sunshine the real value of formality and official superintendence. There
was in the province of Nova Scotia one little neglected corner, the
country of the _neutral French_; which, having the good-fortune to
escape the fostering care of both France and England, and to have been
shut out from the protection and regulation of councils of commerce and
of boards of trade, did, in silence, without notice, and without
assistance, increase to a considerable degree. But it seems our nation
had more skill and ability in destroying than in settling a colony. In
the last war, we did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretences
that in the eye of an honest man are not worth a farthing, root out this
poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or
to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate. Whatever the
merits of that extirpation might have been, it was on the footsteps of a
neglected people, it was on the fund of unconstrained poverty, it was on
the acquisitions of unregulated industry, that anything which deserves
the name of a colony in that province has been formed. It has been
formed by overflowings from the exuberant population of New England, and
by emigration from other parts of Nova Scotia of fugitives from the
protection of the Board of Trade.
But if all of these things were not more than sufficient to prove to you
the inutility of that expensive establishment, I would desire you to
recollect, Sir, that those who may be very ready to defend it are very
cautious how they employ it,--cautious how they employ it even in
appearance and pretence. They are afraid they should lose the benefit of
its influence in Parliament, if they deemed to keep it up for any other
purpose. If ever there were commercial points of great weight, and most
closely connected with our dependencies, they are those which have been
agitated and decided in Parliament since I came into it. Which of the
innumerable regulations since made had their origin or their improvement
in the Board of Trade? Did any of the several East India bills which
have been successively produced since 1767 originate there? Did any one
dream of referring them, or any part of them, thither? Was anybody so
ridiculous as even to think of it? If ever there was an occasion on
which the Board was fit to be consulted, it was with regard to the acts
that were preludes to the American war, or attendant on its
commencement. Those acts were full of commercial regulations, such as
they were: the Intercourse Bill; the Prohibitory Bill; the Fishery
Bill. If the Board was not concerned in such things, in what particular
was it thought fit that it should be concerned? In the course of all
these bills through the House, I observed the members of that board to
be remarkably cautious of intermeddling. They understood decorum better;
they know that matters of trade and plantations are no business of
theirs.
There were two very recent occasions, which, if the idea of any use for
the Board had not been extinguished by prescription, appeared loudly to
call for their interference.
When commissioners were sent to pay his Majesty's and our dutiful
respects to the Congress of the United States, a part of their powers
under the commission were, it seems, of a commercial nature. They were
authorized, in the most ample and undefined manner, to form a commercial
treaty with America on the spot. This was no trivial object. As the
formation of such a treaty would necessarily have been no less than the
breaking up of our whole commercial system, and the giving it an entire
new form, one would imagine that the Board of Trade would have sat day
and night to model propositions, which, on our side, might serve as a
basis to that treaty. No such thing. Their learned leisure was not in
the least interrupted, though one of the members of the Board was a
commissioner, and might, in mere compliment to his office, have been
supposed to make a show of deliberation on the subject. But he knew that
his colleagues would have thought he laughed in their faces, had he
attempted to bring anything the most distantly relating to commerce or
colonies before _them_. A noble person, engaged in the same commission,
and sent to learn his commercial rudiments in New York, (then under the
operation of an act for the universal prohibition of trade,) was soon
after put at the head of that board. This contempt from the present
ministers of all the pretended functions of that board, and their manner
of breathing into its very soul, of inspiring it with its animating and
presiding principle, puts an end to all dispute concerning their opinion
of the clay it was made of. But I will give them heaped measure.
It was but the other day, that the noble lord in the blue ribbon carried
up to the House of Peers two acts, altering, I think much for the
better, but altering in a great degree, our whole commercial system:
those acts, I mean, for giving a free trade to Ireland in woollens, and
in all things else, with independent nations, and giving them an equal
trade to our own colonies. Here, too, the novelty of this great, but
arduous and critical improvement of system, would make you conceive that
the anxious solicitude of the noble lord in the blue ribbon would have
wholly destroyed the plan of summer recreation of that board, by
references to examine, compare, and digest matters for Parliament. You
would imagine that Irish commissioners of customs, and English
commissioners of customs, and commissioners of excise, that merchants
and manufacturers of every denomination, had daily crowded their outer
rooms. _Nil horum_. The perpetual virtual adjournment, and the unbroken
sitting vacation of that board, was no more disturbed by the Irish than
by the plantation commerce, or any other commerce. The same matter made
a large part of the business which occupied the House for two sessions
before; and as our ministers were not then mellowed by the mild,
emollient, and engaging blandishments of our dear sister into all the
tenderness of unqualified surrender, the bounds and limits of a
restrained benefit naturally required much detailed management and
positive regulation. But neither the qualified propositions which were
received, nor those other qualified propositions which were rejected by
ministers, were the least concern of theirs, or were they ever thought
of in the business.
