I am so far from being convinced that any danger can arise from this inquiry, that I believe the nation can only be injured by a long neglect of such examinations; and that a minister is easily formidable, when he has exempted himself by a kind of prescription from exposing his accounts, and has long had an opportunity of employing the publick money in multiplying his dependants, enriching his hirelings, enslaving boroughs, and corrupting senates.

That those have been, in reality, the purposes for which the taxes of many years have been squandered, is sufficiently apparent without an inquiry.  We have wasted sums with which the French, in pursuance of their new scheme of increasing their influence, would have been able to purchase the submission of half the nations of the earth, and with which the monarchs of Europe might have been held dependant on a nod; these they have wasted only to sink our country into disgrace, to heighten the spirit of impotent enemies, to destroy our commerce, and distress our colonies.  We have patiently suffered, during a peace of twenty years, those taxes to be extorted from us, by which a war might have been supported against the most powerful nation, and have seen them ingulfed in the boundless expenses of the government, without being able to discover any other effect from them than the establishment of ministerial tyranny.

There has, indeed, been among the followers of the court a regular subordination, and exact obedience; nor has any man been found hardy enough to reject the dictates of the grand vizier.  Every man who has received his pay, has with great cheerfulness complied with his commands; and every man who has held any post or office under the crown, has evidently considered himself as enlisted by the minister.

But the visible influence of places, however destructive to the constitution, is not the chief motive of an inquiry; an inquiry implies something secret, and is intended to discover the private methods of extending dependence, and propagating corruption; the methods by which the people have been influenced to choose those men for representatives whose principles they detest, and whose conduct they condemn; and by which those whom their country has chosen for the guardians of its liberties, have been induced to support, in this house, measures, which in every other place they have made no scruple to censure.

When we shall examine the distribution of the publick treasure, when we shall inquire by what conduct we have been debarred from the honours of war, and at the same time deprived of the blessings of peace, to what causes it is to be imputed, that our debts have continued during the long-continued tranquillity of Europe, nearly in the state to which they were raised by fighting, at our own expense, the general quarrel of mankind; and why the sinking fund, a kind of inviolable deposit appropriated to the payment of our creditors, and the mitigation of our taxes, has been from year