of their quota:  from hence your Majesty has been obliged, for the preventing disappointments in the most pressing services, to supply those deficiencies by additional reinforcements of your own ships; nor hath the single increase of such a charge been the only ill consequence that attended it; for by this means the debt of the navy hath been enhanced, so that the discounts arising upon the credit of it have affected all other parts of the service.  From the same cause, your Majesty’s ships of war have been forced in greater numbers to continue in remote seas, and at unseasonable times of the year, to the great damage and decay of the British navy.  This also hath been the occasion that your Majesty hath been straitened in your convoys for trade; your coasts have been exposed, for want of a sufficient number of cruisers to guard them; and you have been disabled from annoying the enemy, in their most beneficial commerce with the West Indies, from whence they received those vast supplies of treasure, without which they could not have supported the expenses of this war.

“That part of the war which hath been carried on in Flanders, was at first immediately necessary to the security of the States General, and hath since brought them great acquisitions, both of revenue and dominion; yet even there the original proportions have been departed from, and, during the course of the war, have been sinking by degrees on the part of Holland; so that in this last year, we find the number in which they fell short of their three-fifths, to your Majesty’s two-fifths, have been twenty thousand eight hundred and thirty-seven men:  we are not unmindful, that in the year one thousand seven hundred and three, a treaty was made between the two nations, for a joint augmentation of twenty thousand men, wherein the proportions were varied, and England consented to take half upon itself.  But it having been annexed as an express condition to the grant of the said augmentation in Parliament, that the States General should prohibit all trade and commerce with France, and that condition having not been performed by them, the Commons think it reasonable, that the first rule of three to two ought to have taken place again, as well in that as in other subsequent augmentations, more especially when they consider, that the revenues of those rich provinces which have been conquered, would, if they were duly applied, maintain a great number of new additional forces against the common enemy; notwithstanding which, the States General have raised none upon that account, but make use of those fresh supplies of money, only to ease themselves in the charge of their first established quota.