrawal of troops from Canada, New Zealand, and the Cape. This was due to the wise policy of Lord Granville and Mr. Gladstone. In spite of the increased cost of education, of army purchase, of the rise of prices, and all the other causes that swell estimates, the country was still spending no more in 1873 than when Mr. Gladstone took office in 1868.(247) To this story we have to add that nearly thirty millions of debt were paid off in the five years. Well might men point to such a record, as the best proof that the promises of economy made at the hustings had been seriously kept.(248)
(M123) When the time came for him to take stock of his own performances, Mr. Lowe, who was apt to be cleverer than he was wise, made a speech at Sheffield, in September 1873, that almost recalls the self-laudation of Cicero over the immortal glories of his consulate. He disclaimed any share of the admirable genius for finance that had been seen in Pitt, Peel, or Gladstone, but he had read in the Latin grammar that economy was a great revenue, and he thought that he could at least discharge the humble task of hindering extravagance. "The first thing I did as chancellor of the exchequer," he said, "was to issue an order that no new expenditure whatever would be allowed without my opinion first being taken upon it....
In an evil hour for my own peace and quietness I took upon myself-I believe it was never taken upon himself by any chancellor of the exchequer before-the duty of protecting the revenue, instead of leaving it to be done by an inferior official." After reciting his figures, he wound up with a resounding paean: "So far as I am aware, up to the present time there is no one who can challenge comparison with what has been done during these years. Sir R. Peel and Mr. Gladstone routed out protection in your trade, a measure that conferred immortal honour on them, but so far as relieving you from taxation is concerned, I believe you would seek in vain in British history for anything like what has been done during these last four years." This strange vein was more than a little distasteful to the prime minister, as a letter to Lord Granville upon it shows (Sept. 9, 1873):-
Lowe"s speech at Sheffield is really too bad, and free as it is from all evil intention, it ill.u.s.trates the invariable solecisms of his extraordinary mind.... He says no chancellor of the exchequer before did treasury business, but left it to a subordinate official.... Some have done more, some less. No one, probably, as much as Lowe, but some almost as much. I did less, perhaps much less. But I hold that the first duties of the chancellor of the exchequer are outside the treasury. One of them is to look after and control the great expenditures and estimates.
In this duty I am sorry to say he was wretchedly deficient; yet he coolly takes to himself the credit of army and navy reductions, which is due to Cardwell and Childers (who, in his admirable speech, did not say a word, I think, for himself), and with which every member of the cabinet had almost as much to do as he had. I can speak from experience, for I know what it has been to have had cast upon my shoulders the most important and most offensive duty of the financial minister.... He has ample merit to stand on, in a great amount of labour done, and generally well done, and with good results for the public. Much of the unpopularity is unjust; a little patience would set all right.