same manner, as the whole House would do; there would moreover be a considerable difficulty in appointing such a committee as would give satisfaction to all sides of the House. Here he lamented that it was not, from the orders of the House, allowable for him to speak out the whole of his idea on the subject; but gentlemen might very well understand him, that there were several different descriptions of men in the House, and that some persons would wish to have one description, and some another description, to compose the committee for his own part, if his office was to be put into commission, he confessed he should be extremely willing to be himself one of the commissioners, and would of course wish to have his own most particular friends for colleagues. On the other hand, he imagined the right hon. gentleman would also choose to be one of the committee, and perhaps would have no objection to being allowed to appoint the rest. In that case, there would be no great difficulty to form some judgment of the sort of report that would proceed from them; for, not to mention the extreme facility with which the right hon. gentleman and his friends had formerly doomed the greatest commercial Company in the world to bankruptcy-[A loud cry of Hear, hear! on which Mr. Pitt said, he was glad to find the gentlemen so sore upon the subject; he considered it as a sign of their repentance.] The very little delicacy which the right hon. gentleman had shewn to the public credit, in coming forward with his present attack at so critical a time, within a few days of that on which he intended to bring on a question relative to the finances, for the purpose of providing for the funding of such part of the national debt incurred in the course of the last war as yet remained to be funded, and for paying the interest of the small loan that might be found necessary, plainly indicated which way his wishes went, and what his real purpose was. Upon the whole, the measure proposed could have no good effect whatever, but must be productive of many bad ones; it must occasion a delay in the very business to which it related-the establishment of the sinking fund; it must tend to create apprehensions for which there was no real foundation, extremely prejudicial to the credit of the nation, and give a temporary check to that rapid progress which had of late taken place in the funds; and which, if not thwarted by idle and useless specu lations of this nature, would shortly rise to such a height as the prosperous state of the public revenue must, when more universally known, tend effectually to secure. Mr. Fox rose to reply. He began with observing, that the right hon. gentleman had thought proper to bestow the name of proselyte upon him. He desired to know at what period of his political life it was that he had ever held any other than one and the same language, respecting the necessity of keeping up the sinking fund, so as to be able to apply a certain sum unalienably towards the discharge of the na tional debt, in time of peace. At all times, and on all occasions, when questions of finance were agitated, had he not contended, that unless this were done, the nation would be inevitably ruined? How happened it, then, that the right hon. gentleman had discovered that it was a new doctrine in his mouth? With regard to his having declared, that the surplus of the sinking fund ought never to be applied towards the annual establishments, or in discharge of the public annuity, he had said directly the reverse; having declared, that it was, in his opinion, right so to apply it, when a necessity arose, as sir Robert Walpole and all his successors had occasionally applied it: but he had at the same time said, that it ought not to be suffered to remain as a fund appropriated to those purposes generally; on the contrary, its great object, viz. the applying it in diminution of the public debt, ought ever to be held in view. Mr. Fox reprobated Mr. Pitt's argument as in the highest degree fallacious and illusory. The right hon. gentleman, he said, uniformly avoided and flew from any computation grounded on the average of a number of years, and upon experience-to resort to what? a computation built upon the amount of the produce of the two last quarters, an amount exceeding any that had gone before, for obvious reasons, joined to the amount of two summer quarters, which accidentally had been the greatest of any two summer quarters to be instanced. This was, he said, of all weak modes of reasoning, the weakest. It was not merely to trust to visionary speculation, but to that sort of speculation most liable to failure. With regard even to the confidence the right hon. gentleman had placed in his conjectures, in consequence of his boasted quarter ending April 5, 1785, he might find his conjectures deceive him; since the only quarter's produce that had greatly * exceeded others, was a quarter in the year 1779, the remaining quarters of which failed beyond all example. Mr. Fox defended lord John Cavendish's budget from imputation, and said he should not have imagined the present administration would have imputed blame to it, since they could not have forgotten, that lord John had been obliged to open his budget within three weeks after he had kissed his Majesty's hand as chancellor of the exchequer, and that he succeeded the right hon. gentleman in that office, who had remained in it six weeks perfectly inactive, and without doing one thing for the public in point of finance. Had lord John continued another year chancellor of the exchequer, undoubtedly he would have been prepared with new taxes, to have supplied the deficiencies of his own taxes, and with some plan for establishing a fund to be applied immediately in diminution of the national debt. But what had been the right hon. gentleman's