lve--ten years short of Sir Robert Walpole in
that office, seven years short of Pitt. But he was also chancellor of the
exchequer under three other prime ministers for ten years. Thus his
connection with the treasury covered a longer period than was attained by
the greatest of his predecessors. His long reign at the treasury, and his
personal predominance in parliament and the country, enabled him to stamp
on the public departments administrative principles of the utmost breadth
and strength. Thrift of public money, resolute resistance to waste, rigid
exactitude in time, and all the other aspects of official duty, conviction
that in the working of the vast machinery of state nothing is a
trifle--through the firm establishment of maxims and principles of this
sort, Mr. Gladstone built up a strong and efficacious system of
administrative unity that must be counted a conspicuous part of his very
greatest work. "No chancellor of the exchequer," he once said, "is worth
his salt who makes his own popularity either his first consideration, or
any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my
opinion, the chancellor of the exchequer is the trusted and confidential
steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all
that he consents to spend."(42) This tone of thinking and feeling about
the service of the state spread under his magisterial influence from
chancellors and the permanent officers that bear unobtrusive but effective
sway in Whitehall, down to tide waiters and distributors of stamps. As
Burke put the old Latin saw, he endeavoured to "give us a system of
economy, which is itself a great revenue." The Exchequer and Audit Act of
1866 is a monument of his zeal and power in this direction. It converted
the nominal control by parliament into a real control, and has borne the
strain of nearly forty years.

He was more alive than any man at the exchequer had ever been before, to
the mischiefs of the spirit of expenditure. As he told the House of
Commons in 1863 (April 16): "I mean this, that together with the so-called
increase of expenditure there grows up what may be termed a spirit of
expenditure, a desire, a tendency prevailing in the country, which,
insensibly and unconsciously perhaps, but really, affects the spirit of
the people, the spirit of parliament, the spirit of the public
departments, and perhaps even the spirit of those whose duty it is to
submit the estimates to parliamen