m
involved, not by the budget of February but by the consent of July to the
scheme which involved the borrowing. No doubt there are palliating
circumstances; and lastly the grievous difficulty of choice between
mischievous [_illegible_] and mischievous resignation. Still I must say,
it is in retrospect, as the people and parliament have a right to judge
it, a bad and unworkmanlike business, and under a skilful analysis of it
in the House of Commons (which there is no one opposite fit to make,
except it be Northcote, who perhaps scruples it) I should wince. All these
things and others more inward than these, make sore places in the mind;
but on the other hand, that I may close with a gleam of sunshine like that
which is now casting its shadow on my paper from Penmaenmawr after a rough
morning, I am thankful in the highest degree to have had a share in
resisting the alarmist mania of the day by means of the French treaty, to
which, if we escape collision, I think the escape will have been mainly
due; and likewise in one at least negative service to the great Italian
cause, which is not Italian merely but European.

Mr. Pitt's War Finance

_Page __59_

_Mr. Gladstone to Herbert Gladstone_

_March 10, 1876._--Mr. Pitt's position in the Revolutionary war was, I
think, a false one. To keep out of that war demanded from the people of
this country an extraordinary degree of self-control, and this degree of
it they did not possess. The consequence of our going into it was to give
an intensity and vitality to the struggle, which but for the tenacity of
English character it would not have possessed. Mr. Pitt did not show the
great genius in war which he possessed as a peace minister. Until the
epoch of the Peninsula our military performances were small and poor, and
the method of subsidy was unsatisfactory and ineffective. The effect of
borrowing money in three per cents. was to load us with a very heavy
capital of national debt. I think at one time we only got L46, or some
such amount, for the L100. It must, however, be taken into view that a
perpetual annuity of L3, redeemable upon paying L100, brought _more_ than
3/4 of what a perpetual annuity of L4, similarly redeemable, would have
brought; or than 3/5 of what a L5 annuity, similarly redeemable, would
have brought. It is not easy to strike the balance. Mr. Newmarch, a living
economist of some authority, I believe, thinks Mr. Pitt was right. I do
not think the case