In the year 1863 the proportion of waste to profit was as 12-1/2:1.  Has this proportion in the quarter of a century which has elapsed increased or has it decreased?

From time to time, as we have seen, the question forces itself upon men’s minds—­whether this revenue could not be administered to better advantage.  Lord Somers encounters the difficulty in the year 1698; Lord Lyndhurst in 1829; Lord Hatherley in 1871.  I suppose that even a Lord Chancellor does not claim infallible wisdom.  Therefore I venture to insist upon the facts that the Reformation destroyed the Religious House of St. Katherine; that the changes made by Lord Somers only made the old Hospital useless; and that the Royal Commission of the year 1871 confirmed, in the new foundation, the later uselessness of the old.  The House of Shams and Shadows in Regent’s Park is not the old St. Katherine’s at all; that is dead and done with; it is a fungus which sprang up yesterday, which is not wholesome for human food, and uses up, for no good purpose, the soil in which it grows.

Yet, because one would not be charged with unfairness, what does the Rev. Simcox Lea, in his history of St. Katherine’s Hospital (Longmans, 1878), say?

’St. Katherine’s Hospital is an Ecclesiastical Corporation, returned as a “Promotion Spiritual” in the reign of Henry VIII., and so acknowledged by law in the reign of Charles I. It takes its place as a Collegiate Church with Westminster and Windsor.  The Clerical Head of its Chapter, the Master of the Hospital, will be entitled, unless Her Majesty shall see fit otherwise to direct, to the style of Very Reverend and the rank of Dean.  The Brothers have the status and dignity of Canons Residentiary, and through the Sisters of the Chapter the parallel dignity of Canonesses is preserved, under another style, to the English Church of our day.  The Collegiate Chapter holds its entire revenues subject to certain eleemosynary trusts embodied in its original constitution, the ecclesiastical and the charitable charges belonging alike to all the estates instead of being assigned separately to different portions of them....  All these principles of the constitution of St. Katherine’s must be kept in view in any scheme which it may be proposed to submit, or in any suggestions which may be offered through the press, for the consideration of the Lord Chancellor in reference to the advice which he may submit to the Queen....  St. Katherine’s Hospital is no more a “Charity” than Westminster Abbey is a Charity, and to describe it as such, after the true facts of the case are known, will leave any writer or speaker open to the charge of discourtesy, directly offered to a capitular body whose personal constitution is worthy of its high and ancient corporate ecclesiastical dignity, and indirectly through the members of the Chapter, to the Queen.’