possibly be. But they are not properly qualified for this object of their ambition. The want of a regular education, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch, a mountebank, a fiddler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that tribe. The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline and final ruin of the empire. It is therefore of very great importance (provided the thing is not overdone) to contrive such an establishment as must, almost whether a prince will or not, bring into daily and hourly offices about his person a great number of his first nobility; and it is rather an useful prejudice that gives them a pride in such a servitude. Though they are not much the better for a court, a court will be much the better for them. I have therefore not attempted to reform any of the offices of honour about the king's person.

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There are, indeed, two offices in his stables which are sinecures. By the change of manners, and indeed by the nature of the thing, they must be so; I mean the several keepers of buck-hounds, stag-hounds, fox-hounds, and harriers. They answer no purpose of utility or of splendour. These I pose to abolish. It is not proper that great noblemen should be keepers of dogs, though they were the king's dogs. In every part of my scheme, I have endeavoured that no primary, and that even no secondary, service of the state should suffer by its frugality. I mean to touch no offices but such as I am perfectly sure are either of no use at all, or not of any use in the least assignable proportion to the burthen with which they load the revenues of the kingdom, and to the influence with which they oppress the freedom of parlia mentary deliberation; for which reason there are but two offices which are properly state offices, that I have a desire to reform.

The first of them is the new office of third secretary of state, which is commonly called secretary of state for the colonies. We know that all the correspondence of the colonies had been, until within a few years, carried on by the southern secretary of state; and that this department has not been shunned upon account of the weight of its duties; but, on

the contrary, much sought on account of its patronage. Indeed he must be poorly acquainted with the history of office, who does not know how very lightly the American functions have always leaned on the shoulders of the ministerial Atlas, who has upheld that side of the sphere. Undoubtedly, great temper and judgment were requisite in the management of the colony politics; but the official detail was a trifle. Since the new appointment, a train of unfortunate accidents has brought before us almost the whole correspondence of this favourite secretary's office, since the first day of its establishment. I will say nothing of its auspicious foundation; of the quality of its correspondence; or of the effects that have ensued from it. I speak merely of its quantity; which we know would have been little or no addition to the trouble of whatever office had its hands the fullest. But what has been the real condition of the old office of secretary of state? Have their velvet bags, and their red boxes, been so full, that nothing more could possibly be crammed into them?

A correspondence of a curious nature has been lately published. In that correspondence, Sir, we find the opinion of a noble person, who is thought to be the grand manufacturer of administrations; and therefore the best judge of the quality of his work. He was of opinion, that there was but one man of diligence and industry in the whole administration-it was the late Earl of Suffolk. The noble lord lamented very justly, that this statesman, of so much mental vigour, was almost wholly disabled from the exertion of it, by his bodily infirmities. Lord Suffolk, dead to the state long before he was dead to nature, at last paid his tribute to the common treasury to which we must all be taxed. But so little want was found even of his intentional industry, that the office, vacant in reality to its duties long before, continued vacant even in nomination and appointment for a year after his death. The whole of the laborious and arduous correspondence of this empire rested solely upon the activity and energy of Lord Weymouth.

It is therefore demonstrable, since one diligent man was fully equal to the duties of the two offices, that two diligent men will be equal to the duty of three. The business of the new office, which I shall propose to you to suppress, is by no

' Letters between Dr. Addington and Sir James Wright.

means too much to be returned to either of the secretaries which remain. If this dust in the balance should be thought too heavy, it may be divided between them both; North America (whether free or reduced) to the northern secretary, the West Indies to the southern. It is not necessary that I should say more upon the inutility of this office. It is burning day-light. But before I have done, I shall just remark, that the history of this office is too recent to suffer us to forget, that it was made for the mere convenience of the arrangements of political intrigue, and not for the service of the state; that it was made, in order to give a colour to an exorbitant increase of the civil list; and in the same act to bring a new accession to the loaded compost heap of corrupt influence.

There is, Sir, another office which was not long since closely connected with this of the American secretary; but has been lately separated from it for the very same purpose for which it had been conjoined; I mean the sole purpose of all the separations and all the conjunctions that have been lately made-a job. I speak, Sir, of the board of trade and plantations. This board is a sort of temperate bed of influence; a sort of gently ripening hot-house, where eight members of parliament receive salaries of a thousand a year, for a certain given time, in order to mature, at a proper season, a claim to two thousand, granted for doing less, and on the credit of having toiled so long in that inferior, laborious department.

