But I think, after all, it was the great passage headed “Finance” that he enjoyed with the most delicate appreciation for style. Perhaps it depended on his mood whether he more admired the lines of the “Gross Revenue and Expenditure” or of the “Net Revenue and Expenditure.” It was sonorous as a hexameter to read aloud that the total gross revenue in India and England for 1905-6 was £84,997,685, and the total gross expenditure charged to revenue was £82,905,831. But the net statements of revenue at £48,539,680, and expenditure at £46,447,826, were trim as a sonnet. It was a dubious point, but for details he certainly preferred the gross, thinking them more realistic, and his favourite passage was that beginning, “Principal heads of Revenue, Land Revenue, £18,862,169, for 1905-6.” Against this he would set, as a kind of antiphone, the gross expenditure on army services (excluding Marine and Military Works) of £19,267,130.[19] There were two passages also from which he appeared to derive the kind of savage pleasure most men seek in tragedy or satire. One was that the gross expenditure on education by the Government of India amounted to less than £1,700,000 in 1905-6, and he worked out the State expenditure for education for the current year (1907-8) at 1½_d._ per head in India, as against 5_s._ 4_d._ per head in France. The other was that the Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Animists contributed out of their labour during the year of grace which we had just survived (1906-7) the sum of £125,906 in order that the British residents might not be devoid of the consolations of religion as represented by Bishops and Anglican chaplains, Roman priests, Presbyterian divines, and cemeteries. For myself, there was, of course, a certain ironic interest in the endowment of an Anglo-Indian’s Christianity by the natives around him, and for the first time I was inclined to favour a system of payment by results. But, in regard to Finance, all such things are insignificant in comparison with the one main question of the tax upon the cultivator.[20]