away a private contract of an expensive nature. If the bank, which is a great corporation, and of course receives the least profits from the money in their custody, should of itself refuse, or be persuaded to refuse this offer upon those terms, I can speak with some confidence, that one at least, if not both parts of the condition would be received, and gratefully received, by several bankers of eminence. There is no banker who will not be at least as good security as any paymaster of the forces, or any treasurer of the navy, that have ever been bankers to the public; as rich at least as my Lord Chatham, or my Lord Holland, or either of the honourable gentlemen who now hold the offices, were at the time that they entered into them; or as ever the whole establishment of the mint has been at any period.

These, Sir, are the outlines of the plan I mean to follow, in suppressing these two large subordinate treasuries. I now come to another subordinate treasury, I mean, that of the paymaster of the pensions; for which purpose I re-enter the limits of the civil establishment-I departed from those limits in pursuit of a principle; and following the same game in its doubles, I am brought into those limits again. That treasury, and that office, I mean to take away; and to transfer the payment of every name, mode, and denomination of pensions, to the exchequer. The present course of diversifying the same object can answer no good purpose, whatever its use may be to purposes of another kind. There are also other lists of pensions, and I mean that they should all be hereafter paid at one and the same place. The whole of that new consolidated list, I mean to reduce to £60,000 a year, which sum I intend it shall never exceed. I think that sum will fully answer as a reward to all real merit, and a provision for all real public charity that is ever likely to be placed upon the list. If any merit of an extraordinary nature should emerge, before that reduction is completed, I have left it open for an address of either house of parliament to provide for the case. To all other demands, it must be answered, with regret but with firmness, "the public is poor."

I do not propose, as I told you before Christmas, to take away any pension. I know that the public seem to call for a reduction of such of them as shall appear unmerited. As a censorial act, and punishment of an abuse, it might answer some purpose. But this can make no part of my plan. I mean to proceed by bill; and I cannot stop for such an inquiry. I know some gentlemen may blame me. It is with great submission to better judgments that I recommend it to consideration; that a critical retrospective examination of the pension list, upon the principle of merit, can never serve for my basis. It cannot answer, according to my plan, any effectual purpose of economy

or of future permanent reformation. The process in any way will be entangled and difficult, and it will be infinitely slow; there is a danger that if we turn our line of march, now directed towards the grand object, into this more laborious than useful detail of operations, we shall never arrive at our end.

The king, Sir, has been by the constitution appointed the sole judge of the merit for which a pension is to be given. We have a right, undoubtedly, to canvass this, as we have to canvass every act of government. But there is a material difference between an office to be reformed and a pension taken away for demerit. In the former case no charge is implied against the holder, in the latter his character is slurred, as well as his lawful emolument affected. The former process is against the thing, the second against the person. The pensioner, certainly, if he pleases, has a right to stand on his own defence, to plead his possession, and to bottom his title in the competency of the crown to give him what he holds. Possessed, and on the defensive as he is, he will not be obliged to prove his special merit, in order to justify the act of legal discretion, now turned into his property, according to his tenure. The very act, he will contend, is a legal presumption, and an implication of his merit. If this be so, from the natural force of all legal presumption, he would put us to the difficult 'proof that he has no merit at all. But other questions would arise in the course of such an inquiry, that is, questions of the merit when weighed against the proportion of the reward; then the difficulty will be much greater.

The difficulty will not, Sir, I am afraid, be much less, if we pass to the person really guilty, in the question of an unmerited pensionthe minister himself. I admit that when called to account for the execution of a trust, he might fairly be obliged to prove the affirmative, sand to state the merit for which the pension is given; though, on the pensioner himself such a process would be hard. If, in this examination we proceed methodically, and so as to avoid all suspicion of partiality and prejudice, we must take the pensions in order of time, or merely alphabetically. The very first pension to which we come, in either of these ways, may appear the most grossly unmerited of any. But the minister may very possibly show that he knows nothing of the putting on this pension; that it was prior in time to his administration; that the minister who laid it on is dead; and then we are thrown back upon the pensioner himself, and plunged into all our former difficulties. Abuses, and gross ones, I doubt not, would appear; and to the correction of which I would readily give my hand; but, when I consider that pensions have not generally been affected by the

revolutions of ministry, as I know not where such inquiries would stop, and as an absence of merit is a negative and loose thing, one might be led to derange the order of families, founded on the probable continuance of their kind of income. I might hurt children; I might injure creditors. I really think it the more prudent course not to follow the letter of the petitions. If we fix this mode of inquiry as a basis, we shall, I fear, end, as parliament has often ended under similar circumstances. There will be great delay, much confusion, much inequality in our proceedings. But what presses me most of all is this: that though we should strike off all the unmerited pensions, while the power of the crown remains unlimited, the very same undeserving persons might afterwards return to the very same list; or, if they did not, other persons, meriting as little as they do, might be put upon it to an indefinable amount. This I think is the pinch of the grievance.

