any contract for a cable. Do not mistake us to mean the least reproach: I am afraid from many passages in the letters of you all that you seem to think we reproach you. Not at . What we mean is to urge upon you, as it is certain some one must come home to do your new loan, is that whoever it is should be armed with sufficient powers. coming to London without them. Featherston tells me he has written to you what took place only today about the cable. The war has ruined everything in the way of speculative enterprise, and we must wait. I do not know whether I have mentioned in any of my letters that I have devoted a good deal of trouble to the system of Exchequer Audit & Treasury departments and the custody and outlet of Public Monies. I never could get from any of the men who had come here, real information on these questions. Fitzherbert did not seem to have more than a general idea of them, and even Crosbie Ward, whose scent for departmental system was strong, knew little of the routine. Fitzgerald used to awe us all into silence by the most portentous declarations of what the English system was, but he seemed to me in a maze. I suspect that Knight knows, but then Knight is a man who likes to keep his knowledge to himself. However this may be, I am taking out with me Blue Books & papers which will tell the lot of us all about it: and if I can prevent myself from being idle on the way out, I shall draw up a popular abstract of the thing, for elementary instruction to Hugo de Carleton and Bunny, and for the confounding of our enemies in the passing of the next Act for reversing all our financial laws. Featherston duly brought back the papers about the light