I confess I feel a degree of disgust, almost leading to despair, at the manner in which we are acting in the great exigencies of our country.  There is now a bill in this House appointing a rigid inquisition into the minutest detail of our offices at home.  The collection of sixteen millions annually, a collection on which the public greatness, safety, and credit have their reliance, the whole order of criminal jurisprudence, which holds together society itself, have at no time obliged us to call forth such powers,—­no, nor anything like them.  There is not a principle of the law and Constitution of this country that is not subverted to favor the execution of that project.[3] And for what is all this apparatus of bustle and terror?  Is it because anything substantial is expected from it?  No.  The stir and bustle itself is the end proposed.  The eye-servants of a short-sighted master will employ themselves, not on what is most essential to his affairs, but on what is nearest to his ken.  Great difficulties have given a just value to economy; and our minister of the day must be an economist, whatever it may cost us.  But where is he to exert his talents?  At home, to be sure; for where else can he obtain a profitable credit for their exertion?  It is nothing to him, whether the object on which he works under our eye be promising or not.  If he does not obtain any public benefit, he may make regulations without end.  Those are sure to pay in present expectation, whilst the effect is at a distance, and may be the concern of other times and other men.  On these principles, he chooses to suppose (for he does not pretend more than to suppose) a naked possibility that he shall draw some resource out of crumbs dropped from the trenchers of penury; that something shall be laid in store from the short allowance of revenue-officers overloaded with duty and famished for want of bread,—­by a reduction from officers who are at this very hour ready to batter the Treasury with what breaks through stone walls for an increase of their appointments.  From the marrowless bones of these skeleton establishments, by the use of every sort of cutting and of every sort of fretting tool, he flatters himself that he may chip and rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to diet into some similitude of health and substance the languishing chimeras of fraudulent reformation.

Whilst he is thus employed according to his policy and to his taste, he has not leisure to inquire into those abuses in India that are drawing off money by millions from the treasures of this country, which are exhausting the vital juices from members of the state, where the public inanition is far more sorely felt than in the local exchequer of England.  Not content with winking at these abuses, whilst he attempts to squeeze the laborious, ill-paid drudges of English revenue, he lavishes, in one act of corrupt prodigality, upon those who never served the public in any honest occupation at all, an annual income equal to two thirds of the whole collection of the revenues of this kingdom.