f the debt
owing to the Government would have been paid in the course of a few
years. "When we consider," says Mr. Webster, "how very simple was the
process of demanding of the contracting ironmasters the patent due
(which for the year 1789 amounted to 15,000L., in 1790 to 15,000L., and
in 1791 to 25,000L.), and which demand might have been enforced by the
same legal process used to ruin the inventor, it is not difficult to
surmise the motive for abstaining." The case, however, was not so
simple as Mr. Webster puts it; for there was such a contingency as that
of the ironmasters combining to dispute the patent right, and there is
every reason to believe that they were prepared to adopt that course.[9]

Although the Cort patents expired in 1796 and 1798 respectively, they
continued the subject of public discussion for some time after, more
particularly in connection with the defalcations of the deceased Adam
Jellicoe. It does not appear that more than 2654L. was realised by the
Government from the Cort estate towards the loss sustained by the
public, as a balance of 24,846L. was still found standing to the debit
of Jellicoe in 1800, when the deficiencies in the naval account's
became matter of public inquiry. A few years later, in 1805, the
subject was again revived in a remarkable manner. In that year, the
Whigs, Perceiving the bodily decay of Mr. Pitt, and being too eager to
wait for his removal by death, began their famous series of attacks
upon his administration. Fearing to tackle the popular statesman
himself, they inverted the ordinary tactics of an opposition, and fell
foul of Dundas, Lord Melville, then Treasurer of the Navy, who had
successfully carried the country through the great naval war with
revolutionary France. They scrupled not to tax him with gross
peculation, and exhibited articles of impeachment against him, which
became the subject of elaborate investigation, the result of which is
matter of history. In those articles, no reference whatever was made
to Lord Melville's supposed complicity with Jellicoe; nor, on the trial
that followed, was any reference made to the defalcations of that
official. But when Mr. Whitbread, on the 8th of April, 1805, spoke to
the "Resolutions" in the Commons for impeaching the Treasurer of the
Navy, he thought proper to intimate that he "had a strong suspicion
that Jellicoe was in the same partnership with Mark Sprott, Alexander
Trotter, and Lord Melville. He ha