In memoriam : died July 27, 1892, aged 80 1/2 years, Rt. Hon. Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke.

  • Simon, Sir John, 1816-1904.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: In memoriam : died July 27, 1892, aged 80 1/2 years, Rt. Hon. Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    to the duties of his membership the very best work of which he was capable. On that footing he served in the House of Commons for some twenty-eight years, and was in office in different capacities for about sixteen of them. Always, whether Minister or not Minister, he was conspicuously a worker among the workers. Of services rendered to the public by Mr. Low^e as holder of office in other branches of government than that in which I worked with him, I cannot speak with departmental know- ledge, and therefore do not attempt to speak in detail. It is only for me to note that both in the years in which he was parliamentary joint secretary to the Indian Board of Control, and in the years in which he was Vice-President of the Board of Trade, very important reforms and extensions of law in those two provinces of government were advocated by him in the House of Commons, and that the period of his Vice- Presidency of the Committee of Council on Education signalised itself as an era of radical revision and reconstruction in the administrative system of the department.* During Mr. Lowe’s Chancellorship of the Exchequer, his view^s on current ques- tions of national finance were, of course, presented in his successive budget speeches; with which may be classed the important speech w'hich he made in debate, June 2, 1871, insisting on the claims of national duty in relation to the repajTnent of national debt, and strongly dissenting from pro- posals to subordinate that duty to the object of largely reduc- ing indirect taxation. Regarding the strictness with which, while at the Exchequer, he watched against the various forms of undue expenditure from the public purse—a strictness by which (as before stated) he no doubt gave rise to a class of ♦ Mr. Lowe, when he had retired from office as Vice-President of the Education Committee, did not cease to interest himself in educational questions concerning the public, but, on the contrary, continued to take an active and influential part in discussing them; as particularly in the years 1867-8, with reference to questions of middle-class education, and to the effect of scholastic endowments. See his educational addresses delivered at Edinburgh and Liverpool, and his pamphlet on ^Endowment or Free Trade in Middle Class Education.^ JS itcJLl.