I have known that board, off and on, for a great number of years. Both of its pretended objects have been much the objects of my study, if I have a right to call any pursuits of mine by so respectable a name. I can assure the House, and I hope they will not think that I risk my little credit lightly, that, without meaning to convey the least reflection upon any one of its members past or present,—it is a board which, if not mischievous, is of no use at all.

You will be convinced, Sir, that I am not mistaken, if you reflect how generally it is true, that commerce, the principal object of that office, flourishes most when it is left to itself. Interest, the great guide of commerce, is not a blind one. It is very well able to find its own way; and its necessities are its best laws. But if it were possible, in the nature of

things, that the young should direct the old, and the inexperienced instruct the knowing; if a board in the state was the best tutor for the counting-house; if the desk ought to read lectures to the anvil, and the pen to usurp the place of the shuttle-yet in any matter of regulation, we know that board must act with as little authority as skill. The prerogative of the crown is utterly inadequate to the object; because all regulations are, in their nature, restrictive of some liberty. In the reign, indeed, of Charles the First, the council, or committees of council, were never a moment unoccupied with affairs of trade. But even where they had no ill intention (which was sometimes the case) trade and manufacture suffered infinitely from their injudicious tampering. But since that period, whenever regulation is wanting (for I do not deny that sometimes it may be wanting) parliament constantly sits; and parliament alone is competent to such regulation. We want no instructions from boards of trade, or from any other board; and God forbid we should give the least attention to their reports. Parliamentary inquiry is the only mode of obtaining parliamentary information. There is more real knowledge to be obtained by attending the detail of business in the committees above-stairs, than ever did come, or ever will come, from any board in this kingdom, or from all of them together. An assiduous member of parliament will not be the worse instructed there, for not being paid a thousand a year for learning his lesson. And now that I speak of the committees above-stairs, I must say, that having till lately attended them a good deal, I have observed that no description of members give so little attendance, either to communicate or to obtain instruction upon matters of commerce, as the honourable members of the grave board of trade. I really do not recollect that I have ever seen one of them in that sort of business. Possibly some members may have better memories; and may call to mind some job that may have accidentally brought one or other of them, at one time or other, to attend a matter of commerce.

This board, Sir, has had both its original formation, and its regeneration, in a job. In a job it was conceived, and in a job its mother brought it forth. It made one among those showy and specious impositions, which one of the experiment

making administrations of Charles the Second held out to delude the people, and to be substituted in the place of the real service which they might expect from a parliament annually sitting. It was intended, also, to corrupt that body whenever it should be permitted to sit. It was projected in the year 1668, and it continued in a tottering and rickety childhood for about three or four years; for it died in the year 1673, a babe of as little hopes as ever swelled the bills of mortality in the article of convulsed or over-laid children, who have hardly stepped over the threshold of life.

It was buried with little ceremony; and never more thought of until the reign of King William, when in the strange vicissitude of neglect and vigour, of good and ill success, that attended his wars in the year 1695, the trade was distressed beyond all example of former sufferings, by the piracies of the French cruisers. This suffering incensed, and, as it should seem, very justly incensed, the House of Commons. In this ferment they struck, not only at the administration, but at the very constitution of the executive government. They attempted to form in parliament a board for the protection of trade; which, as they planned it, was to draw to itself a great part, if not the whole, of the functions and powers, both of the admiralty and of the treasury; and thus, by a parliamentary delegation of office and officers, they threatened absolutely to separate these departments from the whole system of the executive government, and of course to vest the most leading and essential of its attributes in this board. As the executive government was in a manner convicted of a dereliction of its functions, it was with infinite difficulty that this blow was warded off in that session. There was a threat to renew the same attempt in the next. To prevent the effect of this manœuvre, the court opposed another manœuvre to it; and, in the year 1696, called into life this board of trade, which had slept since 1673.

This, in a few words, is the history of the regeneration of the board of trade. It has perfectly answered its purposes. It was intended to quiet the minds of the people, and to compose the ferment that was then strongly working in parliament. The courtiers were too happy to be able to substitute a board, which they knew would be useless, in the place of one that they feared would be dangerous. Thus