to this wittol nation! Sir, this colony has stood us in a sum of not less than seven hundred thousand pounds. To this day it has made no repayment,-- it does not even support those offices of expense which are miscalled its government: the whole of that job still lies upon the patient, callous shoulders of the people of England.

Sir, I am going to state a fact to you that will serve to set in full 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 any thing 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 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 seemed 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

8 A wittol is, properly, a husband dishonoured in his home, and knowing himself to be so, yet tamely putting up with it.

9 Acadia is, I suppose, the province referred to; well known to readers of poetry as the scene of Longfellow's Evangeline. Acadia, however, or Acadie, is merely the old French name of Nova Scotia.

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 any thing 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 it 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

riband 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 riband 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 sister1 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, nor 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; where that 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

1 Ireland is the "dear sister" meant, and the "blandishments" she had used were open revolt, a whirlwind of public commotion, the people demanding relief with arms in their hands. The matter is fully discussed in Burke's Speech to the Electors of Bristol.

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 admit 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 endeavour 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 rights; 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 honour, 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 honour 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