A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

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)




Sir, I think myself bound to give you my reasons as clearly and as fully
for stopping in the course of reformation as for proceeding in it. My
limits are the rules of law, the rules of policy, and the service of the
state. This is the reason why I am not able to intermeddle with another
article, which seems to be a specific object in several of the
petitions: I mean the reduction of exorbitant emoluments to efficient
offices. If I knew of any real efficient office which did possess
exorbitant emoluments, I should be extremely desirous of reducing them.
Others may know of them: I do not. I am not possessed of an exact common
measure between real service and its reward. I am very sure that states
do sometimes receive services which is hardly in their power to reward
according to their worth. If I were to give my judgment with regard to
this country, I do not think the great efficient offices of the state to
be overpaid. The service of the public is a thing which cannot be put to
auction and struck down to those who will agree to execute it the
cheapest. When the proportion between reward and service is our object,
we must always consider of what nature the service is, and what sort of
men they are that must perform it. What is just payment for one kind of
labor, and full encouragement for one kind of talents, is fraud and
discouragement to others. Many of the great offices have much duty to
do, and much expense of representation to maintain. A Secretary of
State, for instance, must not appear sordid in the eyes of the ministers
of other nations; neither ought our ministers abroad to appear
contemptible in the courts where they reside. In all offices of duty,
there is almost necessarily a great neglect of all domestic affairs. A
person in high office can rarely take a view of his family-house. If he
sees that the state takes no detriment, the state must see that his
affairs should take as little.

I will even go so far as to affirm, that, if men were willing to serve
in such situations without salary, they ought not to be permitted to do
it. Ordinary service must be secured by the motives to ordinary
integrity. I do not hesitate to say that that state which lays its
foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its
superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and
fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all
things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security
against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will
infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men
are left no way of ascertaining their profits but by their means of
obtaining them, those means will be increased to infinity. This is true
in all the parts of administration, as well as in the whole. If any
individual were to decline his appointments, it might give an unfair
advantage to ostentatious ambition over unpretending service; it might
breed invidious comparisons; it might tend to destroy whatever little
unity and agreement may be found among ministers. And, after all, when
an ambitious man had run down his competitors by a fallacious show of
disinterestedness, and fixed himself in power by that means, what
security is there that he would not change his course, and claim as an
indemnity ten times more than he has given up?

This rule, like every other, may admit its exceptions. When a great man
has some one great object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may
be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads,
and, if his fortune permits it, to hold himself out as a splendid
example. I am told that something of this kind is now doing in a country
near us. But this is for a short race, the training for a heat or two,
and not the proper preparation for the regular stages of a methodical
journey. I am speaking of establishments, and not of men.

It may be expected, Sir, that, when I am giving my reasons why I limit
myself in the reduction of employments, or of their profits, I should
say something of those which seem of eminent inutility in the state: I
mean the number of officers who, by their places, are attendant on the
person of the king. Considering the commonwealth merely as such, and
considering those officers only as relative to the direct purposes of
the state, I admit that they are of no use at all. But there are many
things in the constitution of establishments, which appear of little
value on the first view, which in a secondary and oblique manner produce
very material advantages. It was on full consideration that I determined
not to lessen any of the offices of honor about the crown, in their
number or their emoluments. These emoluments, except in one or two
cases, do not much more than answer the charge of attendance. Men of
condition naturally love to be about a court; and women of condition
love it much more. But there is in all regular attendance so much of
constraint, that, if it wore a mere charge, without any compensation,
you would soon have the court deserted by all the nobility of the
kingdom.

