In the next place it may be said, to excuse any appearance of inconsistency between the author’s actions and his declarations, that he thought it right to relieve the landed interest, and lay the burden where it ought to lie, on the colonies.  What! to take off a revenue so necessary to our being, before anything whatsoever was acquired in the place of it?  In prudence, he ought to have waited at least for the first quarter’s receipt of the new anonymous American revenue, and Irish land-tax.  Is there something so specific for our disorders in American, and something so poisonous in English money, that one is to heal, the other to destroy us?  To say that the landed interest could not continue to pay it for a year or two longer, is more than the author will attempt to prove.  To say that they would pay it no longer, is to treat the landed interest, in my opinion, very scurvily.  To suppose that the gentry, clergy, and freeholders of England do not rate the commerce, the credit, the religion, the liberty, the independency of their country, and the succession of their crown, at a shilling in the pound land-tax!  They never gave him reason to think so meanly of them.  And, if I am rightly informed, when that measure was debated in Parliament, a very different reason was assigned by the author’s great friend, as well as by others, for that reduction:  one very different from the critical and almost desperate state of our finances.  Some people then endeavored to prove, that the reduction might be made without detriment to the national credit, or the due support of a proper peace establishment; otherwise it is obvious that the reduction could not be defended in argument.  So that this author cannot despair so much of the commonwealth, without this American and Irish revenue, as he pretends to do.  If he does, the reader sees how handsomely he has provided for us, by voting away one revenue, and by giving us a pamphlet on the other.

I do not mean to blame the relief which was then given by Parliament to the land.  It was grounded on very weighty reasons.  The administration contended only for its continuance for a year, in order to have the merit of taking off the shilling in the pound immediately before the elections; and thus to bribe the freeholders of England with their own money.

It is true, the author, in his estimate of ways and means, takes credit for 400,000_l._ a year, Indian Revenue.  But he will not very positively insist, that we should put this revenue to the account of his plans or his power; and for a very plain reason:  we are already near two years in possession of it.  By what means we came to that possession, is a pretty long story; however, I shall give nothing more than a short abstract of the proceeding, in order to see whether the author will take to himself any part in that measure.