undoubted right to expect.  We are under infinite obligations to our constituents, who have raised us to so distinguished a trust, and have imparted such a degree of sanctity to common characters.  We ought to walk before them with purity, plainness, and integrity of heart,—­with filial love, and not with slavish fear, which is always a low and tricking thing.  For my own part, in what I have meditated upon that subject, I cannot, indeed, take upon me to say I have the honor to follow the sense of the people.  The truth is, I met it on the way, while I was pursuing their interest according to my own ideas.  I am happy beyond expression to find that my intentions have so far coincided with theirs, that I have not had, cause to be in the least scrupulous to sign their petition, conceiving it to express my own opinions, as nearly as general terms can express the object of particular arrangements.

I am therefore satisfied to act as a fair mediator between government and the people, endeavoring to form a plan which should have both an early and a temperate operation.  I mean, that it should be substantial, that it should be systematic, that it should rather strike at the first cause of prodigality and corrupt influence than attempt to follow them in all their effects.

It was to fulfil the first of these objects (the proposal of something substantial) that I found myself obliged, at the outset, to reject a plan proposed by an honorable and attentive member of Parliament,[33] with very good intentions on his part, about a year or two ago.  Sir, the plan I speak of was the tax of twenty-five per cent moved upon places and pensions during the continuance of the American war.  Nothing, Sir, could have met my ideas more than such a tax, if it was considered as a practical satire on that war, and as a penalty upon those who led us into it; but in any other view it appeared to me very liable to objections.  I considered the scheme as neither substantial, nor permanent, nor systematical, nor likely to be a corrective of evil influence.  I have always thought employments a very proper subject of regulation, but a very ill-chosen subject for a tax.  An equal tax upon property is reasonable; because the object is of the same quality throughout.  The species is the same; it differs only in its quantity.  But a tax upon salaries is totally of a different nature; there can be no equality, and consequently no justice, in taxing them by the hundred in the gross.

We have, Sir, on our establishment several offices which perform real service:  we have also places that provide large rewards for no service at all.  We have stations which are made for the public decorum, made for preserving the grace and majesty of a great people:  we have likewise expensive formalities, which tend rather to the disgrace than the ornament of the state and the court.  This, Sir, is the real condition of our establishments.  To fall with the same severity on objects so perfectly dissimilar