Treasury, as well as the natural bent of his mind, had made him
"confessedly the ablest man of business in the House of Commons."
The Governors of the Bank of England, very efficient men
certainly, held it a great point in the minister's favor that
they "could never do business with any man with the same ease
they had done it with him." Undoubtedly the first axiom of
business is that one's accounts should be kept straight, one's
books nicely balanced; the second, that one's assets should
exceed one's liabilities. Mr. Grenville, accordingly, "had
studied the revenues with professional assiduity, and something
of professional ideas seemed to mingle in all his regulations
concerning them." He "felt the weight of debt, amounting at this
time to one hundred and fifty-eight millions, which oppressed his
country, and he looked to the amelioration of the revenue as the
only mode of relieving it."

It is true there were some untouched sources of revenue still
available in England. As sinecures went in that day, Mr.
Grosvenor Bedford's was not of the best; and on any consideration
of the matter from the point of view of revenue only, Grenville
might well have turned his attention to a different class of
officials; for example, to the Master of the Rolls in Ireland,
Mr. Rigby, who was also Paymaster of the Forces, and to whose
credit there stood at the Bank of England, as Mr. Trevelyan
assures us, a million pounds of the public money, the interest of
which was paid to him "or to his creditors." This was a much
better thing than Grosvenor Bedford had with his paltry
collectorship at Philadelphia; and the interest on a million
pounds, more or less, had it been diverted from Mr. Rigby's
pocket to the public treasury, would perhaps have equaled the