Hicks-Beach, of course, was more in his place when at the head of the financial department of the administration. He is admitted to have been one of the most skillful and enlightened among modern Chancellors of the Exchequer. His financial statements were always thoroughly clear, symmetrical, and interesting from first to last. He never got into any entanglement with his figures, and his array of facts was always marshaled with something like dramatic skill. I do not profess to be very strong upon financial questions, but I could always understand and follow with the deepest interest any financial exposition made by Hicks-Beach. He seemed to me to be distinctly above the level of his party and his official colleagues on all such questions, and it has often occurred to me that such a man was rather thrown away upon a Conservative Government. Whatever else might be said against them, it could not be said that his speeches at any time sank to the level of the commonplace. There was something combative in his nature, and his style of speaking, with its clear, strong, and sometimes almost harsh tones, appeared as if it were designed in advance to confront and put down all opposition. The House of Commons had for a long time got into the way of regarding Hicks-Beach as a man in advance of his colleagues on all subjects of financial administration. Every Tory in office, or likely to be in office, now professes himself a free-trader, in the English sense of the phrase, but Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was evidently a genuine free-trader, and never could have been anything else since he first turned his attention seriously and steadily to financial questions. I should describe him as one of the foremost debaters in the House of Commons among the men who made no pretensions to the higher order of eloquence; and probably an additional attraction was given to his speeches by that aggressive and combative tone which I have just noticed. I have sometimes fancied that his combativeness of manner and his dictatorial style were less intended for the discomfiture of his recognized political opponents than for that of his own colleagues in office. Long before there was any rumor of incompatibility between Hicks-Beach and the members of the present Government, I have often found myself wondering how the man who expressed such enlightened ideas on so many financial and political questions could possibly get on with a somewhat reactionary Conservative administration. Of course I have no means of knowing anything beyond that which is known to the general public concerning the causes which led to Hicks-Beach's withdrawal or exclusion from his place in the present Government. Even those London journals which profess to know everything about the inner councils of the Cabinet did not, and do not, tell us anything more on this particular subject than the news, impossible to be concealed, that Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had ceased to be a member of the Conservative