At the end of this month Thomas Raikes had a talk with him about the Sunday-school movement, and was much delighted by the old man’s enthusiastic approval: “No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the days of the Apostles.” But towards another philanthropic scheme, for planting fishing-villages along the Highland coast, he displayed, wrote Wilberforce, “a certain characteristic coolness,” observing that “he looked for no other consequence from the scheme than the entire loss of every shilling that should be expended on it, granting, however, with uncommon candour, that the public would be no great sufferer, because he believed the individuals meant to put their hands only in their own pockets.” Mr. Rae, who has traced the scheme down to 1893 when it was finally wound up, shows that the shareholders lost half their original capital of £35,000, and wasted besides £100,000 of taxpayers’ money, which a foolish Government improvidently provided for one of their ill-conceived projects. After all, philanthropy cannot afford to neglect the cool precepts of political economy, nor is moral fervour the worse for a pinch of common sense. In November, having returned to Edinburgh, he heard with “heartfelt joy” the news that he had been elected Rector of his old University, and he was installed in the following month. “No preferment,” he wrote in a graceful letter of thanks, “could have given me so much real satisfaction.” “No man can own greater obligations to a Society than I do to the University of Glasgow. They educated me, they sent me to Oxford, soon after my return to Scotland they elected me one of their own members, and afterwards preferred me to another office to which the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson had given a superior degree of illustration. The period of thirteen years which I spent as a member of that Society, I remember as by far the most useful and therefore as by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life; and now, after three-and-twenty years’ absence, to be remembered in so very agreeable a manner by my old friends and protectors gives me a heartfelt joy which I cannot easily express to you.”