, which, I think, he cannot dispute. All that he bestows
upon the nation, which it does not possess without him, and supposing it
all sure money, amounts to no more than a sum of 300,000_l._ a year.
This, he thinks, will do the business completely, and render us
flourishing at home, and respectable abroad. If the option between glory
and shame, if our salvation or destruction, depended on this sum, it is
impossible that he should have been active, and made a merit of that
activity, in taking off a shilling in the pound of the land-tax, which
came up to his grand desideratum, and upwards of 100,000_l._ more. By
this manoeuvre, he left our trade, navigation, and manufactures, on the
verge of destruction, our finances in ruin, our credit expiring, Ireland
on the point of being ceded to France, the colonies of being torn to
pieces, the succession of the crown at the mercy of our great rival, and
the kingdom itself on the very point of becoming tributary to that
haughty power. All this for want of 300,000_l._; for I defy the reader
to point out any other revenue, or any other precise and defined scheme
of politics, which he assigns for our redemption.

I know that two things may be said in his defence, as bad reasons are
always at hand in an indifferent cause; that he was not sure the money
would be applied as he thinks it ought to be, by the present ministers.
I think as ill of them as he does to the full. They have done very near
as much mischief as they can do, to a constitution so robust as this is.
Nothing can make them more dangerous, but that, as they are already in
general composed of his disciples and instruments, they may add to the
public calamity of their own measures, the adoption of his projects. But
be the ministers what they may, the author knows that they could not
avoid applying this 450,000_l._ to the service of the establishment, as
faithfully as he, or any other minister, could do. I say they could not
avoid it, and have no merit at all for the application. But supposing
that they should greatly mismanage this revenue. Here is a good deal of
room for mistake and prodigality before you come to the edge of ruin.
The difference between the amount of that real and his imaginary revenue
is, 150,000_l._ a year at least; a tolerable sum for them to play with:
this might compensate the difference between the author's economy and
their profusion; and still, notwithstanding their vices and ignorance,
the nation mig