er, 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. Th