Excerpt from Some Occasional Papers: Read at the Richmond Athenæum; Founded 1881

With ancient corporations, who love cobwebs and antiquity - whose hearts are centred in the good old times who have a veneration for monopolies - who like silence and darkness - I need hardly say that these gentlemen are not popular; nevertheless they exist, and to a very good purpose. W110 likes his territory to be invaded by a foreign foe? None certainly none. But what if by and bye the foe should turn out to be a friend? Oh, the gratitude! And I can assure you that the curses showered upon Charity Commissioners at first have been changed into blessings in many hundreds of parishes in England; and though their powers are too limited for real effective work, in some very stony ground, yet we may well trust the affairs of our bigger endowed charities in the hands of a body of men far removed from pettiness, out of the reach of corruption business-like, firm, but courteous. Their powers are all too limited to meet the requirements of reform, without great delay and expense, in certain flagrant cases, as they have not the legal right to coerce from themselves. At present they can but advise and wait, and only in extreme cases obtain an injunction against a corrupt charity from the Court of Chancery. They are seeking enlarged powers to do enlarged work, and it is to be hoped that Conservators of the ancient will discriminate between the useful and the useless, between the sweet and the fusty, between traditions which are wise to preserve and those which it is folly to perpetuate, so as not to hinder a great commission from having legitimate power, effective and equal to the worst of its work. There is a spurious Conservatism as well as a spurious Liberalism, and when Lord Salisbury emasculates (as he did last year) a useful Bill in the House of Lords in order to spite a Government which is not his own, he shows the hands of a partisan, unworthy of his great ability and services, and not the wisdom of a statesman.

With the past labours of the Charity Commissioners I do not propose to deal to-night, though a sense of gratitude might dispose you, of Richmond, to listen to a few details, for they have rendered you a little service in connection with certain institutions of your own, by sweeping clean sundry places which shall be nameless, which places had grown a little dirty owing to the dearness of brooms, the costliness of whitewash, the uncertainty of the Richmond water supply, the general habits of the great unwashed, and, Mr. Maxwell would add, the insufficiency of the sewage arrangements. Well, I must tread tenderly here; but living as I do in the neighbourhood of one of these institutions I must express my gratitude for the increased sweetness and light, and record my thanks for favours past, which I regard as pledges for more favours yet to come.

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