Kitabı oku: «The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 02 (of 12)», sayfa 19

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.

It is therefore, Sir, on the opinion of Parliament, on the opinion of the ministers, and even on their own opinion of their inutility, that I shall propose to you to suppress the Board of Trade and Plantations, and to recommit all its business to the Council, from whence it was very improvidently taken; and which business (whatever it might be) was much better done, and without any expense; and, indeed, where in effect it may all come at last. Almost all that deserves the name of business there is the reference of the plantation acts to the opinion of gentlemen of the law. But all this may be done, as the Irish business of the same nature has always been done, by the Council, and with a reference to the Attorney and Solicitor General.

There are some regulations in the household, relative to the officers of the yeomen of the guards, and the officers and band of gentlemen pensioners, which I shall likewise submit to your consideration, for the purpose of regulating establishments which at present are much abused.

I have now finished all that for the present I shall trouble you with on the plan of reduction. I mean next to propose to you the plan of arrangement, by which I mean to appropriate and fix the civil list money to its several services according to their nature: for I am thoroughly sensible, that, if a discretion wholly arbitrary can be exercised over the civil list revenue, although the most effectual methods may be taken to prevent the inferior departments from exceeding their bounds, the plan of reformation will still be left very imperfect. It will not, in my opinion, be safe to permit an entirely arbitrary discretion even in the First Lord of the Treasury himself; it will not be safe to leave with him a power of diverting the public money from its proper objects, of paying it in an irregular course, or of inverting perhaps the order of time, dictated by the proportion of value, which ought to regulate his application of payment to service.

I am sensible, too, that the very operation of a plan of economy which tends to exonerate the civil list of expensive establishments may in some sort defeat the capital end we have in view,—the independence of Parliament; and that, in removing the public and ostensible means of influence, we may increase the fund of private corruption. I have thought of some methods to prevent an abuse of surplus cash under discretionary application,—I mean the heads of secret service, special service, various payments, and the like,—which I hope will answer, and which in due time I shall lay before you. Where I am unable to limit the quantity of the sums to be applied, by reason of the uncertain quantity of the service, I endeavor to confine it to its line, to secure an indefinite application to the definite service to which it belongs,—not to stop the progress of expense in its line, but to confine it to that line in which it professes to move.

But that part of my plan, Sir, upon which I principally rest, that on which I rely for the purpose of binding up and securing the whole, is to establish a fixed and invariable order in all its payments, which it shall not be permitted to the First Lord of the Treasury, upon any pretence whatsoever, to depart from. I therefore divide the civil list payments into nine classes, putting each class forward according to the importance or justice of the demand, and to the inability of the persons entitled to enforce their pretensions: that is, to put those first who have the most efficient offices, or claim the justest debts, and at the same time, from the character of that description of men, from the retiredness or the remoteness of their situation, or from their want of weight and power to enforce their pretensions, or from their being entirely subject to the power of a minister, without any reciprocal power of awing, ought to be the most considered, and are the most likely to be neglected,—all these I place in the highest classes; I place in the lowest those whose functions are of the least importance, but whose persons or rank are often of the greatest power and influence.

In the first class I place the judges, as of the first importance. It is the public justice that holds the community together; the ease, therefore, and independence of the judges ought to supersede all other considerations, and they ought to be the very last to feel the necessities of the state, or to be obliged either to court or bully a minister for their right; they ought to be as weak solicitors on their own demands as strenuous assertors of the rights and liberties of others. The judges are, or ought to be, of a reserved and retired character, and wholly unconnected with the political world.

In the second class I place the foreign ministers. The judges are the links of our connections with one another; the foreign ministers are the links of our connection with other nations. They are not upon the spot to demand payment, and are therefore the most likely to be, as in fact they have sometimes been, entirely neglected, to the great disgrace and perhaps the great detriment of the nation.

In the third class I would bring all the tradesmen who supply the crown by contract or otherwise.

In the fourth class I place all the domestic servants of the king, and all persons in efficient offices whose salaries do not exceed two hundred pounds a year.

In the fifth, upon account of honor, which ought to give place to nothing but charity and rigid justice, I would place the pensions and allowances of his Majesty's royal family, comprehending of course the queen, together with the stated allowance of the privy purse.

In the sixth class I place those efficient offices of duty whose salaries may exceed the sum of two hundred pounds a year.

In the seventh class, that mixed mass, the whole pension list.

In the eighth, the offices of honor about the king.

In the ninth, and the last of all, the salaries and pensions of the First Lord of the Treasury himself, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the other Commissioners of the Treasury.

If, by any possible mismanagement of that part of the revenue which is left at discretion, or by any other mode of prodigality, cash should be deficient for the payment of the lowest classes, I propose that the amount of those salaries where the deficiency may happen to fall shall not be carried as debt to the account of the succeeding year, but that it shall be entirely lapsed, sunk, and lost; so that government will be enabled to start in the race of every new year wholly unloaded, fresh in wind and in vigor. Hereafter no civil list debt can ever come upon the public. And those who do not consider this as saving, because it is not a certain sum, do not ground their calculations of the future on their experience of the past.

