All these incumbrances, which are themselves nuisances, produce other incumbrances and other nuisances.  For the payment of these useless establishments there are no less than three useless treasurers:  two to hold a purse, and one to play with a stick.  The treasurer of the household is a mere name.  The cofferer and the treasurer of the chamber receive and pay great sums, which it is not at all necessary they should either receive or pay.  All the proper officers, servants, and tradesmen may be enrolled in their several departments, and paid in proper classes and times with great simplicity and order, at the Exchequer, and by direction from the Treasury.

The Board of Works, which in the seven years preceding 1777 has cost towards 400,000_l._,[37] and (if I recollect rightly) has not cost less in proportion from the beginning of the reign, is under the very same description of all the other ill-contrived establishments, and calls for the very same reform.  We are to seek for the visible signs of all this expense.  For all this expense, we do not see a building of the size and importance of a pigeon-house.  Buckingham House was reprised by a bargain with the public for one hundred thousand pounds; and the small house at Windsor has been, if I mistake not, undertaken since that account was brought before us.  The good works of that Board of Works are as carefully concealed as other good works ought to be:  they are perfectly invisible.  But though it is the perfection of charity to be concealed, it is, Sir, the property and glory of magnificence to appear and stand forward to the eye.

That board, which ought to be a concern of builders and such like, and of none else, is turned into a junto of members of Parliament.  That office, too, has a treasury and a paymaster of its own; and lest the arduous affairs of that important exchequer should be too fatiguing, that paymaster has a deputy to partake his profits and relieve his cares.  I do not believe, that, either now or in former times, the chief managers of that board have made any profit of its abuse.  It is, however, no good reason that an abusive establishment should subsist, because it is of as little private as of public advantage.  But this establishment has the grand radical fault, the original sin, that pervades and perverts all our establishments:  the apparatus is not fitted to the object, nor the workmen to the work.  Expenses are incurred on the private opinion of an inferior establishment, without consulting the principal, who can alone determine the proportion which it ought to bear to the other establishments of the state, in the order of their relative importance.

I propose, therefore, along with the rest, to pull down this whole ill-contrived scaffolding, which obstructs, rather than forwards, our public works; to take away its treasury; to put the whole into the hands of a real builder, who shall not be a member of Parliament; and to oblige him, by a previous estimate and final payment, to appear twice at the Treasury before the public can be loaded.  The king’s gardens are to come under a similar regulation.