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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) by Edmund Burke

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12)




Besides, Sir, they have a rule in the Exchequer, which, I believe, they
have founded upon a very ancient statute, that of the 51st of Henry the
Third, by which it is provided, that, "when a sheriff or bailiff hath
begun his account, none other shall be received to account, until he
that was first appointed hath clearly accounted, and that the sum has
been received."[38] Whether this clause of that statute be the ground of
that absurd practice I am not quite able to ascertain. But it has very
generally prevailed, though I am told that of late they have began to
relax from it. In consequence of forms adverse to substantial account,
we have a long succession of paymasters and their representatives who
have never been admitted to account, although perfectly ready to do so.

As the extent of our wars has scattered the accountants under the
paymaster into every part of the globe, the grand and sure paymaster,
Death, in all his shapes, calls these accountants to another reckoning.
Death, indeed, domineers over everything but the forms of the Exchequer.
Over these he has no power. They are impassive and immortal. The audit
of the Exchequer, more severe than the audit to which the accountants
are gone, demands proofs which in the nature of things are difficult,
sometimes impossible, to be had. In this respect, too, rigor, as usual,
defeats itself. Then the Exchequer never gives a particular receipt, or
clears a man of his account as far as it goes. A final acquittance (or a
_quietus_, as they term it) is scarcely ever to be obtained. Terrors and
ghosts of unlaid accountants haunt the houses of their children from
generation to generation. Families, in the course of succession, fall
into minorities; the inheritance comes into the hands of females; and
very perplexed affairs are often delivered over into the hands of
negligent guardians and faithless stewards. So that the demand remains,
when the advantage of the money is gone,--if ever any advantage at all
has been made of it. This is a cause of infinite distress to families,
and becomes a source of influence to an extent that can scarcely be
imagined, but by those who have taken some pains to trace it. The
mildness of government, in the employment of useless and dangerous
powers, furnishes no reason for their continuance.

As things stand, can you in justice (except perhaps in that over-perfect
kind of justice which has obtained by its merits the title of the
opposite vice[39]) insist that any man should, by the course of his
office, keep a _bank_ from whence he is to derive no advantage? that a
man should be subject to demands below and be in a manner refused an
acquittance above, that he should transmit an original sin and
inheritance of vexation to his posterity, without a power of
compensating himself in some way or other for so perilous a situation?
We know, that, if the paymaster should deny himself the advantages of
his bank, the public, as things stand, is not the richer for it by a
single shilling. This I thought it necessary to say as to the offensive
magnitude of the profits of this office, that we may proceed in
reformation on the principles of reason, and not on the feelings of
envy.

The treasurer of the navy is, _mutatis mutandis_, in the same
circumstances. Indeed, all accountants are. Instead of the present mode,
which is troublesome to the officer and unprofitable to the public, I
propose to substitute something more effectual than rigor, which is the
worst exactor in the world. I mean to remove the very temptations to
delay; to facilitate the account; and to transfer this bank, now of
private emolument, to the public. The crown will suffer no wrong at
least from the pay offices; and its terrors will no longer reign over
the families of those who hold or have held them. I propose that these
offices should be no longer _banks_ or _treasuries_, but mere _offices
of administration_. I propose, first, that the present paymaster and the
treasurer of the navy should carry into the Exchequer the whole body of
the vouchers for what they have paid over to deputy-paymasters, to
regimental agents, or to any of those to whom they have and ought to
have paid money. I propose that those vouchers shall be admitted as
actual payments in their accounts, and that the persons to whom the
money has been paid shall then stand charged in the Exchequer in their
place. After this process, they shall be debited or charged for nothing
but the money-balance that remains in their hands.

I am conscious, Sir, that, if this balance (which they could not expect
to be so suddenly demanded by any usual process of the Exchequer) should
now be exacted all at once, not only their ruin, but a ruin of others to
an extent which I do not like to think of, but which I can well
conceive, and which you may well conceive, might be the consequence. I
told you, Sir, when I promised before the holidays to bring in this
plan, that I never would suffer any man or description of men to suffer
from errors that naturally have grown out of the abusive constitution of
those offices which I propose to regulate. If I cannot reform with
equity, I will not reform at all.