It is therefore, Sir, on the opinion of Parliament, on the opinion of
the ministers, and even on their own opinion of their inutility, that I
shall propose to you to _suppress the Board of Trade and Plantations_,
and to recommit all its business to the Council, from whence it was very
improvidently taken; and which business (whatever it might be) was much
better done, and without any expense; and, indeed, where in effect it
may all come at last. Almost all that deserves the name of business
there is the reference of the plantation acts to the opinion of
gentlemen of the law. But all this may be done, as the Irish business of
the same nature has always been done, by the Council, and with a
reference to the Attorney and Solicitor General.
There are some regulations in the household, relative to the officers of
the yeomen of the guards, and the officers and band of gentlemen
pensioners, which I shall likewise submit to your consideration, for the
purpose of regulating establishments which at present are much abused.
I have now finished all that for the present I shall trouble you with on
the _plan of reduction_. I mean next to propose to you the _plan of
arrangement_, by which I mean to appropriate and fix the civil list
money to its several services according to their nature: for I am
thoroughly sensible, that, if a discretion wholly arbitrary can be
exercised over the civil list revenue, although the most effectual
methods may be taken to prevent the inferior departments from exceeding
their bounds, the plan of reformation will still be left very imperfect.
It will not, in my opinion, be safe to permit an entirely arbitrary
discretion even in the First Lord of the Treasury himself; it will not
be safe to leave with him a power of diverting the public money from its
proper objects, of paying it in an irregular course, or of inverting
perhaps the order of time, dictated by the proportion of value, which
ought to regulate his application of payment to service.
I am sensible, too, that the very operation of a plan of economy which
tends to exonerate the civil list of expensive establishments may in
some sort defeat the capital end we have in view,--the independence of
Parliament; and that, in removing the public and ostensible means of
influence, we may increase the fund of private corruption. I have
thought of some methods to prevent an abuse of surplus cash under
discretionary application,--I mean the heads of _secret service, special
service, various payments_, and the like,--which I hope will answer, and
which in due time I shall lay before you. Where I am unable to limit the
quantity of the sums to be applied, by reason of the uncertain quantity
of the service, I endeavor to confine it to its _line_, to secure an
indefinite application to the definite service to which it belongs,--not
to stop the progress of expense in its line, but to confine it to that
line in which it professes to move.
But that part of my plan, Sir, upon which I principally rest, that on
which I rely for the purpose of binding up and securing the whole, is to
establish a fixed and invariable order in all its payments, which it
shall not be permitted to the First Lord of the Treasury, upon any
pretence whatsoever, to depart from. I therefore divide the civil list
payments into _nine_ classes, putting each class forward according to
the importance or justice of the demand, and to the inability of the
persons entitled to enforce their pretensions: that is, to put those
first who have the most efficient offices, or claim the justest debts,
and at the same time, from the character of that description of men,
from the retiredness or the remoteness of their situation, or from their
want of weight and power to enforce their pretensions, or from their
being entirely subject to the power of a minister, without any
reciprocal power of awing, ought to be the most considered, and are the
most likely to be neglected,--all these I place in the highest classes;
I place in the lowest those whose functions are of the least importance,
but whose persons or rank are often of the greatest power and influence.
In the first class I place the _judges_, as of the first importance. It
is the public justice that holds the community together; the ease,
therefore, and independence of the judges ought to supersede all other
considerations, and they ought to be the very last to feel the
necessities of the state, or to be obliged either to court or bully a
minister for their right; they ought to be as _weak solicitors on their
own demands_ as strenuous assertors of the rights and liberties of
others. The judges are, or ought to be, of a _reserved_ and retired
character, and wholly unconnected with the political world.
In the second class I place the foreign ministers. The judges are the
links of our connections with one another; the foreign ministers are the
links of our connection with other nations. They are not upon the spot
to demand payment, and are therefore the most likely to be, as in fact
they have sometimes been, entirely neglected, to the great disgrace and
perhaps the great detriment of the nation.
In the third class I would bring all the tradesmen who supply the crown
by contract or otherwise.
In the fourth class I place all the domestic servants of the king, and
all persons in efficient offices whose salaries do not exceed two
hundred pounds a year.
In the fifth, upon account of honor, which ought to give place to
nothing but charity and rigid justice, I would place the pensions and
allowances of his Majesty's royal family, comprehending of course the
queen, together with the stated allowance of the privy purse.
In the sixth class I place those efficient offices of duty whose
salaries may exceed the sum of two hundred pounds a year.
In the seventh class, that mixed mass, the whole pension list.
