letter-writer, very naturally, hearing that Mr. Bedford was to
lose an office to which in the course of years he had become much
accustomed, sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. George Grenville
in behalf of his friend and servant. "Though I am sensible I have
no pretensions for asking you a favour, ...yet I flatter
myself I shall not be thought quite impertinent in interceding
for a person, who I can answer has neither been to blame nor any
way deserved punishment, and therefore I think you, Sir, will be
ready to save him from prejudice. The person I mean is my deputy,
Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, who, above five and twenty years ago, was
appointed Collector of the Customs in Philadelphia by my father.
I hear he is threatened to be turned out. If the least fault can
be laid to his charge, I do not desire to have him protected. If
there cannot, I am too well persuaded, Sir, of your justice not
to be sure you will be pleased to protect him."

George Grenville, a dry, precise man of great knowledge and
industry, almost always right in little matters and very patient
of the misapprehensions of less exact people, wrote in reply a
letter which many would think entirely adequate to the matter in
hand: "I have never heard [he began] of any complaint against Mr.
Grosvenor Bedford, or of any desire to turn him out; but by the
office which you tell me he holds in North America, I believe I
know the state of the case, which I will inform you of, that you
may be enabled to judge of it yourself. Heavy complaints were
last year made in Parliament of the state of our revenues in
North America which amount to between 1,000 pounds and 9,000
pounds a year, the collecting of which costs upon the
establishment of the Customs in Great Britain between 7,000
pounds and 8,000 pounds a year. This, it was urged, arose from