The king's household has not only several strong traces of this feudality, but it is formed also upon the principles of a body corporate; it has its own magistrates, courts, and by-laws.

This might be necessary in the ancient times, in order to have a government within itself, capable of regulating the vast and often unruly multitude which composed and attended it. This was the origin of the ancient court called the Green Cloth-composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other great officers of the household, with certain clerks. The rich subjects of the kingdom, who had formerly the same establishments (only on a reduced scale) have since altered their economy; and turned the course of their expense from the maintenance of vast establishments within their walls, to the employment of a great variety of independent trades abroad. Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation, and a style of splendor, suited to the manners of the times, has been increased. Royalty itself has insensibly followed; and the royal household has been carried away by the resistless tide of manners; but with this very material difference--private men have got rid of the establishments along with the reasons of them; whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching anything of the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete, into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tons of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.

But when the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burthen of them. This is superstitiously to embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it. It is to burn precious oils in the tomb; it is to offer meat and drink to the deadnot so much an honor to the deceased, as a disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there' Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud,' howling through the vacant lobbies and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed

tyrants-the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries-who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity, and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead, and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce that those constant attendants upon all courts in all ages, Jobs, were still alive; for whose sake alone it is, that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain. These palaces are a true emblem of some governments; the inhabitants are decayed, but the governors and magistrates still flourish. They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with the busy hum of men,' though now you can only trace the streets by the colour of the corn; and its sole manufacture is in members of parliament.

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 reformation. 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. If the barriers of law should be broken, upon ideas of 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 honors. It is indeed the only genuine ununadulterated 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. 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 labor, and the fixed settlement of acknowledged merit. There is a time, when the weatherbeaten 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.

The

I would, therefore, leave to the crown the possibility of conferring some favors, which, whilst they are received as a reward, do not operate as corruption. When men receive

1 Before the Statute of Queen Anne, which limited the alienation of land.

obligations from the crown through the pious hands of fathers, or of connections as venerable as the paternal, the dependence 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 connections, and those political principles in which they began life. They are antidotes against corrupt levity, instead of causes of it. What an unseemly spectacle would it afford, what a disgrace would it be to the commonwealth that suffered such things, to see the hopeful son of a meritorious minister begging his bread at the door of that treasury from whence his father dispensed the economy of an empire, and promoted the happiness and glory of his country? Why should he be obliged to prostrate his honor, and to submit his principles at the levee of some proud favourite, shouldered and thrust aside by every impudent pretender, on the very spot where a few days before he saw himself adored ?obliged to cringe to the author of the calamities of his house, and to kiss the hands that are red with his father's blood? No, sir, these things are unfit, they are intolerable.

Sir, I shall be asked why I do not choose to destroy those offices which are pensions, and appoint pensions under the direct title in their stead? I allow that in some cases it leads to abuse; to have things appointed for one purpose, and applied to another. I have no great objection to such a change: but I do not think it quite prudent for me to propose it. If I should take away the present establishment, the burthen of proof rests upon me that so many pensions, and no more, and to such an amount each, and no more, are necessary for the public service. This is what I can never prove, for it is a thing incapable of definition. I do not like to take away an object that I think answers my purpose, in hopes of getting it back again in a better shape. People will bear an old establishment when its excess is corrected, who will revolt at a new one. I do not think these office-pensions to be more in number than sufficient: but on that point the house will exercise its discretion. As to abuse, I am convinced that very few trusts in the ordinary course of administration have admitted less abuse