The difficulty will not, Sir, I am afraid, be much less, if we pass to the person really guilty in the question of an unmerited pension:  the minister himself.  I admit, that, when called to account for the execution of a trust, he might fairly be obliged to prove the affirmative, and to state the merit for which the pension is given, though on the pensioner himself such a process would be hard.  If in this examination we proceed methodically, and so as to avoid all suspicion of partiality and prejudice, we must take the pensions in order of time, or merely alphabetically.  The very first pension to which we come, in either of these ways, may appear the most grossly unmerited of any.  But the minister may very possibly show that he knows nothing of the putting on this pension; that it was prior in time to his administration; that the minister who laid it on is dead:  and then we are thrown back upon the pensioner himself, and plunged into all our former difficulties.  Abuses, and gross ones, I doubt not, would appear, and to the correction of which I would readily give my hand:  but when I consider that pensions have not generally been affected by the revolutions of ministry; as I know not where such inquiries would stop; and as an absence of merit is a negative and loose thing;—­one might be led to derange the order of families founded on the probable continuance of their kind of income; I might hurt children; I might injure creditors;—­I really think it the more prudent course not to follow the letter of the petitions.  If we fix this mode of inquiry as a basis, we shall, I fear, end as Parliament has often ended under similar circumstances.  There will be great delay, much confusion, much inequality in our proceedings.  But what presses me most of all is this:  that, though we should strike off all the unmerited pensions, while the power of the crown remains unlimited, the very same undeserving persons might afterwards return to the very same list; or, if they did not, other persons, meriting as little as they do, might be put upon it to an undefinable amount.  This, I think, is the pinch of the grievance.

For these reasons, Sir, I am obliged to waive this mode of proceeding as any part of my plan.  In a plan of reformation, it would be one of my maxims, that, when I know of an establishment which may be subservient to useful purposes, and which at the same time, from its discretionary nature, is liable to a very great perversion from those purposes, I would limit the quantity of the power that might be so abused.  For I am sure that in all such cases the rewards of merit will have very narrow bounds, and that partial or corrupt favor will be infinite.  This principle is not arbitrary, but the limitation of the specific quantity must be so in some measure.  I therefore state 60,000_l._, leaving it open to the House to enlarge or contract the sum as they shall see, on examination, that the discretion I use is scanty or liberal.  The whole amount of the pensions