ortioning his grant,
or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine of
revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of man. It does
not, indeed, vote you L152,750: 11: 2-3/4ths, nor any other paltry
limited sum; but it gives the strong-box itself, the fund, the bank,
from whence only revenues can arise amongst a people sensible of
freedom: _Posita luditur arca_. Cannot you in England, cannot you at
this time of day, cannot you, an House of Commons, trust to the
principle which has raised so mighty a revenue, and accumulated a debt
of near 140 millions in this country? Is this principle to be true in
England and false everywhere else? Is it not true in Ireland? Has it not
hitherto been true in the colonies? Why should you presume, that, in any
country, a body duly constituted for any function will neglect to
perform its duty, and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption would go
against all government in all modes. But, in truth, this dread of penury
of supply from a free assembly has no foundation in Nature. For first,
observe, that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of
supporting the honor of their own government, that sense of dignity, and
that security to property, which ever attends freedom, has a tendency to
increase the stock of the free community. Most may be taken where most
is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has not
uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting
from the weight of its own rich luxuriance, has ever run with a more
copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of
oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in the
world?

Next, we know that parties must ever exist in a free country. We know,
too, that the emulations of such parties, their contradictions, their
reciprocal necessities, their hopes, and their fears, must send them all
in their turns to him that holds the balance of the state. The parties
are the gamesters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the
winner in the end. When this game is played, I really think it is more
to be feared that the people will be exhausted than that government will
not be supplied. Whereas whatever is got by acts of absolute power ill
obeyed because odious, or by contracts ill kept because constrained,
will be narrow, feeble, uncertain, and precarious.

"Ease would retract
Vows made in p