nsaction
in which it will be a miracle if a single penny will be ever found
really advanced from the private stock of the pretended creditors.

In this manner, and at such an interest, the ministers have thought
proper to dispose of 294,000_l._ of the public revenues, for what is
called the Cavalry Loan. After dispatching this, the right honorable
gentleman leads to battle his last grand division, the consolidated debt
of 1777. But having exhausted all his panegyric on the two first, he has
nothing at all to say in favor of the last. On the contrary, he admits
that it was contracted in defiance of the Company's orders, without even
the pretended sanction of any pretended representatives. Nobody, indeed,
has yet been found hardy enough to stand forth avowedly in its defence.
But it is little to the credit of the age, that what has not
plausibility enough to find an advocate has influence enough to obtain a
protector. Could any man expect to find that protector anywhere? But
what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman
of the Committee of Secrecy[21], who had published to the House, and to
the world, the facts that condemn these debts, the orders that forbid
the incurring of them, the dreadful consequences which attended them?
Even in his official letter, when he tramples on his Parliamentary
report, yet his general language is the same. Read the preface to this
part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this
debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could
fall from a vigilant guardian of the public treasury upon those who
attempted to rob it. What must be felt by every man who has feeling,
when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is
ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its
authenticity,--without a single step taken to settle even the amount of
the demand,--without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons
claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three
hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand
pound, principal money,[22]--without an attempt made to ascertain the
proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of
Directors,--of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle,
by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about
for their own particular purposes?

My honorable friend who made you the motion has s