carried a new Standing Order, enabling the Speaker to exclude strangers when he saw fit, but submitting the attempt of a private Member to clear the House, to the check of an immediate and undebateable vote. Sir Stafford Northcote’s Budget was ominous of hard times coming. Prices were beginning to fall, and unsound Foreign Loans, in which rich people had invested, were beginning to collapse. Sir Stafford Northcote, therefore, though he received half a million more revenue than he expected, wisely made no sanguine estimate for the ensuing year. His anticipated expenditure he put at £75,268,000, an increase of £939,000, and his revenue at £75,685,000, showing a probable surplus of £417,000, which was ultimately converted by supplementary estimates into an estimated deficit of £300,000--a bad contrast to the miraculous surplus of £6,000,000, which in the previous year he inherited from Mr. Gladstone. There was no special feature in the Budget, save the scheme fixing the charge for the paying up the interest and the principal of the National Debt in future at £28,000,000 a year, and making it obligatory to meet this sum before any surplus could be declared. It was, in fact, a plan for establishing a rigid Sinking Fund to discharge the National Debt, and though it was popular at the time, it failed, as all such plans fail, because whenever a difficulty arises Ministers of Finance always confiscate a Sinking Fund in preference to imposing new taxes. [Illustration: ABERGELDIE CASTLE. (_From a Photograph by G. W. Wilson and Co._)]