These various studies, however, were but subordinate to one principal enterprise, towards which his later work and thoughts had been steadily converging, and for which both the time and the man certainly seemed ripe. He had planned and partly written a great Treatise on Economics, which was, as he hoped, to be the achievement of his life, and in which he would have worked up the immense store of classified materials which he had been accumulating for more than twenty years. He had unrivalled qualifications for the task he had set himself; his death, when he had just fairly set out upon it, falls on many of us with all the weight of a personal and irreparable loss.