se, or whether he
was betrayed to it only by his hatred of the administration, which would
prompt him to recant his own advice, if it should happen to be approved,
I will not pretend to determine, but I must lament, on this occasion,
the entertainment which the house will lose, by the eternal cessation of
any harangues on the army, since he cannot now declaim on either part
without contradicting his former declarations.

Nor will the honourable gentleman find less difficulty in proving, that
justice, rather than policy, requires the promotion of Serjeants to
commissions. Military preferments are always at the disposal of the
crown, nor can any right be pretended to them, but such as arises from
the custom which has been generally followed in conferring them, which
is not only variable at pleasure, but has never been, at any time,
regularly observed. The order of rotation has been suffered sometimes to
proceed, because of two persons, otherwise equal, he that has served
longest may plead the most merit; but the plea of service has been
always overruled by birth or powerful recommendation. And though, sir,
it is natural for men disappointed to complain, yet as those officers,
whose preferment has been delayed, were not thought, in reality, to have
received any injury, their murmurs have been the less regarded.

It might be expected, sir, from a patriot, a lamenter of the degeneracy
of mankind, and an inflexible opponent of corruption, that he should
consider rather facts than persons, that he should regulate his decision
by the unvariable principles of reason and justice, and that, therefore,
he should not applaud at one time what he condemns at another.

But this gentleman seems to have established some new maxims of conduct,
and, perhaps, upon new notions of morality; for he seems to imagine,
that his friends may seize, as their right, what his adversaries cannot
touch without robbery, though the claim of both be the same.

It is well known, sir, to the whole army, that a noble person, whose
abilities are so loudly celebrated, whose virtues are so liberally
praised, and whose removal from his military employments is so solemnly
lamented as a publick calamity, obtained his first preferments by
pretensions very different from military merit, and that at the age only
of seventeen, a time of life in which, whatever might be his abilities,
very little prudence or experience could be expected, he was advanced to
the comman