a shower of Georges, and thistles, and medals, and collars of S.S. would assail him at his first entrance into the antechamber, after an insolvent Christmas quarter!—­a tumult which could not be appeased by all the harmony of the new year’s ode.  Rebellion it is certain there would be; and rebellion may not now, indeed, be so critical an event to those who engage in it, since its price is so correctly ascertained at just a thousand pound.

Sir, this classing, in my opinion, is a serious and solid security for the performance of a minister’s duty.  Lord Coke says, that the staff was put into the Treasurer’s hand to enable him to support himself when there was no money in the Exchequer, and to beat away importunate solicitors.  The method which I propose would hinder him from the necessity of such a broken staff to lean on, or such a miserable weapon for repulsing the demands of worthless suitors, who, the noble lord in the blue ribbon knows, will bear many hard blows on the head, and many other indignities, before they are driven from the Treasury.  In this plan, he is furnished with an answer to all their importunity,—­an answer far more conclusive than if he had knocked them down with his staff:—­“Sir, (or my Lord,) you are calling for my own salary,—­Sir, you are calling for the appointments of my colleagues who sit about me in office,—­Sir, you are going to excite a mutiny at court against me,—­you are going to estrange his Majesty’s confidence from me, through the chamberlain, or the master of the horse, or the groom of the stole.”

As things now stand, every man, in proportion to his consequence at court, tends to add to the expenses of the civil list, by all manner of jobs, if not for himself, yet for his dependants.  When the new plan is established, those who are now suitors for jobs will become the most strenuous opposers of them.  They will have a common interest with the minister in public economy.  Every class, as it stands low, will become security for the payment of the preceding class; and thus the persons whose insignificant services defraud those that are useful would then become interested in their payment.  Then the powerful, instead of oppressing, would be obliged to support the weak; and idleness would become concerned in the reward of industry.  The whole fabric of the civil economy would become compact and connected in all its parts; it would be formed into a well-organized body, where every member contributes to the support of the whole, and where even the lazy stomach secures the vigor of the active arm.

This plan, I really flatter myself, is laid, not in official formality, nor in airy speculation, but in real life, and in human nature, in what “comes home” (as Bacon says) “to the business and bosoms of men.”  You have now, Sir, before you, the whole of my scheme, as far as I have digested it into a form that might be in any respect worthy of your consideration.  I intend to lay it before you in five bills.[44] The plan consists,