In proportion, however, as I am tender of the past, I would be provident of the future.  All money that was formerly imprested to the two great pay offices I would have imprested in future to the Bank of England.  These offices should in future receive no more than cash sufficient for small payments.  Their other payments ought to be made by drafts on the Bank, expressing the service.  A check account from both offices, of drafts and receipts, should be annually made up in the Exchequer,—­charging the Bank in account with the cash balance, but not demanding the payment until there is an order from the Treasury, in consequence of a vote of Parliament.

As I did not, Sir, deny to the paymaster the natural profits of the bank that was in his hands, so neither would I to the Bank of England.  A share of that profit might be derived to the public in various ways.  My favorite mode is this:  that, in compensation for the use of this money, the bank may take upon themselves, first, the charge of the Mint, to which they are already, by their charter, obliged to bring in a great deal of bullion annually to be coined.  In the next place, I mean that they should take upon themselves the charge of remittances to our troops abroad.  This is a species of dealing from which, by the same charter, they are not debarred.  One and a quarter per cent will be saved instantly thereby to the public on very large sums of money.  This will be at once a matter of economy and a considerable reduction of influence, by taking away a private contract of an expensive nature.  If the Bank, which is a great corporation, and of course receives the least profits from the money in their custody, should of itself refuse or be persuaded to refuse this offer upon those terms, I can speak with some confidence that one at least, if not both parts of the condition would be received, and gratefully received, by several bankers of eminence.  There is no banker who will not be at least as good security as any paymaster of the forces, or any treasurer of the navy, that have ever been bankers to the public:  as rich at least as my Lord Chatham, or my Lord Holland, or either of the honorable gentlemen who now hold the offices, were at the time that they entered into them; or as ever the whole establishment of the Mint has been at any period.

These, Sir, are the outlines of the plan I mean to follow, in suppressing these two large subordinate treasuries.  I now come to another subordinate treasury,—­I mean that of the paymaster of the pensions; for which purpose I reenter the limits of the civil establishment:  I departed from those limits in pursuit of a principle; and, following the same game in its doubles, I am brought into those limits again.  That treasury and that office I mean to take away, and to transfer the payment of every name, mode, and denomination of pensions to the Exchequer.  The present course of diversifying the same object can answer no good purpose, whatever