I know of no mode of preserving the effectual execution of any duty, but to make it the direct interest of the executive officer that it shall be faithfully performed. Assuming, then, that the present vast allowance to the civil list is perfectly adequate to all its purposes, if there should be any failure, it must be from the mismanagement or neglect of the First Commissioner of the Treasury; since, upon the proposed plan, there can be no expense of any consequence which he is not himself previously to authorize and finally to control. It is therefore just, as well as politic, that the loss should attach upon the delinquency.

If the failure from the delinquency should be very considerable, it will fall on the class directly above the First Lord of the Treasury, as well as upon himself and his board. It will fall, as it ought to fall, upon offices of no primary importance in the state; but then it will fall upon persons whom it will be a matter of no slight importance for a minister to provoke: it will fall upon persons of the first rank and consequence in the kingdom,—upon those who are nearest to the king, and frequently have a more interior credit with him than the minister himself. It will fall upon masters of the horse, upon lord chamberlains, upon lord stewards, upon grooms of the stole, and lords of the bedchamber. The household troops form an army, who will be ready to mutiny for want of pay, and whose mutiny will be really dreadful to a commander-in-chief. A rebellion of the thirteen lords of the bedchamber would be far more terrible to a minister, and would probably affect his power more to the quick, than a revolt of thirteen colonies. What an uproar such an event would create at court! What petitions, and committees, and associations, would it not produce! Bless me! what a clattering of white sticks and yellow sticks would be about his head! what a storm of gold keys would fly about the ears of the minister! what a shower of Georges, and thistles, and medals, and collars of S.S. would assail him at his first entrance into the antechamber, after an insolvent Christmas quarter!—a tumult which could not be appeased by all the harmony of the new year's ode. Rebellion it is certain there would be; and rebellion may not now, indeed, be so critical an event to those who engage in it, since its price is so correctly ascertained at just a thousand pound.

Sir, this classing, in my opinion, is a serious and solid security for the performance of a minister's duty. Lord Coke says, that the staff was put into the Treasurer's hand to enable him to support himself when there was no money in the Exchequer, and to beat away importunate solicitors. The method which I propose would hinder him from the necessity of such a broken staff to lean on, or such a miserable weapon for repulsing the demands of worthless suitors, who, the noble lord in the blue ribbon knows, will bear many hard blows on the head, and many other indignities, before they are driven from the Treasury. In this plan, he is furnished with an answer to all their importunity,—an answer far more conclusive than if he had knocked them down with his staff:—"Sir, (or my Lord,) you are calling for my own salary,—Sir, you are calling for the appointments of my colleagues who sit about me in office,—Sir, you are going to excite a mutiny at court against me,—you are going to estrange his Majesty's confidence from me, through the chamberlain, or the master of the horse, or the groom of the stole."

As things now stand, every man, in proportion to his consequence at court, tends to add to the expenses of the civil list, by all manner of jobs, if not for himself, yet for his dependants. When the new plan is established, those who are now suitors for jobs will become the most strenuous opposers of them. They will have a common interest with the minister in public economy. Every class, as it stands low, will become security for the payment of the preceding class; and thus the persons whose insignificant services defraud those that are useful would then become interested in their payment. Then the powerful, instead of oppressing, would be obliged to support the weak; and idleness would become concerned in the reward of industry. The whole fabric of the civil economy would become compact and connected in all its parts; it would be formed into a well-organized body, where every member contributes to the support of the whole, and where even the lazy stomach secures the vigor of the active arm.

This plan, I really flatter myself, is laid, not in official formality, nor in airy speculation, but in real life, and in human nature, in what "comes home" (as Bacon says) "to the business and bosoms of men." You have now, Sir, before you, the whole of my scheme, as far as I have digested it into a form that might be in any respect worthy of your consideration. I intend to lay it before you in five bills.⁴⁴ The plan consists, indeed, of many parts; but they stand upon a few plain principles. It is a plan which takes nothing from the civil list without discharging it of a burden equal to the sum carried to the public service. It weakens no one function necessary to government; but, on the contrary, by appropriating supply to service, it gives it greater vigor. It provides the means of order and foresight to a minister of finance, which may always keep all the objects of his office, and their state, condition, and relations, distinctly before him. It brings forward accounts without hurrying and distressing the accountants: whilst it provides for public convenience, it regards private rights. It extinguishes secret corruption almost to the possibility of its existence. It destroys direct and visible influence equal to the offices of at least fifty members of Parliament. Lastly, it prevents the provision for his Majesty's children from being diverted to the political purposes of his minister.

These are the points on which I rely for the merit of the plan. I pursue economy in a secondary view, and only as it is connected with these great objects. I am persuaded, that even for supply this scheme will be far from unfruitful, if it be executed to the extent I propose it. I think it will give to the public, at its periods, two or three hundred thousand pounds a year; if not, it will give them a system of economy, which is itself a great revenue. It gives me no little pride and satisfaction to find that the principles of my proceedings are in many respects the very same with those which are now pursued in the plans of the French minister of finance. I am sure that I lay before you a scheme easy and practicable in all its parts. I know it is common at once to applaud and to reject all attempts of this nature. I know it is common for men to say, that such and such things are perfectly right, very desirable,—but that, unfortunately, they are not practicable. Oh, no, Sir! no! Those things-which are not practicable are not desirable. There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-directed pursuit. There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world. If we cry, like children, for the moon, like children we must cry on.