I feel that the sacrifice which I am about to make is great.  But the motives which urge me to make it are quite irresistible.  Every day that I live I become less and less desirous of great wealth.  But every day makes me more sensible of the importance of a competence.  Without a competence it is not very easy for a public man to be honest; it is almost impossible for him to be thought so.  I am so situated that I can subsist only in two ways:  by being in office, and by my pen.  Hitherto, literature has been merely my relaxation,—­the amusement of perhaps a month in the year.  I have never considered it as the means of support.  I have chosen my own topics, taken my own time, and dictated my own terms.  The thought of becoming a bookseller’s hack; of writing to relieve, not the fulness of the mind, but the emptiness of the pocket; of spurring a jaded fancy to reluctant exertion; of filling sheets with trash merely that the sheets may be filled; of bearing from publishers and editors what Dryden bore from Tonson, and what, to my own knowledge, Mackintosh bore from Lardner, is horrible to me.  Yet thus it must be, if I should quit office.  Yet to hold office merely for the sake of emolument would be more horrible still.  The situation, in which I have been placed for some time back, would have broken the spirit of many men.  It has rather tended to make me the most mutinous and unmanageable of the followers of the Government.  I tendered my resignation twice during the course of the last Session.  I certainly should not have done so if I had been a man of fortune.  You, whom malevolence itself could never accuse of coveting office for the sake of pecuniary gain, and whom your salary very poorly compensates for the sacrifice of ease, and of your tastes, to the public service, cannot estimate rightly the feelings of a man who knows that his circumstances lay him open to the suspicion of being actuated in his public conduct by the lowest motives.  Once or twice, when I have been defending unpopular measures in the House of Commons, that thought has disordered my ideas, and deprived me of my presence of mind.

If this were all, I should feel that, for the sake of my own happiness and of my public utility, a few years would be well spent in obtaining an independence.  But this is not all.  I am not alone in the world.  A family which I love most fondly is dependent on me.  Unless I would see my father left in his old age to the charity of less near relations; my youngest brother unable to obtain a good professional education; my sisters, who are more to me than any sisters ever were to a brother, forced to turn governesses or humble companions,—­I must do something, I must make some effort.  An opportunity has offered itself.  It is in my power to make the last days of my father comfortable, to educate my brother, to provide for my sisters, to procure a competence for myself.  I may hope, by the time I am thirty-nine or forty, to return to England with a fortune of thirty thousand pounds.  To me that would be affluence.  I never wished for more.