I have endeavored that this plan should include, in its execution, a considerable reduction of improper expense; that it should effect a conversion of unprofitable titles into a productive estate; that it should lead to, and indeed almost compel, a provident administration of such sums of public money as must remain under discretionary trusts; that it should render the incurring debts on the civil establishment (which must ultimately affect national strength and national credit) so very difficult as to become next to impracticable.

But what, I confess, was uppermost with me, what I bent the whole force of my mind to, was the reduction of that corrupt influence which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality and of all disorder,—­which loads us more than millions of debt,—­which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our Constitution.

Sir, I assure you very solemnly, and with a very clear conscience, that nothing in the world has led me to such an undertaking but my zeal for the honor of this House, and the settled, habitual, systematic affection I bear to the cause and to the principles of government.

I enter perfectly into the nature and consequences of my attempt, and I advance to it with a tremor that shakes me to the inmost fibre of my frame.  I feel that I engage in a business, in itself most ungracious, totally wide of the course of prudent conduct, and, I really think, the most completely adverse that can be imagined to the natural turn and temper of my own mind.  I know that all parsimony is of a quality approaching to unkindness, and that (on some person or other) every reform must operate as a sort of punishment.  Indeed, the whole class of the severe and restrictive virtues are at a market almost too high for humanity.  What is worse, there are very few of those virtues which are not capable of being imitated, and even outdone in many of their most striking effects, by the worst of vices.  Malignity and envy will carve much more deeply, and finish much more sharply, in the work of retrenchment, than frugality and providence.  I do not, therefore, wonder that gentlemen have kept away from such a task, as well from good-nature as from prudence.  Private feeling might, indeed, be overborne by legislative reason; and a man of a long-sighted and a strong-nerved humanity might bring himself not so much to consider from whom he takes a superfluous enjoyment as for whom in the end he may preserve the absolute necessaries of life.

But it is much more easy to reconcile this measure in humanity than to bring it to any agreement with prudence.  I do not mean that little, selfish, pitiful, bastard thing which sometimes goes by the name of a family in which it is not legitimate and to which it is a disgrace;—­I mean even that public and enlarged prudence, which, apprehensive of being disabled from rendering acceptable services