the problems presented by passing politics, and expounding the drift and meaning of current events in his nation and the others which bore closest on it, as France and America.  That he gained such a hearing was due not alone to his immense ability, and to a style carefully modeled on the conversation of business men with each other, but to his cool moderation and evident aloofness from party as party.  He dissected each like a man of science:  party was to him a tool and not a religion.  He gibed at the Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory at heart,—­he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of popular ignorance.  He was rarely warm for the actual measures of the Liberals; but the Liberals knew that he intensely despised the pig-headed obstructiveness of the typical Tory, and had no kinship with the blind worshipers of the status quo.  To natives and foreigners alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable:  in it one could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts and the real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and counter-prejudice of the party press.

An outgrowth of his treble position as banker, economic writer, and general litterateur, was his charming book ‘Lombard Street.’  Most writers know nothing about business, he sets forth, most business men cannot write, therefore most writing about business is either unreadable or untrue:  he put all his literary gifts at its service, and produced a book as instructive as a trade manual and more delightful than most novels.  Its luminous, easy, half-playful “business talk” is irresistibly captivating.  It is a description and analysis of the London money market and its component parts,—­the Bank of England, the joint-stock banks, the private banks, and the bill-brokers.  It will live, however, as literature and as a picture, not as a banker’s guide; as the vividest outline of business London, of the “great commerce” and the fabric of credit which is the basis of modern civilization and of which London is the centre, that the world has ever known.

Previous to this, the most widely known of his works—­’The English Constitution,’ much used as a text-book—­had made a new epoch in political analysis, and placed him among the foremost thinkers and writers of his time.  Not only did it revolutionize the accepted mode of viewing that governmental structure, but as a treatise on government in general its novel types of classification are now admitted commonplaces.  Besides its main themes, the book is a great store of thought and suggestion on government, society, and human nature,—­for as in all his works, he pours on his nominal subject a flood of illumination and analogy from the unlikeliest sources; and a piece of eminently pleasurable reading from end to end.  Its basic novelty lay in what seems the most natural of inquiries, but which in fact was left for Bagehot’s