otion that he has not
yet resorted to those mild means of exhortation--what the
presbyterians call dealing with an erring brother--from which we
had hoped much. The unhappy men may therefore yet come to their
senses; in any case I rejoice to think that you, in the new
capacity of mad doctor, are sure to cure them and abate the
mischief, if the which do not happen (I quote the new Tennyson):--

"some evil chance
Will make the smouldering scandal break and blaze
Before the people and our Lord the King."(44)

After a due amount of amusing correspondence, the recusant confederacy
struck their colours and paid their money.

When he went to Corfu in the _Terrible_ in 1858, some two or three
sleeping cabins were made by wooden partitions put up round spaces
taken off the deck. Thirteen years after, his unslumbering memory
made this an illustrating point in an exhortation to a first lord
of the admiralty not to disregard small outgoings. "I never in my
life was more astonished than upon being told the sum this had
cost; I think it was in hundreds of pounds, where I should have
expected tens." Sometimes, no doubt, this thrift descended to the
ludicrous. On this same expedition to Corfu, among the small
pieces of economy enjoined by Mr. Gladstone on the members of his
mission, one was to scratch out the address on the parchment label
of the despatch bags and to use the same label in returning the
bag to the colonial office in London. One day while the secretary
was busily engaged in thus saving a few halfpence, an officer came
into the room, having arrived by a special steamer from Trieste at
a cost of between seven and eight hundred pounds. The ordinary
mail-boat would have brought him a very few hours later. We can
hardly wonder that the heroical economist denounced such pranks as
"profligate" and much else. Though an individual case may often
enough seem ludicrous, yet the system and the spirit engendered by
it were to the taxpayer, that is to the nation, priceless.

IV

One of the few failures of this active and fruitful period was the
proposal (1863) that charities should pay income-tax upon the returns from
their endowments. What is their exemption but the equivalent of a gift to
them from the general taxpayer? He has to make good the sum that ought in
reason and equity to have been paid by