These desires of the people of England, which come far short of the voluntary concessions of the king of France, are moderate indeed.  They only contend that we should interweave some economy with the taxes with which we have chosen to begin the war.  They request, not that you should rely upon economy exclusively, but that you should give it rank and precedence, in the order of the ways and means of this single session.

But if it were possible that the desires of our constituents, desires which are at once so natural and so very much tempered and subdued, should have no weight with an House of Commons which has its eye elsewhere, I would turn my eyes to the very quarter to which theirs are directed.  I would reason this matter with the House on the mere policy of the question; and I would undertake to prove that an early dereliction of abuse is the direct interest of government,—­of government taken abstractedly from its duties, and considered merely as a system intending its own conservation.

If there is any one eminent criterion which above all the rest distinguishes a wise government from an administration weak and improvident, it is this:  “well to know the best time and manner of yielding what it is impossible to keep.”  There have been, Sir, and there are, many who choose to chicane with their situation rather than be instructed by it.  Those gentlemen argue against every desire of reformation upon the principles of a criminal prosecution.  It is enough for them to justify their adherence to a pernicious system, that it is not of their contrivance,—­that it is an inheritance of absurdity, derived to them from their ancestors,—­that they can make out a long and unbroken pedigree of mismanagers that have gone before them.  They are proud of the antiquity of their house; and they defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance, afraid of derogating from their nobility, and carefully avoiding a sort of blot in their scutcheon, which they think would degrade them forever.

It was thus that the unfortunate Charles the First defended himself on the practice of the Stuart who went before him, and of all the Tudors.  His partisans might have gone to the Plantagenets.  They might have found bad examples enough, both abroad and at home, that could have shown an ancient and illustrious descent.  But there is a time when men will not suffer bad things because their ancestors have suffered worse.  There is a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw reverence nor obtain protection.  If the noble lord in the blue ribbon pleads, “Not guilty,” to the charges brought against the present system of public economy, it is not possible to give a fair verdict by which he will not stand acquitted.  But pleading is not our present business.  His plea or his traverse may be allowed as an answer to a charge, when a charge is made.  But if he puts himself in the way to obstruct reformation, then the faults of his office