But his whole career has shown this suddenness of advance, at distinct periods, which, as we have said, always coincided with the brightening of the prospects of the respective agitations. It is true, as is earlier pointed out, that he took something like a quarter of a century to travel the ground between the Conservative starting-point and the Radical position, but the length of time was not owing to his creeping between the bounds; he has traversed it at successive leaps, standing still between, and, at the places where he remained stationary, there was always the warm shelter of office. This style of progress has characterized him down to the present moment. As late as 1874 he told a deputation that he did not consider the question of the County Franchise ripe. There has been a good deal of very indifferent weather since then; but whether or not the field crops have matured, it seems now that the agricultural labourer has been growing fast. Mr. Joseph Arch has been the sun that has shone upon him, and Mr. Gladstone, as usual, is quite ready to reap the harvest. Examples might be multiplied manifold. Take the boasted case of the Liberal surplus, of which we have never ceased to hear--just as if Mr. Lowe and Mr. Gladstone had between them coined the money. Its history, stated in three words, was this: Mr. Lowe had mulcted the public in an unnecessary twopence of Income Tax, and, instead of shamefully confessing the incompetency it showed in a Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented himself before the constituencies, on the eve of the elections, with his hands full of gold, and with the air of presenting it to them. Mr. Gladstone, great financier as he is, was not above profiting by his subordinate's miscalculation. Instead of administering a rebuke, as a good journeyman might have been expected to do to a bad apprentice, he patted Mr. Lowe on the back. Indeed, in the Greenwich address, when he so magniloquently spoke of the money being given back in the shape of abolishing the Income Tax, he seemed to take some credit to himself.