Lord Benthorpe, thus left a widower, with his little son Charles no more than four years old, applied himself to his public work with a redoubled zeal. His weight in Hampshire during the early nineties, when that great agricultural county was, I regret to say, flirting with Home Rule, cannot be overestimated; yet it formed but a slight part of his beneficent influence. His speeches in the House of Lords recalled the old days when he had been entrusted by the government with the Bill to which allusion has been made; and it was confidently predicted that, on the restoration of his Party to power, he would be given some post in the cabinet. These hopes were not fulfilled. His disappointment appeared the more bitter, when he considered how widely the journalists upon whom he had wasted his attentions, had recently spread his public reputation; it appeared appalling when he contemplated the condition of his fortunes. For, it must be admitted (though it cuts one to the heart to expose the humiliation of a man so prominent in our commonweal) that, towards 1895, Lord Benthorpe found himself deprived of all resources whatsoever. The interest upon his various mortgages was met precisely, in good years, by the rent of his land and the products of the home farm. In bad years by these combined with the letting of Placton—a source alas! too often insufficient. Our society does not permit men to fall unaided. If this is true of the generality of citizens, it is still more true of those whose names seem to stand for the stability of the country itself. Help was immediately found. The management of the house and estate was taken over (together with the mortgages) by the Anglo-Saxon Loan and Investment Company, with which, by a happy coincidence, the name of Mr Barnett was prominently associated. The house and grounds were kept by this financial company in a condition worthy of the name they bore; and Lord Benthorpe was generously permitted to make them his permanent home, not only from a sentiment of what was due to the dignity of his name, but also from a consideration of the added value which he lent to the premises by his continued residence. I do not mention this magnanimity on the part of a group of business men in order to impair their reputation for shrewdness and commercial capacity. Everything, down to the wages of the servants, passed through their hands; and they had made it a condition—a condition to which Lord Benthorpe very readily agreed—that even for such small hospitalities as he might desire to extend to neighbours he should, in every case, receive the written permission of the mortgagees. Lord Benthorpe, at the moment when the great affair of the M’Korio entered the arena of politics, bore an appearance which those unaccustomed to our administrative classes might have mistaken for weakness.