For the regulation of past accounts, I shall therefore propose such a
mode, as men, temperate and prudent, make use of in the management of
their private affairs, when their accounts are various, perplexed, and
of long standing. I would therefore, after their example, divide the
public debts into three sorts,--good, bad, and doubtful. In looking over
the public accounts, I should never dream of the blind mode of the
Exchequer, which regards things in the abstract, and knows no difference
in the quality of its debts or the circumstances of its debtors. By this
means it fatigues itself, it vexes others, it often crushes the poor, it
lets escape the rich, or, in a fit of mercy or carelessness, declines
all means of recovering its just demands. Content with the eternity of
its claims, it enjoys its Epicurean divinity with Epicurean languor. But
it is proper that all sorts of accounts should be closed some time or
other,--by payment, by composition, or by oblivion. _Expedit reipublicae
ut sit finis litium_. Constantly taking along with me, that an extreme
rigor is sure to arm everything against it, and at length to relax into
a supine neglect, I propose, Sir, that even the best, soundest, and the
most recent dents should be put into instalments, for the mutual benefit
of the accountant and the public.

In proportion, however, as I am tender of the past, I would be provident
of the future. All money that was formerly imprested to the two great
_pay offices_ I would have imprested in future to the _Bank of England_.
These offices should in future receive no more than cash sufficient for
small payments. Their other payments ought to be made by drafts on the
Bank, expressing the service. A check account from both offices, of
drafts and receipts, should be annually made up in the
Exchequer,--charging the Bank in account with the cash balance, but not
demanding the payment until there is an order from the Treasury, in
consequence of a vote of Parliament.

As I did not, Sir, deny to the paymaster the natural profits of the bank
that was in his hands, so neither would I to the Bank of England. A
share of that profit might be derived to the public in various ways. My
favorite mode is this: that, in compensation for the use of this money,
the bank may take upon themselves, first, _the charge of the Mint_, to
which they are already, by their charter, obliged to bring in a great
deal of bullion annually to be coined. In the next place, I mean that
they should take upon themselves the charge of _remittances to our
troops abroad_. This is a species of dealing from which, by the same
charter, they are not debarred. One and a quarter per cent will be saved
instantly thereby to the public on very large sums of money. This will
be at once a matter of economy and a considerable reduction of
influence, by taking away a private contract of an expensive nature. If
the Bank, which is a great corporation, and of course receives the least
profits from the money in their custody, should of itself refuse or be
persuaded to refuse this offer upon those terms, I can speak with some
confidence that one at least, if not both parts of the condition would
be received, and gratefully received, by several bankers of eminence.
There is no banker who will not be at least as good security as any
paymaster of the forces, or any treasurer of the navy, that have ever
been bankers to the public: as rich at least as my Lord Chatham, or my
Lord Holland, or either of the honorable gentlemen who now hold the
offices, were at the time that they entered into them; or as ever the
whole establishment of the Mint has been at any period.

These, Sir, are the outlines of the plan I mean to follow, in
suppressing these two large subordinate treasuries. I now come to
another subordinate treasury,--I mean that of the _paymaster of the
pensions_; for which purpose I reenter the limits of the civil
establishment: I departed from those limits in pursuit of a principle;
and, following the same game in its doubles, I am brought into those
limits again. That treasury and that office I mean to take away, and to
transfer the payment of every name, mode, and denomination of pensions
to the Exchequer. The present course of diversifying the same object can
answer no good purpose, whatever its use may be to purposes of another
kind. There are also other lists of pensions; and I mean that they
should all be hereafter paid at one and the same place. The whole of
the new consolidated list I mean to reduce to 60,000_l._ a year, which
sum I intend it shall never exceed. I think that sum will fully answer
as a reward to all real merit and a provision for all real public
charity that is ever like to be placed upon the list. If any merit of an
extraordinary nature should emerge before that reduction is completed, I
have left it open for an address of either House of Parliament to
provide for the case. To all other demands it must be answered, with
regret, but with firmness, "The public is poor."