Sir, the most serious mischiefs would follow from such a desertion.
Kings are naturally lovers of low company. They are so elevated above
all the rest of mankind that they must look upon all their subjects as
on a level. They are rather apt to hate than to love their nobility, on
account of the occasional resistance to their will which will be made by
their virtue, their petulance, or their pride. It must, indeed, be
admitted that many of the nobility are as perfectly willing to act the
part of flatterers, tale-bearers, parasites, pimps, and buffoons, as any
of the lowest and vilest of mankind can possibly be. But they are not
properly qualified for this object of their ambition. The want of a
regular education, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their
dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch,
a mountebank, a fiddler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that
tribe. The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves
into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline
and final ruin of the empire. It is therefore of very great importance
(provided the thing is not overdone) to contrive such an establishment
as must, almost whether a prince will or not, bring into daily and
hourly offices about his person a great number of his first nobility;
and it is rather an useful prejudice that gives them a pride in such a
servitude. Though they are not much the better for a court, a court
will be much the better for them. I have therefore not attempted to
reform any of the offices of honor about the king's person.

There are, indeed, two offices in his stables which are sinecures: by
the change of manners, and indeed by the nature of the thing, they must
be so: I mean the several keepers of buck-hounds, stag-hounds,
foxhounds, and harriers. They answer no purpose of utility or of
splendor. These I propose to abolish. It is not proper that great
noblemen should be keepers of dogs, though they were the king's dogs.

In every part of the scheme, I have endeavored that no primary, and that
even no secondary, service of the state should suffer by its frugality.
I mean to touch no offices but such as I am perfectly sure are either of
no use at all, or not of any use in the least assignable proportion to
the burden with which they load the revenues of the kingdom, and to the
influence with which they oppress the freedom of Parliamentary
deliberation; for which reason there are but two offices, which are
properly state offices, that I have a desire to reform.

The first of them is the new office of _Third Secretary of State_, which
is commonly called _Secretary of State for the Colonies_.

_We_ know that all the correspondence of the colonies had been, until
within a few years, carried on by the Southern Secretary of State, and
that this department has not been shunned upon account of the weight of
its duties, but, on the contrary, much sought on account of its
patronage. Indeed, he must be poorly acquainted with the history of
office who does not know how very lightly the American functions have
always leaned on the shoulders of the ministerial _Atlas_ who has
upheld that side of the sphere. Undoubtedly, great temper and judgment
was requisite in the management of the colony politics; but the official
detail was a trifle. Since the new appointment, a train of unfortunate
accidents has brought before us almost the whole correspondence of this
favorite secretary's office since the first day of its establishment. I
will say nothing of its auspicious foundation, of the quality of its
correspondence, or of the effects that have ensued from it. I speak
merely of its _quantity_, which we know would have been little or no
addition to the trouble of whatever office had its hands the fullest.
But what has been the real condition of the old office of Secretary of
State? Have their velvet bags and their red boxes been so full that
nothing more could possibly be crammed into them?

A correspondence of a curious nature has been lately published.[43] In
that correspondence, Sir, we find the opinion of a noble person who is
thought to be the grand manufacturer of administrations, and therefore
the best judge of the quality of his work. He was of opinion that there
was but one man of diligence and industry in the whole administration:
it was the late Earl of Suffolk. The noble lord lamented very justly,
that this statesman, of so much mental vigor, was almost wholly disabled
from the exertion of it by his bodily infirmities. Lord Suffolk, dead to
the state long before he was dead to Nature, at last paid his tribute to
the common treasury to which we must all be taxed. But so little want
was found even of his intentional industry, that the office, vacant in
reality to its duties long before, continued vacant even in nomination
and appointment for a year after his death. The whole of the laborious
and arduous correspondence of this empire rested solely upon the
activity and energy of Lord Weymouth.

It is therefore demonstrable, since one diligent man was fully equal to
the duties of the two offices, that two diligent men will be equal to
the duty of three. The business of the new office, which I shall propose
to you to suppress, is by no means too much to be returned to either of
the secretaries which remain. If this dust in the balance should be
thought too heavy, it may be divided between them both,--North America
(whether free or reduced) to the Northern Secretary, the West Indies to
the Southern. It is not necessary that I should say more upon the
inutility of this office. It is burning daylight. But before I have
done, I shall just remark that the history of this office is too recent
to suffer us to forget that it was made for the mere convenience of the
arrangements of political intrigue, and not for the service of the
state,--that it was made in order to give a color to an exorbitant
increase of the civil list, and in the same act to bring a new accession
to the loaded compost-heap of corrupt influence.

