Mark here the silent virtue of organic constitutional growth, and how a gentry can find it possible to create where demagogues would have destroyed. Point by point and function by function, one marine interest after another attached itself to the Court of Dowry as the beautiful organisms of the sea attach themselves to the ships that plough its waters, until there had grown up round the Court of Dowry by the end of the nineteenth century so considerable a mass of precedent and custom and, with the vast extension of our maritime commerce, duties so manifold and of such moment to the nation, that the office re-emerged after its life of six centuries, an organ of capital importance in the workings of English Government. As must be the case in any old and secure State, certain anomalous duties were further attached to it: the inspection of patent medicines for instance, the giving out of contracts for buoys and rockets, and the formal stamping of licences to sell sarsaparilla. Even so the wretched and insufficient salary of £2000 remained the sole remuneration of the Warden, though the great name of GHERKIN had raised it to be among the foremost posts of the Cabinet, and it had since seen the brilliancy, the learning and the judgment respectively of a Dibley, a Powker and a Hump. By 1912 its strict control over the great steamship lines, its supervision of wrecks, derelicts, Hunnage, Mixings, and Ports Consequent, made it second only to the Foreign Office in the matter of public interest, and, like the Foreign Office, largely removed from the wranglings of party. Some months later the salary was raised, amid the cheers (as I have said) of a united House, to £5000 a year, with a further allowance of £5000 for the expenses of entertainment and travel, which fall with peculiar severity upon this great Department; and in the hands of Charles Repton it had risen to be something even more, if that were possible, than GHERKIN had made it. * * * * * So much did Mary Smith discover: partly in what she already knew, partly in her reading. The living voices of men told her further things. It seemed that in the dingy offices which (by a lovely trait in the character of politics!) house this great Department--they stand between Parliament Street and New Scotland Yard--a certain Mr. Sorrel had for now seven years exercised his marvellous and hidden powers, and while all were prepared to admit the genius of Charles Repton, those who best knew the workings of a great Government office, spoke almost as though Mr. Sorrel were in himself the Court of Dowry.