For these reasons, Sir, I am obliged to waive this mode of proceeding as any part of my plan. In a plan of reformation it would be one of my maxims, that when I know of an establishment, which may be subservient to useful purposes, and which at the same time, from its discretionary nature, is liable to a very great perversion from those purposes, I would limit the quantity of the power that might be so abused. For I am sure, that in all such cases, the rewards of merit will have very narrow bounds, and that partial or corrupt favour will be infinite. This principle is not arbitrary; but the limitation of the specific quantity must be so in some measure. I therefore state £60,000, leaving it open to the house to enlarge or contract the sum as they shall see, on examination, that the discretion I use is scanty or liberal. The whole amount of the pensions of all denominations, which have been laid before us, amount, for a period of seven years. to considerably more than £100,000 a-year. To what the other lists amount, I know not. That will be seen hereafter. But, from those that do appear, a saving will accrue to the public, at one time or other, of £40,000 a-year, and we had better in my opinion to let it fall in naturally than to tear it crude and unripe from the stalk.

There is a great deal of uneasiness among the people upon an article which I must class under the head of pensions. I mean the great patent offices in the exchequer. They are in reality and substance no other than pensions, and in no other light shall I consider them; they are sinecures; they are always executed by deputy; the duty of the principal is as nothing. They differ, however, from the pensions on the list in some particulars-they are held for life. I think, with the public, that the profits of those places are grown enormous; the magnitude of those profits, and the nature of them, both call for reforma

tion. The nature of their profits, which grow out of the public distress, is itself invidious and grievous. But I fear that reform cannot be immediate. I find myself under a restriction. These places, and others of the same kind, which are held for life, have been considered as property. They have been given as a provision for children; they have been the subject of family settlements; they have been the security of creditors. What the law respects shall be sacred to me.. It the barriers of law should be broken down, upon ideas af convenience, even of public convenience, we shall have no longer anything certain among us. If the discretion of power is once let loose upon property, we can be at no loss to determine whose power and what discretion it is that will prevail at last. It would be wise to attend upon the order of things, and not to attempt to outrun the slow, but smooth and even course of nature. There are occasions, I admit, of public necessity so vast, so clear, so evident, that they supersede all laws. Law being only made for the benefit of the community, cannot, in any one of its parts, resist a demand which may comprehend the total of the public interest. To be sure, no law can set itself up against the cause and reason of all law; but such a case very rarely happens, and this most certainly is not such a case. The mere time of the reform is by no means worth the sacrifice of a principle of law. Individuals pass like shadows, but the commonwealth is fixed and stable. The difference, therefore, of to-day and to-morrow, which, to private people is immense, to the state is nothing. At any rate, it is better, if possible, to reconcile our economy with our laws, than to set them at variance; a quarrel which in the end must be destructive to both.

My idea, therefore, is to reduce those officers to fixed salaries, as the present lives and reversions shall successively fall. I mean that the office of the great auditor (the auditor of the receipt) shall be reduced to £3,000 a-year; and the auditors of the imprest, and the rest of the principal officers, to fixed appointments of £1,500 a-year each. It will not be difficult to calculate the value of this fall of lives to the public, when we shall have obtained a just account of the present income of those places; and we shall obtain that account with great facility, if the present possessors are not alarmed with any apprehension of danger to their freehold office.

I know too that it will be demanded of me how it comes, that since I admit these offices to be no better than pensions, I chose, after the principle of law had been satisfied, to retain them at all? To this, Sir, I answer, that conceiving it to be a fundamental part of the constitution of this country, and of the reason of state in every

'country, that there must be means of rewarding public service, those means will be incomplete, and indeed wholly insufficient for that purpose, if there should be no further reward for that service, than the daily wages it receives during the pleasure of the crown.

Whoever seriously considers the excellent argument of Lord Somers, in the banker's case, will see he bottoms himself upon the very same maxim which I do; and one of his principal grounds of doctrine for the alienability of the domain in England, contrary to the maxim of the law in France, he lays in the constitutional policy of furnishing a permanent reward to public service; of making that reward the origin of families; and the foundation of wealth as well as of honours. It is indeed the only genuine unadulterated origin of nobility. It is a great principle in government; a principle at the very foundation of the whole structure. The other judges who held the same doctrine went beyond Lord Somers with regard to the remedy, which they thought was given by law against the crown, upon the grant of pensions. Indeed no man knows, when he cuts off the incitements to a virtuous ambition, and the just rewards of public service, what infinite mischief he may do his country through all generations. Such saving to the public may prove the worst mode of robbing it. The crown, which has in its hands the trust of the daily pay for national service, ought to have in its hands also the means for the repose of public labour, and the fixed settlement of acknowledged merit. There is a time when the weather-beaten vessels of the state ought to come into harbour. They must at length have a retreat from the malice of rivals, from the perfidy of political friends, and the inconstancy of the people. Many of the persons, who in all times have filled the great offices of state, have been younger brothers, who had originally little, if any fortune. These offices do not furnish the means of amassing wealth. There ought to be some power in the crown of granting pensions out of the reach of its own caprices. An entail of dependence is a bad reward of merit.

I would, therefore, leave to the crown the possibility of conferring some favours, which, whilst they are received as a reward, do not operate as corruption. When men receive obligations from the crown through the pious hands of fathers, or of connexions as venerable as the paternal, the dependences which arise from thence are the obligations of gratitude, and not the fetters of servility. Such ties originate in virtue, and they promote it. They continue men in those habitudes of friendship, those political connexions, and those political principles in which they began life. They are antidotes against a corrupt levity, instead of causes of it. What an unseemly spectacle