Читать книгу A Change in the Cabinet онлайн

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The Wardenship of the Court of Dowry carried with it something regal in that great world of affairs in which he moved, and bitter as had been the attacks upon his colleagues in the Nationalist Cabinet,—especially during the futile attempt to pass the Broadening of the Streets Bill—Sir Charles had always been treated with peculiar and exceptional respect, though he would never have used methods so underhand as to foreclose upon any newspaper with whom he might have a political difference or to embarrass by official action any considerable advertiser of patent medicines whose manufacture came under the purview of his Department.

It would be an exaggeration to say that he had raised one of the minor Government posts to the level of the Foreign Office, but, at any rate, it had under his reign become almost as prominent as it had been when GHERKIN had first raised it to the rank of a principal function in the State. It was one of the great spending departments; Repton saw to that.

Sir Charles Repton prepared to leave his house, I say, at half-past nine; his mind was intent upon the business of the morning, which was a Board meeting of the Van Diemens. It need not yet concern the reader, it is enough for her to know (and the knowledge is consonant with Repton’s character) that the Company was prepared to develop all that North-eastern littoral of the Australian Continent for which it had obtained a charter but which no enterprise had as yet succeeded in bringing into line with the vast energies of the Empire.