In the eighth, the offices of honor about the king.
In the ninth, and the last of all, the salaries and pensions of the
First Lord of the Treasury himself, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and
the other Commissioners of the Treasury.
If, by any possible mismanagement of that part of the revenue which is
left at discretion, or by any other mode of prodigality, cash should be
deficient for the payment of the lowest classes, I propose that the
amount of those salaries where the deficiency may happen to fall shall
not be carried as debt to the account of the succeeding year, but that
it shall be entirely lapsed, sunk, and lost; so that government will be
enabled to start in the race of every new year wholly unloaded, fresh in
wind and in vigor. Hereafter no civil list debt can ever come upon the
public. And those who do not consider this as saving, because it is not
a certain sum, do not ground their calculations of the future on their
experience of the past.
I know of no mode of preserving the effectual execution of any duty, but
to make it the direct interest of the executive officer that it shall be
faithfully performed. Assuming, then, that the present vast allowance to
the civil list is perfectly adequate to all its purposes, if there
should be any failure, it must be from the mismanagement or neglect of
the First Commissioner of the Treasury; since, upon the proposed plan,
there can be no expense of any consequence which he is not himself
previously to authorize and finally to control. It is therefore just, as
well as politic, that the loss should attach upon the delinquency.
If the failure from the delinquency should be very considerable, it will
fall on the class directly above the First Lord of the Treasury, as well
as upon himself and his board. It will fall, as it ought to fall, upon
offices of no primary importance in the state; but then it will fall
upon persons whom it will be a matter of no slight importance for a
minister to provoke: it will fall upon persons of the first rank and
consequence in the kingdom,--upon those who are nearest to the king, and
frequently have a more interior credit with him than the minister
himself. It will fall upon masters of the horse, upon lord
chamberlains, upon lord stewards, upon grooms of the stole, and lords of
the bedchamber. The household troops form an army, who will be ready to
mutiny for want of pay, and whose mutiny will be _really_ dreadful to a
commander-in-chief. A rebellion of the thirteen lords of the bedchamber
would be far more terrible to a minister, and would probably affect his
power more to the quick, than a revolt of thirteen colonies. What an
uproar such an event would create at court! What _petitions_, and
_committees_, and _associations_, would it not produce! Bless me! what a
clattering of white sticks and yellow sticks would be about his head!
what a storm of gold keys would fly about the ears of the minister! what
a shower of Georges, and thistles, and medals, and collars of S.S. would
assail him at his first entrance into the antechamber, after an
insolvent Christmas quarter!--a tumult which could not be appeased by
all the harmony of the new year's ode. Rebellion it is certain there
would be; and rebellion may not now, indeed, be so critical an event to
those who engage in it, since its price is so correctly ascertained at
just a thousand pound.
Sir, this classing, in my opinion, is a serious and solid security for
the performance of a minister's duty. Lord Coke says, that the staff was
put into the Treasurer's hand to enable him to support himself when
there was no money in the Exchequer, and to beat away importunate
solicitors. The method which I propose would hinder him from the
necessity of such a broken staff to lean on, or such a miserable weapon
for repulsing the demands of worthless suitors, who, the noble lord in
the blue ribbon knows, will bear many hard blows on the head, and many
other indignities, before they are driven from the Treasury. In this
plan, he is furnished with an answer to all their importunity,--an
answer far more conclusive than if he had knocked them down with his
staff:--"Sir, (or my Lord,) you are calling for my own salary,--Sir, you
are calling for the appointments of my colleagues who sit about me in
office,--Sir, you are going to excite a mutiny at court against me,--you
are going to estrange his Majesty's confidence from me, through the
chamberlain, or the master of the horse, or the groom of the stole."
As things now stand, every man, in proportion to his consequence at
court, tends to add to the expenses of the civil list, by all manner of
jobs, if not for himself, yet for his dependants. When the new plan is
established, those who are now suitors for jobs will become the most
strenuous opposers of them. They will have a common interest with the
minister in public economy. Every class, as it stands low, will become
security for the payment of the preceding class; and thus the persons
whose insignificant services defraud those that are useful would then
become interested in their payment. Then the powerful, instead of
oppressing, would be obliged to support the weak; and idleness would
become concerned in the reward of industry. The whole fabric of the
civil economy would become compact and connected in all its parts; it
would be formed into a well-organized body, where every member
contributes to the support of the whole, and where even the lazy stomach
secures the vigor of the active arm.