There is, Sir, another office which was not long since closely connected
with this of the American Secretary, but has been lately separated from
it for the very same purpose for which it had been conjoined: I mean the
sole purpose of all the separations and all the conjunctions that have
been lately made,--a job. I speak, Sir, of the _Board of Trade and
Plantations_. This board is a sort of temperate bed of influence, a sort
of gently ripening hothouse, where eight members of Parliament receive
salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given time, in order to
mature, at a proper season, a claim to two thousand, granted for doing
less, and on the credit of having toiled so long in that inferior,
laborious department.

I have known that board, off and on, for a great number of years. Both
of its pretended objects have been much the objects of my study, if I
have a right to call any pursuits of mine by so respectable a name. I
can assure the House, (and I hope they will not think that I risk my
little credit lightly,) that, without meaning to convey the least
reflection upon any one of its members, past or present, it is a board
which, if not mischievous, is of no use at all.

You will be convinced, Sir, that I am not mistaken, if you reflect how
generally it is true, that commerce, the principal object of that
office, flourishes most when it is left to itself. Interest, the great
guide of commerce, is not a blind one. It is very well able to find its
own way; and its necessities are its best laws. But if it were possible,
in the nature of things, that the young should direct the old, and the
inexperienced instruct the knowing,--if a board in the state was the
best tutor for the counting-house,--if the desk ought to read lectures
to the anvil, and the pen to usurp the place of the shuttle,--yet in any
matter of regulation we know that board must act with as little
authority as skill. The prerogative of the crown is utterly inadequate
to the object; because all regulations are, in their nature, restrictive
of some liberty. In the reign, indeed, of Charles the First, the
Council, or Committees of Council, were never a moment unoccupied with
affairs of trade. But even where they had no ill intention, (which was
sometimes the case,) trade and manufacture suffered infinitely from
their injudicious tampering. But since that period, whenever regulation
is wanting, (for I do not deny that sometimes it may be wanting,)
Parliament constantly sits; and Parliament alone is competent to such
regulation. We want no instruction from boards of trade, or from any
other board; and God forbid we should give the least attention to their
reports! Parliamentary inquiry is the only mode of obtaining
Parliamentary information. There is more real knowledge to be obtained
by attending the detail of business in the committees above stairs than
ever did come, or ever will come, from any board in this kingdom, or
from all of them together. An assiduous member of Parliament will not be
the worse instructed there for not being paid a thousand a year for
learning his lesson. And now that I speak of the committees above
stairs, I must say, that, having till lately attended them a good deal,
I have observed that no description of members give so little
attendance, either to communicate or to obtain instruction upon matters
of commerce, as the honorable members of the grave Board of Trade. I
really do not recollect that I have ever seen one of them in that sort
of business. Possibly some members may have better memories, and may
call to mind some job that may have accidentally brought one or other of
them, at one time or other, to attend a matter of commerce.

This board, Sir, has had both its original formation and its
regeneration in a job. In a job it was conceived, and in a job its
mother brought it forth. It made one among those showy and specious
impositions which one of the experiment-making administrations of
Charles the Second held out to delude the people, and to be substituted
in the place of the real service which they might expect from a
Parliament annually sitting. It was intended, also, to corrupt that
body, whenever it should be permitted to sit. It was projected in the
year 1668, and it continued in a tottering and rickety childhood for
about three or four years: for it died in the year 1673, a babe of as
little hopes as ever swelled the bills of mortality in the article of
convulsed or overlaid children who have hardly stepped over the
threshold of life.

