he time he was in office as Paymaster-General, 1783-4.
Burke refuses to do so in four angry and quibbling pages,
and declares he will appeal to his country against the
demand if it is pressed. Why should Burke wish to conceal
his accounts? There certainly were suspicions around Burke,
and they may have caused Pitt to renounce his intention,
conveyed to Burke, August 30, 1794, of asking Parliament to
bestow on him a pension. "It is not exactly known," says one
of Burke's editors, "what induced Mr. Pitt to decline
bringing before Parliament a measure which he had himself
proposed without any solicitation whatever on the part of
Burke." (Burke's "Works," English Ed., 1852, ii., p. 252.)
The pensions were given without consultation with
Parliament--1200L. granted him by the King from the Civil
List, and 2500L. by Pitt in West Indian 41/2 per cents.
Burke, on taking his seat beside Pitt in the great Paine
Parliament (December, 1792), had protested that he had not
abandoned his party through expectation of a pension, but
the general belief of those with whom he had formerly acted
was that he had been promised a pension. A couplet of the
time ran:

"A pension makes him change his plan,
And loudly damn the rights of man."

Writing in 1819, Cobbett says: "As my Lord Grenville
introduced the name of Burke, suffer me, my Lord, to
introduce the name of the man [Paine] who put this Burke to
shame, who drove him off the public stage to seek shelter in
the Pension List, and who is now named fifty million times
where the name of the pensioned Burke is mentioned once."--
_Editor._

X. ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE.

Paris, Sept. 25, [1792.] First Year of the Republic.

Fellow Citizens,

I RECEIVE, with affectionate gratitude, the honour which the late
National Assembly has conferred upon me, by adopting me a Citizen of
France: and the additional honor of being elected by my fellow citizens
a Member of the National Convention.(1) Happily impressed, as I am, by
those testimonies of respect shown towards me as an individual, I feel
my felicity increased by seeing the barrier broken down that divided
patriotism by spots of earth, and limited citizenship to the soil, like
vegetation.

Had those honours been conferred in an hour of national tranquillity,
they would have afford