It would seem that no questions concerning war or peace, or the extension of the suffrage, or the removal of great moral evils, or promised boons in education, or Church disestablishment, or threatened dangers to the State,--questions touching the very life of the nation,--received so much attention or excited so great interest as those which affected the small burdens which the people had to bear; not the burden of taxation itself, but how that should be distributed. I will not say that the English are "a nation of shopkeepers;" but I do say that comparatively small matters occupy the thoughts of men in every country outside the routine of ordinary duties, and form the staple of ordinary conversation,--among pedants, the difference between _ac_ and _et_; among aristocrats, the investigation of pedigrees; in society, the comparative merits of horses, the movements of well-known persons, the speed of ocean steamers, boat-races, the dresses of ladies of fashion, football contests, the last novel, weddings, receptions, the trials of housekeepers, the claims of rival singers, the gestures and declamation of favorite play-actors, the platitudes of popular preachers, the rise and fall of stocks, murders in bar-rooms, robberies in stores, accidental fires in distant localities,--these and other innumerable forms of gossip, collected by newspapers and retailed in drawing-rooms, which have no important bearing on human life or national welfare or immortal destiny. It is not that the elaborate presentations of financial details for which Mr. Gladstone was so justly famous were without importance. I only wonder why they should have had such overwhelming interest to English legislators and the English public; and why his statistics should have given him claims to transcendent oratory and the profoundest statesmanship,--for it is undeniable that his financial speeches brought him more fame and importance in the House of Commons than all the others he made during those seven years of parliamentary gladiatorship. One of these triumphantly carried through Parliament a commercial reciprocity treaty with France, arranged by Mr. Cobden; and another, scarcely less notable, repealed the duty on paper,--a measure of great importance for the facilitation of making books and cheapening newspapers, but both of which were desperately opposed by the monopolists and manufacturers.