An assiduous member of Parliament will not be the worse instructed there for not being paid a thousand a year for learning his lesson.  And now that I speak of the committees above stairs, I must say, that, having till lately attended them a good deal, I have observed that no description of members give so little attendance, either to communicate or to obtain instruction upon matters of commerce, as the honorable members of the grave Board of Trade.  I really do not recollect that I have ever seen one of them in that sort of business.  Possibly some members may have better memories, and may call to mind some job that may have accidentally brought one or other of them, at one time or other, to attend a matter of commerce.

This board, Sir, has had both its original formation and its regeneration in a job.  In a job it was conceived, and in a job its mother brought it forth.  It made one among those showy and specious impositions which one of the experiment-making administrations of Charles the Second held out to delude the people, and to be substituted in the place of the real service which they might expect from a Parliament annually sitting.  It was intended, also, to corrupt that body, whenever it should be permitted to sit.  It was projected in the year 1668, and it continued in a tottering and rickety childhood for about three or four years:  for it died in the year 1673, a babe of as little hopes as ever swelled the bills of mortality in the article of convulsed or overlaid children who have hardly stepped over the threshold of life.

It was buried with little ceremony, and never more thought of until the reign of King William, when, in the strange vicissitude of neglect and vigor, of good and ill success that attended his wars, in the year 1695, the trade was distressed beyond all example of former sufferings by the piracies of the French cruisers.  This suffering incensed, and, as it should seem, very justly incensed, the House of Commons.  In this ferment, they struck, not only at the administration, but at the very constitution of the executive government.  They attempted to form in Parliament a board for the protection of trade, which, as they planned it, was to draw to itself a great part, if not the whole, of the functions and powers both of the Admiralty and of the Treasury; and thus, by a Parliamentary delegation of office and officers, they threatened absolutely to separate these departments from the whole system of the executive government, and of course to vest the most leading and essential of its attributes in this board.  As the executive government was in a manner convicted of a dereliction of its functions, it was with infinite difficulty that this blow was warded off in that session.  There was a threat to renew the same attempt in the next.  To prevent the effect of this manoeuvre, the court opposed another manoeuvre to it, and, in the year 1696, called into life this Board of Trade, which had slept since 1673.