to go to law with the king.  The object is neither your business nor mine.  Which of the parties got the better I really forget.  The material point is that the suit cost about L15,000.  But as the Duke of Lancaster is but agent of Duke Humphrey, and not worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to pay the costs of both.”  The system which involved these costly absurdities Burke proposed entirely to abolish.  In the same spirit he wished to dispose of the Crown lands and the forest lands, which it was for the good of the community, not less than of the Crown itself, to throw into the hands of private owners.

One of the most important of these projected reforms, and one which its author did not flinch from carrying out two years later to his own loss, related to the office of Paymaster.  This functionary was accustomed to hold large balances of the public money in his own hands and for his own profit, for long periods, owing to a complex system of accounts which was so rigorous as entirely to defeat its own object.  The paymaster could not, through the multiplicity of forms and the exaction of impossible conditions, get a prompt acquittance.  The audit sometimes did not take place for years after the accounts were virtually closed.  Meanwhile the money accumulated in his hands, and its profits were his legitimate perquisite.  Lord Holland, or his representatives, held the balances of his office from 1765, when he retired, until 1778, when they were audited.  During this time he realised, as the interest on the use of these balances, nearly two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.  Burke diverted these enormous gains into the coffers of the State.  He fixed the paymaster’s salary at four thousand pounds a year, and was himself the first person who accepted the curtailed income.

Not the most fervid or brilliant of Burke’s pieces, yet the speech on Economical Reform is certainly not the least instructive or impressive of them.  It gives a suggestive view of the relations existing at that time between the House of Commons and the Court.  It reveals the narrow and unpatriotic spirit of the king and the ministers, who could resist proposals so reasonable in themselves, and so remedial in their effects, at a time when the nation was suffering the heavy and distressing burdens of the most disastrous war that our country has ever carried on.  It is especially interesting as an illustration of its author’s political capacity.  At a moment when committees and petitions and great county meetings showed how thoroughly the national anger was roused against the existing system, Burke came to the front of affairs with a scheme, of which the most striking characteristic proved to be that it was profoundly temperate.  Bent on the extirpation of the system, he had no ill-will towards the men who had happened to flourish in it.  “I never will suffer,” he said, “any man or description of men to suffer from errors that naturally have grown out of the abusive