In the field of economy there are so many thinkers who are far better judges of Bagehot’s invaluable work than myself, that I will say a very few words indeed upon it. It is curious, but I believe it to be almost universally true, that what may be called the primitive impulse of all economic _action_, is generally also strong in great economic _thinkers_ and financiers—I mean the saving, or at least the anti-spending, instinct. It is very difficult to see why it should be so, but I think it _is_ so. No one was more large-minded in his view of finance than Bagehot. He preached that, in the case of a rich country like England, efficiency was vastly more important than the mere reduction of expenditure, and held that Mr. Gladstone and other great Chancellors of the Exchequer made a great deal too much of saving for saving’s sake. None the less he himself had the anti-spending instinct in some strength, and he was evidently pleased to note its existence in his favourite economic thinker, Ricardo. Generous as Bagehot was—and no one ever hesitated less about giving largely for an adequate end—he always told me, even in boyhood, that spending was disagreeable to him, and that it took something of an effort to pay away money. In a letter before me, he tells his correspondent of the marriage of an acquaintance, and adds that the lady is a Dissenter, ‘and therefore probably rich. Dissenters don’t spend, _and quite right too_.’ I suppose it takes some feeling of this kind to give the intellect of a man of high capacity that impulse towards the study of the laws of the increase of wealth, without which men of any imagination would be more likely to turn in other directions. Nevertheless, even as an economist, Bagehot’s most original writing was due less to his deductions from the fundamental axioms of the modern science, than to that deep insight into men which he had gained in many different fields. The essays, published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for February and May 1876[16]—in which he showed so powerfully how few of the conditions of the science known to us as ‘political economy’ have ever been really applicable to any large portion of the globe during the longest periods of human history—furnish quite an original study in social history and in human nature. His striking book, ‘Lombard Street,’ is quite as much a study of bankers and bill-brokers as of the principles of banking. Take, again, Bagehot’s view of the intellectual position and value of the capitalist classes. Every one who knows his writings in the _Economist_, knows how he ridiculed the common impression that the chief service of the capitalist class—that by which they _earn_ their profits—is merely what the late Mr. Senior used to call ‘abstinence,’ that is, the practice of deferring their enjoyment of their savings in order that those savings may multiply themselves; and knows too how inadequate he thought it, merely to add that when capitalists are