This plan, I really flatter myself, is laid, not in official formality,
nor in airy speculation, but in real life, and in human nature, in what
"comes home" (as Bacon says) "to the business and bosoms of men." You
have now, Sir, before you, the whole of my scheme, as far as I have
digested it into a form that might be in any respect worthy of your
consideration. I intend to lay it before you in five bills.[44] The plan
consists, indeed, of many parts; but they stand upon a few plain
principles. It is a plan which takes nothing from the civil list without
discharging it of a burden equal to the sum carried to the public
service. It weakens no one function necessary to government; but, on the
contrary, by appropriating supply to service, it gives it greater vigor.
It provides the means of order and foresight to a minister of finance,
which may always keep all the objects of his office, and their state,
condition, and relations, distinctly before him. It brings forward
accounts without hurrying and distressing the accountants: whilst it
provides for public convenience, it regards private rights. It
extinguishes secret corruption almost to the possibility of its
existence. It destroys direct and visible influence equal to the offices
of at least fifty members of Parliament. Lastly, it prevents the
provision for his Majesty's children from being diverted to the
political purposes of his minister.
These are the points on which I rely for the merit of the plan. I pursue
economy in a secondary view, and only as it is connected with these
great objects. I am persuaded, that even for supply this scheme will be
far from unfruitful, if it be executed to the extent I propose it. I
think it will give to the public, at its periods, two or three hundred
thousand pounds a year; if not, it will give them a system of economy,
which is itself a great revenue. It gives me no little pride and
satisfaction to find that the principles of my proceedings are in many
respects the very same with those which are now pursued in the plans of
the French minister of finance. I am sure that I lay before you a scheme
easy and practicable in all its parts. I know it is common at once to
applaud and to reject all attempts of this nature. I know it is common
for men to say, that such and such things are perfectly right, very
desirable,--but that, unfortunately, they are not practicable. Oh, no,
Sir! no! Those things-which are not practicable are not desirable. There
is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the
reach of an informed understanding and a well-directed pursuit. There is
nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the
means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world. If we cry,
like children, for the moon, like children we must cry on.
We must follow the nature of our affairs, and conform ourselves to our
situation. If we do, our objects are plain and compassable. Why should
we resolve to do nothing, because what I propose to you may not be the
exact demand of the petition, when we are far from resolved to comply
even with what evidently is so? Does this sort of chicanery become us?
The people are the masters. They have only to express their wants at
large and in gross. We are the expert artists, we are the skilful
workmen, to shape their desires into perfect form, and to fit the
utensil to the use. They are the sufferers, they tell the symptoms of
the complaint; but we know the exact seat of the disease, and how to
apply the remedy according to the rules of art. How shocking would it be
to see us pervert our skill into a sinister and servile dexterity, for
the purpose of evading our duty, and defrauding our employers, who are
our natural lords, of the object of their just expectations! I think the
whole not only practicable, but practicable in a very short time. If we
are in earnest about it, and if we exert that industry and those talents
in forwarding the work, which, I am afraid, may be exerted in impeding
it, I engage that the whole may be put in complete execution within a
year. For my own part, I have very little to recommend me for this or
for any task, but a kind of earnest and anxious perseverance of mind,
which, with all its good and all its evil effects, is moulded into my
constitution. I faithfully engage to the House, if they choose to
appoint me to any part in the execution of this work, (which, when they
have made it theirs by the improvements of their wisdom, will be worthy
of the able assistance they may give me,) that by night and by day, in
town or in country, at the desk or in the forest, I will, without regard
to convenience, ease, or pleasure, devote myself to their service, not
expecting or admitting any reward whatsoever. I owe to this country my
labor, which is my all; and I owe to it ten times more industry, if ten
times more I could exert. After all, I shall be an unprofitable servant.
At the same time, if I am able, and if I shall be permitted, I will lend
an humble helping hand to any other good work which is going on. I have
not, Sir, the frantic presumption to suppose that this plan contains in
it the whole of what the public has a right to expect in the great work
of reformation they call for. Indeed, it falls infinitely short of it.
It falls short even of my own ideas. I have some thoughts, not yet fully
ripened, relative to a reform in the customs and excise, as well as in
some other branches of financial administration. There are other things,
too, which form essential parts in a great plan for the purpose of
restoring the independence of Parliament. The contractors' bill of last
year it is fit to revive; and I rejoice that it is in better hands than
mine. The bill for suspending the votes of custom-house officers,
brought into Parliament several years ago by one of our worthiest and
wisest members,[45]--would to God we could along with the plan revive
the person who designed it! but a man of very real integrity, honor, and
ability will be found to take his place, and to carry his idea into full
execution. You all see how necessary it is to review our military
expenses for some years past, and, if possible, to bind up and close
that bleeding artery of profusion; but that business also, I have reason
to hope, will be undertaken by abilities that are fully adequate to it.
Something must be devised (if possible) to check the ruinous expense of
elections.