The space which has been given in the papers this
week to Lady Oxford's enforced sale of " The Wharf " and its contents provokes one reflection that seems to e pertinent. At the end of the War substantial money grants were made, not merely ungrudgingly but by acclamation, to the heads of the fighting forces by land and sea. Lord Jellicoe, I believe, got £50,000, Lord Haig £100,000, and Lord Plumer, Lord Byng and several others were among the beneficiaries. No one grudged a penny of this at the time, and no one grudges it to-day in retrospect. But did either Jellicoe or Haig, in fact, give more to the country than men who, at the head of the Government—Mr. Asquith for over two years of the War and Mr. Lloyd George for something less—spent themselves unsparingly in the national cause ? Their financial reward was a First Lord of the Treasury's salary on which they could not live without encroaching on private means—that and nothing else. There is very real reason for sympathizing with a Prime Minister's widow on this score.
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