its use may be to purposes of another kind.  There are also other lists of pensions; and I mean that they should all be hereafter paid at one and the same place.  The whole of the new consolidated list I mean to reduce to 60,000_l._ a year, which sum I intend it shall never exceed.  I think that sum will fully answer as a reward to all real merit and a provision for all real public charity that is ever like to be placed upon the list.  If any merit of an extraordinary nature should emerge before that reduction is completed, I have left it open for an address of either House of Parliament to provide for the case.  To all other demands it must be answered, with regret, but with firmness, “The public is poor.”

I do not propose, as I told you before Christmas, to take away any pension.  I know that the public seem to call for a reduction of such of them as shall appear unmerited.  As a censorial act, and punishment of an abuse, it might answer some purpose.  But this can make no part of my plan.  I mean to proceed by bill; and I cannot stop for such an inquiry.  I know some gentlemen may blame me.  It is with great submission to better judgments that I recommend it to consideration, that a critical retrospective examination of the pension list, upon the principle of merit, can never serve for my basis.  It cannot answer, according to my plan, any effectual purpose of economy, or of future, permanent reformation.  The process in any way will be entangled and difficult, and it will be infinitely slow:  there is a danger, that, if we turn our line of march, now directed towards the grand object, into this more laborious than useful detail of operations, we shall never arrive at our end.

The king, Sir, has been by the Constitution appointed sole judge of the merit for which a pension is to be given.  We have a right, undoubtedly, to canvass this, as we have to canvass every act of government.  But there is a material difference between an office to be reformed and a pension taken away for demerit.  In the former case, no charge is implied against the holder; in the latter, his character is slurred, as well as his lawful emolument affected.  The former process is against the thing; the second, against the person.  The pensioner certainly, if he pleases, has a right to stand on his own defence, to plead his possession, and to bottom his title in the competency of the crown to give him what he holds.  Possessed and on the defensive as he is, he will not be obliged to prove his special merit, in order to justify the act of legal discretion, now turned into his property, according to his tenure.  The very act, he will contend, is a legal presumption, and an implication of his merit.  If this be so, from the natural force of all legal presumption, he would put us to the difficult proof that he has no merit at all.  But other questions would arise in the course of such an inquiry,—­that is, questions of the merit when weighed against the proportion of the reward; then the difficulty will be much greater.