conduct? Who, that had last year seen him assume an air of the utmost personal importance and gravity, and heard him ardently talk of his determination to encounter loss of popularity, public clamour, and public odium, rather than not effect so necessary a purpose as applying a fund towards the immediate diminution of the national debt, would have imagined that he would this year have come forward with a series of computa. tions, founded in demonstrable fallacy and error, in order to ground a pretence for putting off the great work till another session? What pledge had the House that he would begin upon it even next session? Indeed, his words were sufficiently big with promises, but would a minister's promise insure a minister's performance? Last year he gave a verbal pledge, and bound himself by words as fast as words could bind him. Master as he was of words, Mr. Fox said, he defied the right hon. gentleman to invent expressions more binding or more strong than those he had used last session, and yet the House had witnessed what security his verbal pledge had proved! Thus might he go on promising and promising ad infinitum, and a work that ought to have been begun before, that would not admit of longer delay, be deferred till we found ourselves again involved in a war; and he was not yet, Mr. Fox said, brought over to the opinion that war was the fittest season for the discharge of the national debt. Mr. Fox took notice of Mr. Pitt's sneer at his having argued in support of the imposition of the new taxes, on an occasion where no taxes were to be imposed. In answer to this, he conceived the question of the day would decide whether new taxes were necessary or not; and therefore it was, of all others, the fittest moment for pressing the argument. Were there no doubt in the case, and were it the decided opinion of that House that taxes ought to be laid, any argument of his in support of such an idea, would undoubtedly be superfluous; it could only be of use where the question was in contest. Mr. Fox, in answer to Mr. Pitt's allusion to the India Bill, said, the very conduct that the right hon. gentleman had at that time imputed to him, he was now practising himselfholding out fallacious accounts and false statements of the revenue, to mislead the public. With regard to India, did any man now believe, that the accounts presented to that House by the directors of the East India Company last year, and upon which they had proceeded to pass a bill into a law, were not fallacious? After what he had lately seen from Bengal, after what the learned gentleman next him knew of the affairs of the Company in India, did the right hon. gentleman think the accounts of the last year were to be relied on? He was persuaded he did not. With regard to the putting the office of chancellor of the exchequer in commission, he had no such intention; nor if he had, would he have thought of putting the chancellor of the exchequer at the head of that commission, any more than he should have thought of putting the office of master-general of the ordnance in commission, and have placed him at the head of a board of commissioners appointed to control the executive branch of his own department. The sort of committee he wished to institute, might, he said, prove essentially serviceable, by investigating facts, and reporting them to the House, whence they would have the way cleared, and be enabled to proceed with certainty. To a committee of the House, be it composed of whom it would, he was ready to trust that or any other business, because he was convinced by the conduct of a committee last year, that however gentlemen, who were chosen in a committee, might generally differ in their political sentiments, they would always form such a report as would do them honour, and prove of essential benefit to the public, by affording the House a species of useful and been a member of it, and that some of his colleagues upon it had been rewarded with peerages for their pains. authentic information which they could not otherwise obtain. Mr. Fox concluded with declaring that he had no objection to leaving out of his motion the words "with their observations thereon." He accord-| ingly moved the omission of those words. The question being put, the amendment was carried. Mr. Burke rose to say a few words only. He had listened with great attention to the arguments of two gentlemen, whose talents he held in high estimation. The abilities of his right hon. friend he always admired, and the abilities of the Chancellor of the Exchequer he could not but say, he thought worthy of a better conduct. Mr. Burke charged Mr. Pitt with having treated the House with most unparalleled insolence in having dared to make so personal a declaration, that if a committee were chosen, if such a set of gentlemen were elected, they would conduct themselves so and so; and if another set of gentlemen, so and so: parcelling out gentlemen, and prejudging what their opinions and conduct would be, was, he said, so unparalleled a piece of insolence in a minister, that the time was, if the right hon. gentleman had been the greatest minister the country had ever known, he would not have sat an hour on the Treasury-bench after such an insult to the House. He said, he was the person who had called out Hear! hear! when the right hon. gentleman had alluded to the India Bill, and had talked of those who had doomed the Company to bankruptcy. He admitted that such interruptions were not decent; but custom had sanctioned them as modes of expressing approbation or reprehension, indignation, or surprise. He had not cried Hear! hear! because he was sore at the mention of the bankruptcy of the India Company, but because he was sorry, and because he was surprised the right hon. gentleman should have forgot that the learned