My idea, therefore, is, to reduce those offices to fixed salaries, as the present lives and reversions shall successively fall.  I mean, that the office of the great auditor (the auditor of the receipt) shall be reduced to 3000_l._ a year; and the auditors of the imprest, and the rest of the principal officers, to fixed appointments of 1,500_l._ a year each.  It will not be difficult to calculate the value of this fall of lives to the public, when we shall have obtained a just account of the present income of those places; and we shall obtain that account with great facility, if the present possessors are not alarmed with any apprehension of danger to their freehold office.

I know, too, that it will be demanded of me, how it comes, that, since I admit these offices to be no better than pensions, I chose, after the principle of law had been satisfied, to retain them at all.  To this, Sir, I answer, that, conceiving it to be a fundamental part of the Constitution of this country, and of the reason of state in every country, that there must be means of rewarding public service, those means will be incomplete, and indeed wholly insufficient for that purpose, if there should be no further reward for that service than the daily wages it receives during the pleasure of the crown.

Whoever seriously considers the excellent argument of Lord Somers, in the Bankers’ Case, will see he bottoms himself upon the very same maxim which I do; and one of his principal grounds of doctrine for the alienability of the domain in England,[41] contrary to the maxim of the law in France, he lays in the constitutional policy of furnishing a permanent reward to public service, of making that reward the origin of families, and the foundation of wealth as well as of honors.  It is, indeed, the only genuine, unadulterated origin of nobility.  It is a great principle in government, a principle at the very foundation of the whole structure.  The other judges who held the same doctrine went beyond Lord Somers with regard to the remedy which they thought was given by law against the crown upon the grant of pensions.  Indeed, no man knows, when he cuts off the incitements to a virtuous ambition, and the just rewards of public service, what infinite mischief he may do his country through all generations.  Such saving to the public may prove the worst mode of robbing it.  The crown, which has in its hands the trust of the daily pay for national service, ought to have in its hands also the means for the repose of public labor and the fixed settlement of acknowledged merit.  There is a time when the weather-beaten, vessels of the state ought to come into harbor.  They must at length have a retreat from the malice of rivals, from the perfidy of political friends, and the inconstancy of the people.  Many of the persons who in all times have filled the great offices of state have been younger brothers, who had originally little, if any fortune.  These offices do not furnish the means of amassing wealth.  There ought to be some power in the crown of granting pensions out of the reach of its own caprices.  An entail of dependence is a bad reward of merit.