ives deepest down into the mass of the community, and adapts
its arrangements to the wants of the greatest number." His exultation in
the stimulus given by fiscal freedom to extended trade, and therefore to
more abundant employment at higher wages, was less the exultation of the
economist watching the intoxicating growth of wealth, than of the social
moralist surveying multiplied access to fuller life and more felicity. I
always remember, in a roving talk with him in 1891, when he was a very old
man and ill, how he gradually took fire at the notion--I forget how it
arose--of the iniquities under which the poor man suffered a generation
ago. "See--the sons and daughters went forth from their homes; the cost of
postage was so high that correspondence was practically prohibited; yet
the rich all the time, by the privilege of franking, carried on a really
immense amount of letter-writing absolutely free. Think what a softening
of domestic exile; what an aid in keeping warm the feel of family
affection, in mitigating the rude breach in the circle of the hearth."
This vigorous sympathy was with Mr. Gladstone a living part of his
Christian enthusiasm. "If you would gain mankind," said old Jeremy
Bentham, "the best way is to appear to love them, and the best way of
appearing to love them, is to love them in reality." When he thought of
the effect of his work at the exchequer, he derived "profound and
inestimable consolation from the reflection that while the rich have been
growing richer, the poor have become less poor." Yet, as my readers have
by this time found out, there never was a man less in need of Aristotle's
warning, that to be forever hunting after the useful befits not those of
free and lofty soul.(41) As was noted by contemporaries, like all the
followers of Sir Robert Peel he never thought without an eye to
utilitarian results, but mixed with that attitude of mind he had "a
certain refinement and subtlety of religiousness that redeemed it from the
coldness, if it sometimes overshadowed the clearness, of mere
statesmanlike prudence." On the other hand, he had "the Lancashire
temperament."

III

(M22) This thought and feeling for the taxpayer was at the root of another
achievement, no less original than the peculiar interest that he was able
to excite by his manner of stating a financial case. Peel was only prime
minister for five years, and only four months chancellor. Mr. Gladstone
was prime minister for twe