gentleman, his confidential friend, who sat next him (Mr. Dundas), was the very person who had first stated the affairs of the Company in India to be ruinous, and had done it with an unusual degree of authority, in his character of chairman of a committee, with which, Mr. Burke said, he had not had the smallest connexion. With regard to the appointment of a committee to inquire into the state of the produce of the taxes, Mr. Burke reminded the House, that there was a precedent for such a committee; nay, that the right hon. gentleman had himself [VOL. XXV.] Mr. Sheridan desired that the entry from the Journals of the motion, and order for the institution of a committee to inquire into the state of the taxes, during the late war, that had been moved in 1782, might be read. It was read accordingly, and it appeared, that lord John Cavendish, as chancellor of the exchequer, had moved it, and presided at it; Mr. William Pitt, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, and several other members, being upon it. Mr. Sheridan then said, that when the right hon. gentleman alluded to the idea of putting the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer into commission, he presumed he had forgotten, that he had himself sat upon the commission into which the office was put, when lord John Cavendish was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Sheridan then went into a defence of lord John Cavendish's budget. Mr. Steele rose to call the attention of the House to the real nature of the question, which, he said, was, whether they. would rely on authentic papers, prepared with all possible accuracy by the Treasury, as vouchers that no taxes were necessary to be imposed this year to raise a sum by way of sinking fund, to be applied in diminution of the national debt; or whether they should appoint a committee to go into a tedious investigation of those papers, which would defer the necessary measures of finance, such as moving for a small loan, and proposing a few trifling taxes to pay the interest, providing a fund, and also one per cent. additional for that part of the debt which yet remained to be funded, and for which an interest of 4 per cent. was provided last year, and substituting a new tax in the room of that to be repealed on fustians, for six or seven weeks at least; whereas these were well known to be measures that his right hon. friend would be ready in a very few days to bring forward. The motion was negatived without a division. Debate on Mr. Sawbridge's Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments.] May 3. Mr. Alderman Sawbridge rose to discharge, what he held to be an act of public duty, though he acknowledged he did not flatter himself with any sanguine hopes of success. Indeed, it was impossible for him to entertain expectations [2 L] that he should be able to carry a motion | scious of his own inability, and never rose for shortening the duration of parliament, to speak in the House without great awe after the arguments that he had heard and embarrassment; he would neverthe. stated with so much ability, a few days less do his duty, not considering inability since, when the question for a reform of to make fine speeches in that House as an the representation was under considera- absolute proof that a man was either a tion. According to the doctrines then fool or a knave; but in regard to the conlaid down, and which had been sanctioned verse of the proposition, he had heard very for the third or fourth time with the fine speeches from some gentlemen, of triumph of a considerable majority, it had whose honesty he did not entertain the been unanswerably demonstrated, as far as highest opinion. He should, therefore, the sort of triumph he alluded to could on the present occasion declare, that he demonstrate any proposition unanswerably, steadily adhered to the opinion he had that the present constitution of the House always avowed, and was for shortening the of Commons was the right and pure con- duration of parliaments, as well as for a stitution, and such as ought to continue reform in the representation. He said, he untouched by the rude hand of reforma- had seen wit, ability, buffoonery, and distion. If, therefore, it was right, that a putation employed, when the latter quesnumber of the representatives of the peo- tion was under discussion, to bear down ple should continue to be appointed by justice, reason, and common sense; he the Crown, that others should be seated flattered himself, however, the arguments there at the will of certain great and to which he alluded were treated by the noble families, and the rest be obliged people without doors with the contempt to buy their seats, and find their way into and indignation they merited. Much stress the House by bribery and corruption; if had been laid on the circumstance of there it was right, that the House should exist not being many petitions on the table; principally at the will of the Crown, it there was, however, one petition which certainly would be troublesome and idle applied as well to the present question as for gentlemen to be frequently sent back to that of parliamentary reform; that peto a fresh election; and it would be much tition, the noble lord in the blue ribbon better for them to continue sitting unin- had read with a tone and emphasis, that terruptedly, as long as they should, by he owned deceived him into an opinion for their conduct, please the Crown and its the moment, that the noble lord, who had ministers; because, if at any time, by proved himself to be the ready leader of asserting the rights of the people, and opposition on all occasions, where any by maintaining the spirit of the constitu- thing like a reform was proposed, had tion, they should chance to displease the suddenly become a convert, and meant Crown and