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Of the strategical advantages such a position can give, I need not speak. Luckily they were in the hands of patriots.

The comparatively small sum of £4,000,000 which by its charter the Company was permitted to raise would have been subscribed twenty times over in the rush for shares seven years before, and it is common knowledge that at a particular moment during which values must surely have been inflated, they reached a premium of between 800 and 900 per cent. The cool process of reflection which often follows such errors had by this time driven them if anything too low, and the original one pound share which had twice all but touched £9, had been for now many months unsaleable at a nominal price of 16/3.

There exists a sound rule of public administration of this country—inaugurated, I believe, by Mr. Gladstone—which forbids a Cabinet Minister to hold any public directorship at the same time as his official post, and indeed it is this rule which renders it usual for a couple of men upon opposite sides of the House to come to an arrangement whereby the one shall be Director while his colleague is in office, lest important commercial affairs should be neglected through the too rigid application of what is in principle so excellent a rule. But there had been no necessity for this arrangement in the case of so great an Imperial business as the Van Diemens: it touched too nearly the major interests of the country for its connection with a Cabinet Minister to be remarkable, and all patriotic opinion was sincerely glad when, in the preceding January, Sir Charles Repton had consented to acquire without direct purchase a few thousand shares and to take an active part in raising the fortunes of the scheme.