hausted. All
things were in the confusion of a chaos, without form or method if not
reduced beyond it, even to annihilation; so that you had not only to
separate the jarring elements, but (if that boldness of expression
might be allowed me) to create them. Your enemies had so embroiled the
management of your office, that they looked on your advancement as the
instrument of your ruin. And as if the clogging of the revenue, and
the confusion of accounts, which you found in your entrance, were not
sufficient, they added their own weight of malice to the public
calamity, by forestalling the credit which should cure it. Your
friends on the other side were only capable of pitying, but not of
aiding you; no farther help or counsel was remaining to you, but what
was founded on yourself; and that indeed was your security; for your
diligence, your constancy, and your prudence, wrought more surely
within, when they were not disturbed by any outward motion. The
highest virtue is best to be trusted with itself; for assistance only
can be given by a genius superior to that which it assists; and it is
the noblest kind of debt, when we are only obliged to God and nature.
This then, my lord, is your just commendation, that you have wrought
out yourself a way to glory, by those very means that were designed
for your destruction: You have not only restored, but advanced the
revenues of your master, without grievance to the subject; and, as if
that were little yet, the debts of the exchequer, which lay heaviest
both on the crown, and on private persons, have by your conduct been
established in a certainty of satisfaction.[2] An action so much the
more great and honourable, because the case was without the ordinary
relief of laws; above the hopes of the afflicted, and beyond the
narrowness of the treasury to redress, had it been managed by a less
able hand. It is certainly the happiest, and most unenvied part of all
your fortune, to do good to many, while you do injury to none; to
receive at once the prayers of the subject, and the praises of the
prince; and, by the care of your conduct, to give him means of
exerting the chiefest (if any be the chiefest) of his royal virtues,
his distributive justice to the deserving, and his bounty and
compassion to the wanting. The disposition of princes towards their
people cannot be better discovered than in the choice of their
ministers; who, like the animal spirits betwixt the soul and body,
participa