r allowances until
other offices could be provided for them, and the more cheerfully
to submit to the expediency of leaving others in a temporary or
partial charge of the internal collections. In effect, the civil
officers [offices?] of this government might be reduced to a very
scanty number, were their exigency alone to determine the list of
your covenanted servants, which at this time consist of no less a
number than two hundred and fifty-two,--many of them the sons of
the first families in the kingdom of Great Britain, and every one
aspiring to the rapid acquisition of lacs, and to return to pass
the prime of their lives at home, as multitudes have done before
them. Neither will the revenues of this country suffice for such
boundless pretensions, nor are they compatible with yours and the
national interests, which may eventually suffer as certain a ruin
from the effects of private competition and the claims of patronage
as from the more dreaded calamities of war, or the other ordinary
causes which lead to the decline of dominion."

My Lords, you have here his declaration, that patronage, which he avows
to be one of the principles of his government, and to be the principle
of the last of his acts, is worse than war, pestilence, and famine,--and
that all these calamities together might not be so effectual as this
patronage in wasting and destroying the country. And at what time does
he tell you this? He tells it you when he himself had just wantonly
destroyed an old regular establishment for the purpose of creating a new
one, in which he says he was under the necessity of pensioning the
members of the old establishment from motives of mere humanity. He here
confesses himself to be the author of the whole mischief. "I could,"
says he, "have acted better; I might have avoided desolating the country
by peculation; but," says he, "I had sons of the first families in the
kingdom of Great Britain, every one aspiring to the rapid acquisition of
lacs, and this would not suffer me to do my duty." I hope your Lordships
will stigmatize the falsehood of this assertion. Consider, my Lords,
what he has said,--two hundred and fifty men at once, and in
succession, aspiring to come home in the prime of their youth with
_lacs_. You cannot take _lacs_ to be less than two; we cannot make a
plural less than two. Two lacs make 20,000_l._ Then multiply that, by