It is therefore, Sir, on the opinion of Parliament, on the opinion of the ministers, and even on their own opinion of their inutility, that I shall propose to you to suppress the Board of Trade and Plantations, and to recommit all its business to the Council, from whence it was very improvidently taken; and which business (whatever it might be) was much better done, and without any expense; and, indeed, where in effect it may all come at last.  Almost all that deserves the name of business there is the reference of the plantation acts to the opinion of gentlemen of the law.  But all this may be done, as the Irish business of the same nature has always been done, by the Council, and with a reference to the Attorney and Solicitor General.

There are some regulations in the household, relative to the officers of the yeomen of the guards, and the officers and band of gentlemen pensioners, which I shall likewise submit to your consideration, for the purpose of regulating establishments which at present are much abused.

I have now finished all that for the present I shall trouble you with on the plan of reduction.  I mean next to propose to you the plan of arrangement, by which I mean to appropriate and fix the civil list money to its several services according to their nature:  for I am thoroughly sensible, that, if a discretion wholly arbitrary can be exercised over the civil list revenue, although the most effectual methods may be taken to prevent the inferior departments from exceeding their bounds, the plan of reformation will still be left very imperfect.  It will not, in my opinion, be safe to permit an entirely arbitrary discretion even in the First Lord of the Treasury himself; it will not be safe to leave with him a power of diverting the public money from its proper objects, of paying it in an irregular course, or of inverting perhaps the order of time, dictated by the proportion of value, which ought to regulate his application of payment to service.

I am sensible, too, that the very operation of a plan of economy which tends to exonerate the civil list of expensive establishments may in some sort defeat the capital end we have in view,—­the independence of Parliament; and that, in removing the public and ostensible means of influence, we may increase the fund of private corruption.  I have thought of some methods to prevent an abuse of surplus cash under discretionary application,—­I mean the heads of secret service, special service, various payments, and the like,—­which I hope will answer, and which in due time I shall lay before you.  Where I am unable to limit the quantity of the sums to be applied, by reason of the uncertain quantity of the service, I endeavor to confine it to its line, to secure an indefinite application to the definite service to which it belongs,—­not to stop the progress of expense in its line, but to confine it to that line in which it professes to move.