e statesman's business is not to
invent ideas in finance, but to create occasions and contrive expedients
for applying them. "What an extraordinary man Pitt is," said Adam Smith;
"he understands my ideas better than I understand them myself."
Originality may lie as much in perception of opportunity as in invention.
Cobden discovered no new economic truths that I know of, but his
perception of the bearings of abstract economic truths upon the actual and
prospective circumstances of his country and the world, made him the most
original economic statesman of his day. The glory of Mr. Gladstone was
different. It rested on the practical power and tenacity with which he
opened new paths, and forced the application of sound doctrine over long
successions of countless obstacles.

(M21) If we probe his fame as financier to the core and marrow, it was not
his power as orator, it was not his ingenuity in device and expedient, it
was his unswerving faith in certain fixed aims, and his steadfast and
insistent zeal in pursuing them, that built up the splendid edifice. Pitt
performed striking financial feats, especially in the consolidation of
duties, in reformed administration, and in the French treaty of 1786. But
ill-fortune dragged him into the vortex of European war, and finance sank
into the place of a secondary instrument, an art for devising aliments,
some of them desperate enough, for feeding the war-chest of the nation.
Sir Robert Walpole, Mr. Gladstone wrote, "had not to contend with like
difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with the
early years of Pitt, in which way of judging he would come off second,
though a man of cool and sagacious judgment, while morally he stood
low."(40)

In the happier conditions of his time, Mr. Gladstone was able to use wise
and bold finance as the lever for enlarging all the facilities of life,
and diffusing them over the widest area. If men sometimes smile at his
extraordinary zeal for cheap wines and cheap books and low railway fares,
if they are sometimes provoked by his rather harsh views on privileges for
patents and copyrights for authors, restrictive of the common enjoyment,
it is well to remember that all this and the like came from what was at
once clear financial vision and true social feeling. "A financial
experience," he once said, "which is long and wide, has profoundly
convinced me that, as a rule, the state or individual or company thrives
best which d