I do not propose, as I told you before Christmas, to take away any
pension. I know that the public seem to call for a reduction of such of
them as shall appear unmerited. As a censorial act, and punishment of an
abuse, it might answer some purpose. But this can make no part of _my_
plan. I mean to proceed by bill; and I cannot stop for such an inquiry.
I know some gentlemen may blame me. It is with great submission to
better judgments that I recommend it to consideration, that a critical
retrospective examination of the pension list, upon the principle of
merit, can never serve for my basis. It cannot answer, according to my
plan, any effectual purpose of economy, or of future, permanent
reformation. The process in any way will be entangled and difficult, and
it will be infinitely slow: there is a danger, that, if we turn our line
of march, now directed towards the grand object, into this more
laborious than useful detail of operations, we shall never arrive at our
end.

The king, Sir, has been by the Constitution appointed sole judge of the
merit for which a pension is to be given. We have a right, undoubtedly,
to canvass this, as we have to canvass every act of government. But
there is a material difference between an office to be reformed and a
pension taken away for demerit. In the former case, no charge is implied
against the holder; in the latter, his character is slurred, as well as
his lawful emolument affected. The former process is against the thing;
the second, against the person. The pensioner certainly, if he pleases,
has a right to stand on his own defence, to plead his possession, and to
bottom his title in the competency of the crown to give him what he
holds. Possessed and on the defensive as he is, he will not be obliged
to prove his special merit, in order to justify the act of legal
discretion, now turned into his property, according to his tenure. The
very act, he will contend, is a legal presumption, and an implication of
his merit. If this be so, from the natural force of all legal
presumption, he would put us to the difficult proof that he has no merit
at all. But other questions would arise in the course of such an
inquiry,--that is, questions of the merit when weighed against the
proportion of the reward; then the difficulty will be much greater.

The difficulty will not, Sir, I am afraid, be much less, if we pass to
the person really guilty in the question of an unmerited pension: the
minister himself. I admit, that, when called to account for the
execution of a trust, he might fairly be obliged to prove the
affirmative, and to state the merit for which the pension is given,
though on the pensioner himself such a process would be hard. If in this
examination we proceed methodically, and so as to avoid all suspicion of
partiality and prejudice, we must take the pensions in order of time,
or merely alphabetically. The very first pension to which we come, in
either of these ways, may appear the most grossly unmerited of any. But
the minister may very possibly show that he knows nothing of the putting
on this pension; that it was prior in time to his administration; that
the minister who laid it on is dead: and then we are thrown back upon
the pensioner himself, and plunged into all our former difficulties.
Abuses, and gross ones, I doubt not, would appear, and to the correction
of which I would readily give my hand: but when I consider that pensions
have not generally been affected by the revolutions of ministry; as I
know not where such inquiries would stop; and as an absence of merit is
a negative and loose thing;--one might be led to derange the order of
families founded on the probable continuance of their kind of income; I
might hurt children; I might injure creditors;--I really think it the
more prudent course not to follow the letter of the petitions. If we fix
this mode of inquiry as a basis, we shall, I fear, end as Parliament has
often ended under similar circumstances. There will be great delay, much
confusion, much inequality in our proceedings. But what presses me most
of all is this: that, though we should strike off all the unmerited
pensions, while the power of the crown remains unlimited, the very same
undeserving persons might afterwards return to the very same list; or,
if they did not, other persons, meriting as little as they do, might be
put upon it to an undefinable amount. This, I think, is the pinch of the
grievance.

