Sir, the profits of the pay office (as an office) are not too great, in my opinion, for its duties, and for the rank of the person who has generally held it.  He has been generally a person of the highest rank,—­that is to say, a person of eminence and consideration in this House.  The great and the invidious profits of the pay office are from the bank that is held in it.  According to the present course of the office, and according to the present mode of accounting there, this bank must necessarily exist somewhere.  Money is a productive thing; and when the usual time of its demand can be tolerably calculated, it may with prudence be safely laid out to the profit of the holder.  It is on this calculation that the business of banking proceeds.  But no profit can be derived from the use of money which does not make it the interest of the holder to delay his account.  The process of the Exchequer colludes with this interest.  Is this collusion from its want of rigor and strictness and great regularity of form?  The reverse is true.  They have in the Exchequer brought rigor and formalism to their ultimate perfection.  The process against accountants is so rigorous, and in a manner so unjust, that correctives must from time to time be applied to it.  These correctives being discretionary, upon the case, and generally remitted by the Barons to the Lords of the Treasury, as the test judges of the reasons for respite, hearings are had, delays are produced, and thus the extreme of rigor in office (as usual in all human affairs) leads to the extreme of laxity.  What with the interested delay of the officer, the ill-conceived exactness of the court, the applications for dispensations from that exactness, the revival of rigorous process after the expiration of the time, and the new rigors producing new applications and new enlargements of time, such delays happen in the public accounts that they can scarcely ever be closed.

Besides, Sir, they have a rule in the Exchequer, which, I believe, they have founded upon a very ancient statute, that of the 51st of Henry the Third, by which it is provided, that, “when a sheriff or bailiff hath begun his account, none other shall be received to account, until he that was first appointed hath clearly accounted, and that the sum has been received."[38] Whether this clause of that statute be the ground of that absurd practice I am not quite able to ascertain.  But it has very generally prevailed, though I am told that of late they have began to relax from it.  In consequence of forms adverse to substantial account, we have a long succession of paymasters and their representatives who have never been admitted to account, although perfectly ready to do so.