three millions
a subscription which at the right moment would probably have been
twenty or thirty.[294]

In a letter to W. R. Farquhar (March 8, 1861) he makes further remarks,
which are introspective and autobiographic:--

Looking back now upon those of my proceedings in 1853 which related
to interest upon exchequer bills and to the reduction of interest
on the public debt, I think that there was nothing in the proposals
themselves which might not have taken full and quick effect, if
they had been made at a time which I may best describe as the time
that precedes high-water with respect to abundance of money and
security of the market. As respects exchequer bills, I am decidedly
of opinion that the rates of premium current for some years before
'53 were wholly incompatible with a sound state of things: and the
fluctuations then were even greater than since. Still I think that
I committed an error from want of sufficient quickness in
discerning the signs of the times, for we were upon the very eve of
an altered state of things, and any alteration of a kind at all
serious was enough to make the period unfit for those grave
operations. It is far from being the first or only time when I have
had reason to lament my own deficiency in the faculty of rapid and
comprehensive observation. I failed to see that high-water was just
past; and that although the tide had not perceptibly fallen, yet it
was going to fall. The truth likewise is this (to go a step further
in my confessions) that almost all my experience in money affairs
had been of a most difficult and trying kind, under circumstances
which admitted of no choice but obliged me to sail always very
near the wind, and this induced a habit of more daring navigation
than I could now altogether approve. Nor will I excuse myself by
saying that others were deceived like me, for none of them were in
a condition to have precisely my responsibility.

Another note contributes a further point of explanation: 'I have always
imagined that this fault was due to my experience in the affairs of the
Hawarden and Oak Farm estates, where it was an incessant course of
sailing near the wind, and there was really no other hope.'

INCOME-TAX

Seven years later Mr. Gladstone, once more chancellor of the exchequer,
again pro