From the beginning of the eighteenth century commercial and financial considerations seem to have played a steadily increasing part in determining the nation’s policy. Horace Walpole is the first person known to have used _speculation_ in the sense of buying and selling stocks and shares; and _budget_ (a little bag or pocket) may owe its modern political meaning to a pamphlet sarcastically entitled _The Budget Opened_, in which his brother Robert’s financial policy received some severe handling. _Prime Minister_ also takes us back to Sir Robert Walpole, to whom it was applied with derisive innuendo, for it had in those days more the sense of ‘Grand Vizier’ or despot’s tool. In the old-fashioned _nabob_, as a synonym for ‘plutocrat’, we have a memory of the latter days of the East India Company when the squandering of large sums of money in London often rounded off a life of empire-building in Bombay or Calcutta. The dictionary suggests, however, that later generations of Anglo-Indians preferred to bring back with them less questionable impedimenta, such as _pyjamas_ and _shampoo_. The phrase, the _Rights of Man_, takes us back to the American Declaration of Independence. The borrowing of _aristocrat_ and _democrat_ from French, the French word _guillotine_, and the appearance in English of _revolutionize_ and _terrorize_ are enduring relics of the French Revolution, and the word _sectional_, which came in in the nineteenth century, is closely bound up with the history of France, for it is derived (together with the geographical use of _section_) from the division of France into electoral sections under the Directory. The military meaning of _conscription_ goes back to the France of the same period. To the campaigns in the Soudan we owe _zareeba_, and to the Boer War the Dutch words _kopje_ and _spoor_. It is too early yet to say what verbal legacy the European War has left us, but the anonymous _stunt_ and _gadget_ (small mechanical contrivance), and the French _camouflage_ seem to have taken a fairly firm hold, while the expressions _eyewash_, to _scrounge_ (meaning to ‘steal’), to _get the wind up_, to _go west_, and possibly to _swing the lead_ (to be idle at somebody else’s expense), are idioms which show no signs of departing from us yet. President Wilson’s _self-determination_ has probably been added to half the languages of the world.