It was buried with little ceremony, and never more thought of until the
reign of King William, when, in the strange vicissitude of neglect and
vigor, of good and ill success that attended his wars, in the year 1695,
the trade was distressed beyond all example of former sufferings by the
piracies of the French cruisers. This suffering incensed, and, as it
should seem, very justly incensed, the House of Commons. In this
ferment, they struck, not only at the administration, but at the very
constitution of the executive government. They attempted to form in
Parliament a board for the protection of trade, which, as they planned
it, was to draw to itself a great part, if not the whole, of the
functions and powers both of the Admiralty and of the Treasury; and
thus, by a Parliamentary delegation of office and officers, they
threatened absolutely to separate these departments from the whole
system of the executive government, and of course to vest the most
leading and essential of its attributes in this board. As the executive
government was in a manner convicted of a dereliction of its functions,
it was with infinite difficulty that this blow was warded off in that
session. There was a threat to renew the same attempt in the next. To
prevent the effect of this manoeuvre, the court opposed another
manoeuvre to it, and, in the year 1696, called into life this Board of
Trade, which had slept since 1673.

This, in a few words, is the history of the regeneration of the Board of
Trade. It has perfectly answered its purposes. It was intended to quiet
the minds of the people, and to compose the ferment that was then
strongly working in Parliament. The courtiers were too happy to be able
to substitute a board which they knew would be useless in the place of
one that they feared would be dangerous. Thus the Board of Trade was
reproduced in a job; and perhaps it is the only instance of a public
body which has never degenerated, but to this hour preserves all the
health and vigor of its primitive institution.

This Board of Trade and Plantations has not been of any use to the
colonies, as colonies: so little of use, that the flourishing
settlements of New England, of Virginia, and of Maryland, and all our
wealthy colonies in the West Indies, were of a date prior to the first
board of Charles the Second. Pennsylvania and Carolina were settled
during its dark quarter, in the interval between the extinction of the
first and the formation of the second board. Two colonies alone owe
their origin to that board. Georgia, which, till lately, has made a very
slow progress,--and never did make any progress at all, until it had
wholly got rid of all the regulations which the Board of Trade had
moulded into its original constitution. That colony has cost the nation
very great sums of money; whereas the colonies which have had the
fortune of not being godfathered by the Board of Trade never cost the
nation a shilling, except what has been so properly spent in losing
them. But the colony of Georgia, weak as it was, carried with it to the
last hour, and carries, even in its present dead, pallid visage, the
perfect resemblance of its parents. It always had, and it now has, an
_establishment_, paid by the public of England, for the sake of the
influence of the crown: that colony having never been able or willing to
take upon itself the expense of its proper government or its own
appropriated jobs.

The province of Nova Scotia was the youngest and the favorite child of
the Board. Good God! what sums the nursing of that ill-thriven,
hard-visaged, and ill-favored brat has cost to this wittol nation! Sir,
this colony has stood us in a sum of not less than seven hundred
thousand pounds. To this day it has made no repayment,--it does not even
support those offices of expense which are miscalled its government; the
whole of that job still lies upon the patient, callous shoulders of the
people of England.

Sir, I am going to state a fact to you that will serve to set in full
sunshine the real value of formality and official superintendence. There
was in the province of Nova Scotia one little neglected corner, the
country of the _neutral French_; which, having the good-fortune to
escape the fostering care of both France and England, and to have been
shut out from the protection and regulation of councils of commerce and
of boards of trade, did, in silence, without notice, and without
assistance, increase to a considerable degree. But it seems our nation
had more skill and ability in destroying than in settling a colony. In
the last war, we did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretences
that in the eye of an honest man are not worth a farthing, root out this
poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or
to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate. Whatever the
merits of that extirpation might have been, it was on the footsteps of a
neglected people, it was on the fund of unconstrained poverty, it was on
the acquisitions of unregulated industry, that anything which deserves
the name of a colony in that province has been formed. It has been
formed by overflowings from the exuberant population of New England, and
by emigration from other parts of Nova Scotia of fugitives from the
protection of the Board of Trade.

