The Prime Minister presided at the eighty-fourth annual dinner of
the Royal Literary Fund, on Wednesday, and made an eloquent appeal for larger resources, stating that in the last thirty years, while the income of the fund has only doubled, the foreign com- merce of the country had quintupled, rising from the value of a hundred millions sterling to five hundred millions. As a mode of representing the enormous increase of English wealth, Mr. Gladstone calculated that if in 1815 England had been simply a pauper, but had produced during every year since that period at
the rate of our recent, instead of at that of our then much smaller, production, she would have been able to produce all the existing wealth of the country in the interval ; in other words, a continuous production of wealth for only sixty years at our present rate, would produce as much as England has accumulated during all the cen- turies of her history. However, Mr. Gladstone did not wish to see the Society turned into a kind of Literary Poor Law Commis- sion. He wished its efforts to be confined to helping those who had been real producers of good literature, and not to be extended to the relief of paupers who happened to have attempted a craft for which they were not fit. And that implies, we suppose, the true defence for the Society,—that literary men, if real, and not sham literary men, suffer in a special degree by being deprived of all the refinements of life, and should, therefore, be saved from deep want by the sympathy of those who can best enter into their needs. Otherwise it would be hard to say that a literary man in want, had more claim than a dunce in want, on the help of literary men.
