he natural bent of his mind,
had made him "confessedly the ablest man of business in the House of
Commons." The Governors of the Bank of England, very efficient men
certainly, held it a great point in the minister's favor that they
"could never do business with any man with the same ease they had done
it with him." Undoubtedly the first axiom of business is that one's
accounts should be kept straight, one's books nicely balanced;
the second, that one's assets should exceed one's liabilities. Mr.
Grenville, accordingly, "had studied the revenues with professional
assiduity, and something of professional ideas seemed to mingle in all
his regulations concerning them." He "felt the weight of debt, amounting
at this time to one hundred and fifty-eight millions, which oppressed
his country, and he looked to the amelioration of the revenue as the
only mode of relieving it."

It is true there were some untouched sources of revenue still available
in England. As sinecures went in that day, Mr. Grosvenor Bedford's was
not of the best; and on any consideration of the matter from the point
of view of revenue only, Grenville might well have turned his attention
to a different class of officials; for example, to the Master of the
Rolls in Ireland, Mr. Rigby, who was also Paymaster of the Forces, and
to whose credit there stood at the Bank of England, as Mr. Trevelyan
assures us, a million pounds of the public money, the interest of which
was paid to him "or to his creditors." This was a much better thing than
Grosvenor Bedford had with his paltry collectorship at Philadelphia;
and the interest on a million pounds, more or less, had it been diverted
from Mr. Rigby's pocket to the public treasury, would perhaps have
equaled the entire increase in the revenue to be expected from even
the most efficient administration of the customs in all the ports of,
America. In addition, it should perhaps be said that Mr. Rigby, although
excelled by none, was by no means the only man in high place with a good
degree of talent for exploiting the common chest.

The reform of such practices, very likely, was work for a statesman
rather than for a man of business. A good man of business, called upon
to manage the King's affairs, was likely to find many obstacles in the
way of depriving the Paymaster of the Forces of his customary sources
of income, and Mr. Grenville, at least, never attempted anything so
hazardous. Scurrilous pamphleteers, in fact, had