For these reasons, Sir, I am obliged to waive this mode of proceeding as
any part of my plan. In a plan of reformation, it would be one of my
maxims, that, when I know of an establishment which may be subservient
to useful purposes, and which at the same time, from its discretionary
nature, is liable to a very great perversion from those purposes, _I
would limit the quantity of the power that might be so abused_. For I am
sure that in all such cases the rewards of merit will have very narrow
bounds, and that partial or corrupt favor will be infinite. This
principle is not arbitrary, but the limitation of the specific quantity
must be so in some measure. I therefore state 60,000_l._, leaving it
open to the House to enlarge or contract the sum as they shall see, on
examination, that the discretion I use is scanty or liberal. The whole
amount of the pensions of all denominations which have been laid before
us amount, for a period of seven years, to considerably more than
100,000_l._ a year. To what the other lists amount I know not. That
will be seen hereafter. But from those that do appear, a saving will
accrue to the public, at one time or other, of 40,000_l._ a year; and
we had better, in my opinion, to let it fall in naturally than to tear
it crude and unripe from the stalk.[40]

There is a great deal of uneasiness among the people upon an article
which I must class under the head of pensions: I mean the _great patent
offices in the Exchequer_. They are in reality and substance no other
than pensions, and in no other light shall I consider them. They are
sinecures; they are always executed by deputy; the duty of the principal
is as nothing. They differ, however, from the pensions on the list in
some particulars. They are held for life. I think, with the public, that
the profits of those places are grown enormous; the magnitude of those
profits, and the nature of them, both call for reformation. The nature
of their profits, which grow out of the public distress, is itself
invidious and grievous. But I fear that reform cannot be immediate. I
find myself under a restriction. These places, and others of the same
kind, which are held for life, have been considered as property. They
have been given as a provision for children; they have been the subject
of family settlements; they have been the security of creditors. What
the law respects shall be sacred to me. If the barriers of law should be
broken down, upon ideas of convenience, even of public convenience, we
shall have no longer anything certain among us. If the discretion of
power is once let loose upon property, we can be at no loss to determine
whose power and what discretion it is that will prevail at last. It
would be wise to attend upon the order of things, and not to attempt to
outrun the slow, but smooth and even course of Nature. There are
occasions, I admit, of public necessity, so vast, so clear, so evident,
that they supersede all laws. Law, being only made for the benefit of
the community, cannot in any one of its parts resist a demand which may
comprehend the total of the public interest. To be sure, no law can set
itself up against the cause and reason of all law; but such a case very
rarely happens, and this most certainly is not such a case. The mere
time of the reform is by no means worth the sacrifice of a principle of
law. Individuals pass like shadows; but the commonwealth is fixed and
stable. The difference, therefore, of to-day and to-morrow, which to
private people is immense, to the state is nothing. At any rate, it is
better, if possible, to reconcile our economy with our laws than to set
them at variance,--a quarrel which in the end must be destructive to
both.

My idea, therefore, is, to reduce those offices to fixed salaries, as
the present lives and reversions shall successively fall. I mean, that
the office of the great auditor (the auditor of the receipt) shall be
reduced to 3000_l._ a year; and the auditors of the imprest, and the
rest of the principal officers, to fixed appointments of 1,500_l._ a
year each. It will not be difficult to calculate the value of this fall
of lives to the public, when we shall have obtained a just account of
the present income of those places; and we shall obtain that account
with great facility, if the present possessors are not alarmed with any
apprehension of danger to their freehold office.

I know, too, that it will be demanded of me, how it comes, that, since I
admit these offices to be no better than pensions, I chose, after the
principle of law had been satisfied, to retain them at all. To this,
Sir, I answer, that, conceiving it to be a fundamental part of the
Constitution of this country, and of the reason of state in every
country, that there must be means of rewarding public service, those
means will be incomplete, and indeed wholly insufficient for that
purpose, if there should be no further reward for that service than the
daily wages it receives during the pleasure of the crown.

