ion, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their
dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch,
a mountebank, a fiddler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that
tribe. The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves
into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline
and final ruin of the empire. It is therefore of very great importance
(provided the thing is not overdone) to contrive such an establishment
as must, almost whether a prince will or not, bring into daily and
hourly offices about his person a great number of his first nobility;
and it is rather an useful prejudice that gives them a pride in such a
servitude. Though they are not much the better for a court, a court
will be much the better for them. I have therefore not attempted to
reform any of the offices of honor about the king's person.

There are, indeed, two offices in his stables which are sinecures: by
the change of manners, and indeed by the nature of the thing, they must
be so: I mean the several keepers of buck-hounds, stag-hounds,
foxhounds, and harriers. They answer no purpose of utility or of
splendor. These I propose to abolish. It is not proper that great
noblemen should be keepers of dogs, though they were the king's dogs.

In every part of the scheme, I have endeavored that no primary, and that
even no secondary, service of the state should suffer by its frugality.
I mean to touch no offices but such as I am perfectly sure are either of
no use at all, or not of any use in the least assignable proportion to
the burden with which they load the revenues of the kingdom, and to the
influence with which they oppress the freedom of Parliamentary
deliberation; for which reason there are but two offices, which are
properly state offices, that I have a desire to reform.

The first of them is the new office of _Third Secretary of State_, which
is commonly called _Secretary of State for the Colonies_.

_We_ know that all the correspondence of the colonies had been, until
within a few years, carried on by the Southern Secretary of State, and
that this department has not been shunned upon account of the weight of
its duties, but, on the contrary, much sought on account of its
patronage. Indeed, he must be poorly acquainted with the history of
office who does not know how very lightly the American functions have
always leaned on the shoulders of the ministerial _Atlas_ who has
u