Anything to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not be forgotten. But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile, nevertheless. He will serve God and Mammon. So complete a man will surely be able to do both. Unfortunately the thing is impossible, as he discovers too late: but he certainly goes as near success in the attempt as ever man did. Everywhere we find him doing justly and loving mercy. Wherever this man steps he leaves his footprint ineffaceably in deeds of benevolence. For one year only, it seems, he is governor of Jersey; yet to this day, it is said, the islanders honour his name, only second to that of Duke Rollo, as their great benefactor, the founder of their Newfoundland trade. In the west country he is ‘as a king,’ ‘with ears and mouth always open to hear and deliver their grievances, feet and hands ready to go and work their redress.’ The tin-merchants have become usurers ‘of fifty in the hundred.’ Raleigh works till he has put down their ‘abominable and cut-throat dealing.’ There is a burdensome west-country tax on curing fish; Raleigh works till it is revoked. In Parliament he is busy with liberal measures, always before his generation. He puts down a foolish act for compulsory sowing of hemp in a speech on the freedom of labour worthy of the nineteenth century. He argues against raising the subsidy from the three-pound men—‘Call you this, Mr. Francis Bacon, _par jugum_, when a poor man pays as much as a rich?’ He is equally rational and spirited against the exportation of ordnance to the enemy; and when the question of abolishing monopolies is mooted he has his wise word. He too is a monopolist of tin, as Lord Warden of the Stannaries. But he has so wrought as to bring good out of evil; for ‘before the granting of his patent, let the price of tin be never so high, the poor workman never had but two shillings a week’; yet now, so has he extended and organised the tin-works, ‘that any man who will can find work, be tin at what price soever, and have four shillings a week truly paid . . . Yet if all others may be repealed, I will give my consent as freely to the cancelling of this as any member of this house.’ Most of the monopolies were repealed: but we do not find that Raleigh’s was among them. Why should it be if its issue was more tin, full work, and double wages? In all things this man approves himself faithful in his generation. His sins are not against man, but against God; such as the world thinks no sins, and hates them, not from morality, but from envy.