o, nor anything like them. There
is not a principle of the law and Constitution of this country that is
not subverted to favor the execution of that project.[3] And for what is
all this apparatus of bustle and terror? Is it because anything
substantial is expected from it? No. The stir and bustle itself is the
end proposed. The eye-servants of a short-sighted master will employ
themselves, not on what is most essential to his affairs, but on what is
nearest to his ken. Great difficulties have given a just value to
economy; and our minister of the day must be an economist, whatever it
may cost us. But where is he to exert his talents? At home, to be sure;
for where else can he obtain a profitable credit for their exertion? It
is nothing to him, whether the object on which he works under our eye be
promising or not. If he does not obtain any public benefit, he may make
regulations without end. Those are sure to pay in present expectation,
whilst the effect is at a distance, and may be the concern of other
times and other men. On these principles, he chooses to suppose (for he
does not pretend more than to suppose) a naked possibility that he shall
draw some resource out of crumbs dropped from the trenchers of penury;
that something shall be laid in store from the short allowance of
revenue-officers overloaded with duty and famished for want of
bread,--by a reduction from officers who are at this very hour ready to
batter the Treasury with what breaks through stone walls for an
_increase_ of their appointments. From the marrowless bones of these
skeleton establishments, by the use of every sort of cutting and of
every sort of fretting tool, he flatters himself that he may chip and
rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to diet into some similitude of
health and substance the languishing chimeras of fraudulent reformation.

Whilst he is thus employed according to his policy and to his taste, he
has not leisure to inquire into those abuses in India that are drawing
off money by millions from the treasures of this country, which are
exhausting the vital juices from members of the state, where the public
inanition is far more sorely felt than in the local exchequer of
England. Not content with winking at these abuses, whilst he attempts to
squeeze the laborious, ill-paid drudges of English revenue, he lavishes,
in one act of corrupt prodigality, upon those who never served the
public in any honest occupation at all, an annual inc