Mr. Goschen, in an amusiog and very eloquent speech at
a. dinner given him by the Lord Mayor on Wednesday, adverted to the receipts of the Treasury for " conscience-money " as being creditable to the City, and jestingly remarked that no remittance of conscience-money had ever been received from a woman. That does not prove much, either as to the honesty or dishonesty of women, as there are comparatively few who trade on the scale which makes it worth while to deceive the Income-tax Commissioners ; but as far as it goes, we should take it as evidence in favour of women. It accords with a general experience. The training of women for centuries as trustees for men in money-matters has made them more rigidly honest than men, and while they would grumble much more at a tax, they would pay it much more carefully. The women who waste money and then fight their milliners' bills are exceptions, as the bankruptcy records show. Women, as the Law Courts testify, exaggerate their rights under wills, and so on, to receive money ; but they think their creditors, Government included, ought to be paid. We should say, as a result of long ex- perience, that it was about three times as safe to lend money to a woman as to a man, and that as regards dates of payment, the former were punctiliously, not to say painfully, exact.
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