Gladstone, subsequently to the award of the pension to Villiers, made a rule by which every ex-Minister to whom he, as First Lord of the Treasury, granted a pension was required not only to make the statutory declaration that he was unable to maintain his social station, but was also obliged to engage to surrender the pension should he come into a private fortune, or obtain a highly paid appointment. Villiers, it seems, had an accession of fortune, but evidently he did not consider that the new engagement applied to him, as he had not signed it. As these pensions are paid, not out of monies voted by Parliament, but directly out of the Consolidated Fund, like the salaries and retiring allowances of the Judges, they cannot be raised as a subject of debate in the House of Commons. Attention, however, was drawn by means of questions to Villiers’ case, and subsequently to the case of Viscount Cross, who died in March, 1914, leaving a personal estate of the value of £72,299, after having drawn a second-class pension of £2,000 for over twenty years, which amounted in the aggregate to £40,760. It appeared that Lord Cross, like Villiers, did not sign the declaration to surrender his pension in the event of an improvement in his pecuniary circumstances. As Lord Beaconsfield left £84,000 at his death, his case differs only in one respect from those of Villiers and Cross—he had been twice Prime Minister of England. 3 The First Lord of the Treasury is restricted by precedent to granting these political pensions only to ex-Ministers of his own Party. In 1883 an application was made to Gladstone for a pension for a Conservative ex-Minister. It was refused on the ground “that no political pension has been granted by any Minister during the last fifty years, except to one with whom he stood on terms of general confidence and co-operation.” The Prime Minister went on to say, “the examination of private circumstances, such as I consider the Act to require, is, for its nature, difficult and invidious; but the examination of competing cases in the ex-official corps is a function that could not be discharged with the necessary combination of free responsible action and of exemption from offence and suspicion.” Gladstone therefore declined to “create a precedent of deviation from a course undeviatingly pursued by my predecessors of all Parties.” Lord Morley, who gives this letter in his _Life of Gladstone_, observes in a note: “Mr. Gladstone had suffered an unpleasant experience in another case of the relations brought about by the refusal of a political pension, after inquiry as to the accuracy of the necessary statement as to the applicant’s need of it.”