the favourites of the Crown, to support the motion of that day; unfor it would be a very easy matter, by an tunately, that had not proved to be the exertion of the prerogative, to turn them case. He then desired to have the Notabout their business, as was the case last tingham petition read; which being done, year, and call another parliament more he concluded with reading, as a part of his subservient and more pliable. Undoubt- speech, an extract from a writer of emiedly, to those who held such opinions, his nence on the constitution. motion must be disagreeable; but as there were persons who entertained very different notions, and as he, for one, was of opinion that the House of Commons ought to speak the sense of the people, and that, in order to do so, they could not be too often sent back to a new election, he should beg leave to move, "That leave be given to bring in a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliament." Mr. Martin said, he was aware of the danger any man encountered, of having what he advanced turned into ridicule, when he rose to say any thing in that House which had the real good of the people for its foundation. He was con The Earl of Surrey said, he did not go so far as the hon. gentleman who made the motion, and some others did, upon the subject. Had the House acceded to the proposition of a reform in the representation, he should have thought the present motion unnecessary, because, if that House was a true representation of the people, as it ought to be, he should think there was not any danger likely to arise from its sitting seven, or even more years; but not having been able to obtain a reform, he should vote for the motion, as the improvement next to be desired. Sir Edward Astley declared he should vote for the question. He said, that if Debate on Mr. Francis's Motion on the Expense of the East India Company's Establishments in India.] May 5, Mr. Francis said, he rose to submit to the House the result of his examination of the several accounts of the East India Company's establishments abroad, which had been laid before them in the course of the last twelve months, some of them in obedience to the late act of parliament, and others by order of the House: that he meant to state facts as he found them, with very little observation upon them; because he believed the facts would appear not only perfectly intelligible of themselves, but that they would lead the House at once to every conclusion that he could propose to draw from them, and make their own impression sufficiently deep, without the assistance of any arguments of his one preliminary observation only was necessary; that, for want of materials respecting Madras and Bombay, what he was going to state would be for the most part confined to the establishments in Bengal, and to the resources or difficulties of the Company's affairs in that quarter. It was the only part of India in which a resource existed, or from which the most distant hope of retrieving their affairs could be formed. In every other quarter the distress existed without the resource: Fort St. George and Bombay hung upon Bengal for their daily exist ence; their establishments would exhaust a great revenue, and they had none: they were overwhelmed with enormous debts, which increased every day, and they had not a rupee of their own to pay either principal or interest. It followed, then, that in confining himself at present to the state of Bengal, he looked at the Company's affairs abroad in the most favourable point of view. If in that quarter their distresses were great and increasing, if in that quarter their resources were declining and their debts accumulating every day, the House might judge from thence what their situation must be at Fort St. George and at Bombay. The act of parliament required, that a perfect list of all civil and military establishments should be produced; whereas he undertook to shew, that the various accounts which had been lately laid before the House, of the Company's establishments in Bengal, were defective, contradictory, and fallacious. In this place Mr. Francis stated a variety of omissions in the account of the civil establishment of Bengal; and observed, that although the whole civil establishment was stated in one account at the enormous amount of 927,945/. and although this account professed to include, as it ought to do, and as the House undoubtedly expected it would do, every expense in the civil department, many articles or heads of expense were left blank, that is, with nothing stated but pronts unknown, which he computed moderately at 100,000l. a year. One establishment, the marine, he said, was completely omitted; yet it stood in the Bengal estimates for 1783 and 1784, at above 80,000l. a year. What sort of information was this to be given to parliament, if the purpose of calling for it was to know the real expense; to compare the expense with the service, and from thence to proceed to reformation and retrenchment? How were they to retrench, or what were they to leave, when in some instances they only knew the employment and office, without the salary and emoluments; and when, in others, the whole establishment was completely kept out of sight? So much for defects and omissions. He then proceeded to the head of contradictions-That there were on the table three statements of one and the same establishment, viz. the civil establishment of Bengal: the first was, an estimate made by the directors on the 14th of February 1784, 350,000. On this estimate they founded some very important conclusions with respect to the state of their finances, the annual provision of an investment, and to the surplus which their revenues in Bengal were to exhibit, and which they depended on as a sinking fund for the discharge of their debts. The second ac |