The objections which some might perhaps take to Gladstone’s fiscal system are, that it retains, though it reduces, the income tax, originally imposed only for the purpose of shoring up the fiscal edifice while a great change was taking place, with a promise that when the change should be effected the tax should cease; and that it rests so much upon the consumption of a few important articles. Suppose tobacco, for instance, were to go out of fashion, as some sanitary authorities say it ought, there would be a serious gap in the Budget. The great master of finance, while he was dealing with it on the largest scale, was conscientiously mindful of the public interest in the most minute details of expenditure. He regarded public money as sacred, and any waste of it, however trifling, as criminal. His biographer has given us amusing instances of his conscientious parsimony in small things. In one case, however, his parsimony was misplaced. He grudged the judges their large salaries. Public money cannot be better expended than in taking the best men from the Bar to the Bench. The expedition of business assured by their command of their courts would in itself be worth the price, apart from the security for justice. Among other relics of Gladstone’s Conservatism was his clinging to his seat in Parliament for the University of Oxford, in which he was supported by a rather strange and precarious alliance of High Churchmen voting for the High Churchman and Liberals voting for the progressive Liberal; a combination the strain upon which became extreme when Palmerston, in whose Government Gladstone was, made Shaftesbury, the lay leader of the Evangelicals, his Minister for ecclesiastical affairs, and allowed him to go on promoting Low Churchmen. But the Tories never made a greater mistake than the ejection of Gladstone from his Oxford seat. By sending him from Oxford to Liverpool, they, to use his own phrase, unmuzzled him. It is true, I believe, that, on the day of his rejection, the Bible fell out of the hand of the statue of James I. on the gate tower of the Bodleian, an omen of the separation of the Church from the State. The stone being very friable, the fall was not miraculous; although it was curiously apt.