have a right, undoubtedly,
to canvass this, as we have to canvass every act of government. But
there is a material difference between an office to be reformed and a
pension taken away for demerit. In the former case, no charge is implied
against the holder; in the latter, his character is slurred, as well as
his lawful emolument affected. The former process is against the thing;
the second, against the person. The pensioner certainly, if he pleases,
has a right to stand on his own defence, to plead his possession, and to
bottom his title in the competency of the crown to give him what he
holds. Possessed and on the defensive as he is, he will not be obliged
to prove his special merit, in order to justify the act of legal
discretion, now turned into his property, according to his tenure. The
very act, he will contend, is a legal presumption, and an implication of
his merit. If this be so, from the natural force of all legal
presumption, he would put us to the difficult proof that he has no merit
at all. But other questions would arise in the course of such an
inquiry,--that is, questions of the merit when weighed against the
proportion of the reward; then the difficulty will be much greater.

The difficulty will not, Sir, I am afraid, be much less, if we pass to
the person really guilty in the question of an unmerited pension: the
minister himself. I admit, that, when called to account for the
execution of a trust, he might fairly be obliged to prove the
affirmative, and to state the merit for which the pension is given,
though on the pensioner himself such a process would be hard. If in this
examination we proceed methodically, and so as to avoid all suspicion of
partiality and prejudice, we must take the pensions in order of time,
or merely alphabetically. The very first pension to which we come, in
either of these ways, may appear the most grossly unmerited of any. But
the minister may very possibly show that he knows nothing of the putting
on this pension; that it was prior in time to his administration; that
the minister who laid it on is dead: and then we are thrown back upon
the pensioner himself, and plunged into all our former difficulties.
Abuses, and gross ones, I doubt not, would appear, and to the correction
of which I would readily give my hand: but when I consider that pensions
have not generally been affected by the revolutions of ministry; as I
know not where such inquiries would stop; and as an absence o