e same matter made
a large part of the business which occupied the House for two sessions
before; and as our ministers were not then mellowed by the mild,
emollient, and engaging blandishments of our dear sister into all the
tenderness of unqualified surrender, the bounds and limits of a
restrained benefit naturally required much detailed management and
positive regulation. But neither the qualified propositions which were
received, nor those other qualified propositions which were rejected by
ministers, were the least concern of theirs, or were they ever thought
of in the business.

It is therefore, Sir, on the opinion of Parliament, on the opinion of
the ministers, and even on their own opinion of their inutility, that I
shall propose to you to _suppress the Board of Trade and Plantations_,
and to recommit all its business to the Council, from whence it was very
improvidently taken; and which business (whatever it might be) was much
better done, and without any expense; and, indeed, where in effect it
may all come at last. Almost all that deserves the name of business
there is the reference of the plantation acts to the opinion of
gentlemen of the law. But all this may be done, as the Irish business of
the same nature has always been done, by the Council, and with a
reference to the Attorney and Solicitor General.

There are some regulations in the household, relative to the officers of
the yeomen of the guards, and the officers and band of gentlemen
pensioners, which I shall likewise submit to your consideration, for the
purpose of regulating establishments which at present are much abused.

I have now finished all that for the present I shall trouble you with on
the _plan of reduction_. I mean next to propose to you the _plan of
arrangement_, by which I mean to appropriate and fix the civil list
money to its several services according to their nature: for I am
thoroughly sensible, that, if a discretion wholly arbitrary can be
exercised over the civil list revenue, although the most effectual
methods may be taken to prevent the inferior departments from exceeding
their bounds, the plan of reformation will still be left very imperfect.
It will not, in my opinion, be safe to permit an entirely arbitrary
discretion even in the First Lord of the Treasury himself; it will not
be safe to leave with him a power of diverting the public money from its
proper objects, of paying it in an irregular course, or of inverting
per