Whoever seriously considers the excellent argument of Lord Somers, in
the Bankers' Case, will see he bottoms himself upon the very same maxim
which I do; and one of his principal grounds of doctrine for the
alienability of the domain in England,[41] contrary to the maxim of the
law in France, he lays in the constitutional policy of furnishing a
permanent reward to public service, of making that reward the origin of
families, and the foundation of wealth as well as of honors. It is,
indeed, the only genuine, unadulterated origin of nobility. It is a
great principle in government, a principle at the very foundation of the
whole structure. The other judges who held the same doctrine went beyond
Lord Somers with regard to the remedy which they thought was given by
law against the crown upon the grant of pensions. Indeed, no man knows,
when he cuts off the incitements to a virtuous ambition, and the just
rewards of public service, what infinite mischief he may do his country
through all generations. Such saving to the public may prove the worst
mode of robbing it. The crown, which has in its hands the trust of the
daily pay for national service, ought to have in its hands also the
means for the repose of public labor and the fixed settlement of
acknowledged merit. There is a time when the weather-beaten, vessels of
the state ought to come into harbor. They must at length have a retreat
from the malice of rivals, from the perfidy of political friends, and
the inconstancy of the people. Many of the persons who in all times have
filled the great offices of state have been younger brothers, who had
originally little, if any fortune. These offices do not furnish the
means of amassing wealth. There ought to be some power in the crown of
granting pensions out of the reach of its own caprices. An entail of
dependence is a bad reward of merit.

I would therefore leave to the crown the possibility of conferring some
favors, which, whilst they are received as a reward, do not operate as
corruption. When men receive obligations from the crown, through the
pious hands of fathers, or of connections as venerable as the paternal,
the dependences which arise from thence are the obligations of
gratitude, and not the fetters of servility. Such ties originate in
virtue, and they promote it. They continue men in those habitudes of
friendship, those political connections, and those political principles,
in which they began life. They are antidotes against a corrupt levity,
instead of causes of it. What an unseemly spectacle would it afford,
what a disgrace would it be to the commonwealth that suffered such
things, to see the hopeful son of a meritorious minister begging his
bread at the door of that Treasury from whence his father dispensed the
economy of an empire, and promoted the happiness and glory of his
country! Why should he be obliged to prostrate his honor and to submit
his principles at the levee of some proud favorite, shouldered and
thrust aside by every impudent pretender on the very spot where a few
days before he saw himself adored,--obliged to cringe to the author of
the calamities of his house, and to kiss the hands that are red with his
father's blood?--No, Sir, these things are unfit,--they are intolerable.

Sir, I shall be asked, why I do not choose to destroy those offices
which are pensions, and appoint pensions under the direct title in their
stead. I allow that in some cases it leads to abuse, to have things
appointed for one purpose and applied to another. I have no great
objection to such a change; but I do not think it quite prudent for me
to propose it. If I should take away the present establishment, the
burden of proof rests upon me, that so many pensions, and no more, and
to such an amount each, and no more, are necessary for the public
service. This is what I can never prove; for it is a thing incapable of
definition. I do not like to take away an object that I think answers my
purpose, in hopes of getting it back again in a better shape. People
will bear an old establishment, when its excess is corrected, who will
revolt at a new one. I do not think these office-pensions to be more in
number than sufficient: but on that point the House will exercise its
discretion. As to abuse, I am convinced that very few trusts in the
ordinary course of administration have admitted less abuse than this.
Efficient ministers have been their own paymasters, it is true; but
their very partiality has operated as a kind of justice, and still it
was service that was paid. When we look over this Exchequer list, we
find it filled with the descendants of the Walpoles, of the Pelhams, of
the Townshends,--names to whom this country owes its liberties, and to
whom his Majesty owes his crown. It was in one of these lines that the
immense and envied employment he now holds came to a certain duke,[42]
who is now probably sitting quietly at a very good dinner directly under
us, and acting _high life below stairs_, whilst we, his masters, are
filling our mouths with unsubstantial sounds, and talking of hungry
economy over his head. But he is the elder branch of an ancient and
decayed house, joined to and repaired by the reward of services done by
another. I respect the original title, and the first purchase of merited
wealth and honor through all its descents, through all its transfers,
and all its assignments. May such fountains never be dried up! May they
ever flow with their original purity, and refresh and fructify the
commonwealth for ages!

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