ness and imprudence.

I am so far from being convinced that any danger can arise from this
inquiry, that I believe the nation can only be injured by a long neglect
of such examinations; and that a minister is easily formidable, when he
has exempted himself by a kind of prescription from exposing his
accounts, and has long had an opportunity of employing the publick money
in multiplying his dependants, enriching his hirelings, enslaving
boroughs, and corrupting senates.

That those have been, in reality, the purposes for which the taxes of
many years have been squandered, is sufficiently apparent without an
inquiry. We have wasted sums with which the French, in pursuance of
their new scheme of increasing their influence, would have been able to
purchase the submission of half the nations of the earth, and with which
the monarchs of Europe might have been held dependant on a nod; these
they have wasted only to sink our country into disgrace, to heighten the
spirit of impotent enemies, to destroy our commerce, and distress our
colonies. We have patiently suffered, during a peace of twenty years,
those taxes to be extorted from us, by which a war might have been
supported against the most powerful nation, and have seen them ingulfed
in the boundless expenses of the government, without being able to
discover any other effect from them than the establishment of
ministerial tyranny.

There has, indeed, been among the followers of the court a regular
subordination, and exact obedience; nor has any man been found hardy
enough to reject the dictates of the grand vizier. Every man who has
received his pay, has with great cheerfulness complied with his
commands; and every man who has held any post or office under the crown,
has evidently considered himself as enlisted by the minister.

But the visible influence of places, however destructive to the
constitution, is not the chief motive of an inquiry; an inquiry implies
something secret, and is intended to discover the private methods of
extending dependence, and propagating corruption; the methods by which
the people have been influenced to choose those men for representatives
whose principles they detest, and whose conduct they condemn; and by
which those whom their country has chosen for the guardians of its
liberties, have been induced to support, in this house, measures, which
in every other place they have made no scruple to censure.

When we shall examine the distributio