When commissioners were sent to pay his Majesty’s and our dutiful respects to the Congress of the United States, a part of their powers under the commission were, it seems, of a commercial nature.  They were authorized, in the most ample and undefined manner, to form a commercial treaty with America on the spot.  This was no trivial object.  As the formation of such a treaty would necessarily have been no less than the breaking up of our whole commercial system, and the giving it an entire new form, one would imagine that the Board of Trade would have sat day and night to model propositions, which, on our side, might serve as a basis to that treaty.  No such thing.  Their learned leisure was not in the least interrupted, though one of the members of the Board was a commissioner, and might, in mere compliment to his office, have been supposed to make a show of deliberation on the subject.  But he knew that his colleagues would have thought he laughed in their faces, had he attempted to bring anything the most distantly relating to commerce or colonies before them.  A noble person, engaged in the same commission, and sent to learn his commercial rudiments in New York, (then under the operation of an act for the universal prohibition of trade,) was soon after put at the head of that board.  This contempt from the present ministers of all the pretended functions of that board, and their manner of breathing into its very soul, of inspiring it with its animating and presiding principle, puts an end to all dispute concerning their opinion of the clay it was made of.  But I will give them heaped measure.

It was but the other day, that the noble lord in the blue ribbon carried up to the House of Peers two acts, altering, I think much for the better, but altering in a great degree, our whole commercial system:  those acts, I mean, for giving a free trade to Ireland in woollens, and in all things else, with independent nations, and giving them an equal trade to our own colonies.  Here, too, the novelty of this great, but arduous and critical improvement of system, would make you conceive that the anxious solicitude of the noble lord in the blue ribbon would have wholly destroyed the plan of summer recreation of that board, by references to examine, compare, and digest matters for Parliament.  You would imagine that Irish commissioners of customs, and English commissioners of customs, and commissioners of excise, that merchants and manufacturers of every denomination, had daily crowded their outer rooms. Nil horum.  The perpetual virtual adjournment, and the unbroken sitting vacation of that board, was no more disturbed by the Irish than by the plantation commerce, or any other commerce.  The same matter made a large part of the business which occupied the House for two sessions before; and as our ministers were not then mellowed by the mild, emollient, and engaging blandishments of our dear sister into all the tenderness of unqualified surrender, the bounds and limits of a restrained benefit naturally required much detailed management and positive regulation.  But neither the qualified propositions which were received, nor those other qualified propositions which were rejected by ministers, were the least concern of theirs, or were they ever thought of in the business.