But if all of these things were not more than sufficient to prove to you
the inutility of that expensive establishment, I would desire you to
recollect, Sir, that those who may be very ready to defend it are very
cautious how they employ it,--cautious how they employ it even in
appearance and pretence. They are afraid they should lose the benefit of
its influence in Parliament, if they deemed to keep it up for any other
purpose. If ever there were commercial points of great weight, and most
closely connected with our dependencies, they are those which have been
agitated and decided in Parliament since I came into it. Which of the
innumerable regulations since made had their origin or their improvement
in the Board of Trade? Did any of the several East India bills which
have been successively produced since 1767 originate there? Did any one
dream of referring them, or any part of them, thither? Was anybody so
ridiculous as even to think of it? If ever there was an occasion on
which the Board was fit to be consulted, it was with regard to the acts
that were preludes to the American war, or attendant on its
commencement. Those acts were full of commercial regulations, such as
they were: the Intercourse Bill; the Prohibitory Bill; the Fishery
Bill. If the Board was not concerned in such things, in what particular
was it thought fit that it should be concerned? In the course of all
these bills through the House, I observed the members of that board to
be remarkably cautious of intermeddling. They understood decorum better;
they know that matters of trade and plantations are no business of
theirs.

There were two very recent occasions, which, if the idea of any use for
the Board had not been extinguished by prescription, appeared loudly to
call for their interference.

When commissioners were sent to pay his Majesty's and our dutiful
respects to the Congress of the United States, a part of their powers
under the commission were, it seems, of a commercial nature. They were
authorized, in the most ample and undefined manner, to form a commercial
treaty with America on the spot. This was no trivial object. As the
formation of such a treaty would necessarily have been no less than the
breaking up of our whole commercial system, and the giving it an entire
new form, one would imagine that the Board of Trade would have sat day
and night to model propositions, which, on our side, might serve as a
basis to that treaty. No such thing. Their learned leisure was not in
the least interrupted, though one of the members of the Board was a
commissioner, and might, in mere compliment to his office, have been
supposed to make a show of deliberation on the subject. But he knew that
his colleagues would have thought he laughed in their faces, had he
attempted to bring anything the most distantly relating to commerce or
colonies before _them_. A noble person, engaged in the same commission,
and sent to learn his commercial rudiments in New York, (then under the
operation of an act for the universal prohibition of trade,) was soon
after put at the head of that board. This contempt from the present
ministers of all the pretended functions of that board, and their manner
of breathing into its very soul, of inspiring it with its animating and
presiding principle, puts an end to all dispute concerning their opinion
of the clay it was made of. But I will give them heaped measure.

It was but the other day, that the noble lord in the blue ribbon carried
up to the House of Peers two acts, altering, I think much for the
better, but altering in a great degree, our whole commercial system:
those acts, I mean, for giving a free trade to Ireland in woollens, and
in all things else, with independent nations, and giving them an equal
trade to our own colonies. Here, too, the novelty of this great, but
arduous and critical improvement of system, would make you conceive that
the anxious solicitude of the noble lord in the blue ribbon would have
wholly destroyed the plan of summer recreation of that board, by
references to examine, compare, and digest matters for Parliament. You
would imagine that Irish commissioners of customs, and English
commissioners of customs, and commissioners of excise, that merchants
and manufacturers of every denomination, had daily crowded their outer
rooms. _Nil horum_. The perpetual virtual adjournment, and the unbroken
sitting vacation of that board, was no more disturbed by the Irish than
by the plantation commerce, or any other commerce. The same matter made
a large part of the business which occupied the House for two sessions
before; and as our ministers were not then mellowed by the mild,
emollient, and engaging blandishments of our dear sister into all the
tenderness of unqualified surrender, the bounds and limits of a
restrained benefit naturally required much detailed management and
positive regulation. But neither the qualified propositions which were
received, nor those other qualified propositions which were rejected by
ministers, were the least concern of theirs, or were they ever thought
of in the business.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

J. D. Beresford - "The Jervaise Comedy"

Sigmund Freud - "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex"

Wm. Murray Graydon - "In Friendship's Guise"

DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen - "Carolina Chansons"

Review: The Dying Game by Melanie King
Articles published by guardian.co.uk Books

Review: Hang the DJ edited by Angus Cargill
Review: The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death by Melanie King

Review: Bait by Nick Brownlee
Review: Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists edited by Angus Cargill