In the meantime, the Disraeli Ministry, which had carried the measure of 1868, had been replaced, on December 9, 1868, by the Gladstone Ministry. On July 5, 1869, the Marquis of Hartington, Postmaster General, laid before Parliament a Bill authorizing the Post Office Department to spend $35,000,000 for the purpose of carrying out the act of 1868. The Marquis of Hartington said that $28,575,000 would be required for the purchase of the assets of the telegraph companies; that $3,500,000 would cover the claims of the railways, which had not yet been adjusted; and that $1,500,000 would suffice to rearrange the telegraph lines and to make such extensions as would be required to give Government telegraph offices to 3,776 places, towns, and cities, the present number of places having telegraph offices being 1,882. The Marquis of Hartington stated that Parliament "was quite competent to repudiate the bargain of 1868, if they thought it a bad one.... Having given the subject his best consideration, he must say, without expressing any opinion as to the terms of the bargain, that if they were to begin afresh, he did not think they could get the property on better terms." He added that the "Government would take over the telegraphs of the companies on January 1, 1870, on the basis of paying twenty times the profits of the year 1867-68. But that in consequence of the increase of the business since 1867-68, the $28,575,000 which the State would pay the telegraph companies, would represent, not twenty years' purchase of the profits in 1870, but considerably under seventeen years' purchase of those profits. The trade of the Electric and International had been found to be growing at the rate of 18 per cent. a year; that of the British and Irish at the rate of 32 per cent."[43] The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Robert Lowe, was by no means so sanguine. He spoke of the "immense price" which the Government was asked to pay, "a price of which he, at all events, washed his hands altogether. The Right Honorable Gentlemen opposite [Mr. Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1868], had accused them of appropriating the honor of this measure. He had not the slightest desire to contest the point with the Right Honorable Gentleman, who was welcome to it all. The matter was found by the present Government in so complicated a state that it was impossible for them to recede; but unless the House was prepared to grant that [_i. e._ a government monopoly] without which they believed it would be impossible to carry on the business effectively, it would be better that they should reject the Bill altogether."[44]