kingdom ever held, and the continuance of as ample privileges as the
House of Commons, in the plenitude of its power, had been habituated to
assert. But if we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty,
if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the
compass of their object, be well assured that everything about us will
dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the
dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid,
home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation
of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great
empire must fall by mean reparations upon mighty ruins.

I confess I feel a degree of disgust, almost leading to despair, at the
manner in which we are acting in the great exigencies of our country.
There is now a bill in this House appointing a rigid inquisition into
the minutest detail of our offices at home. The collection of sixteen
millions annually, a collection on which the public greatness, safety,
and credit have their reliance, the whole order of criminal
jurisprudence, which holds together society itself, have at no time
obliged us to call forth such powers,--no, 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