er. These are the monuments of real kings, who
were the fathers of their people; testators to a posterity which they
embrace as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition;
but the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with
reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of
human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a
vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits
of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of
generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.

Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant
of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious
funds of culture and population that everywhere the reservoirs were
fallen into a miserable decay. But after those domestic enemies had
provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not
leave it until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their
avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not
either totally destroyed, or cut through with such gaps as to require a
serious attention and much cost to re-establish them, as the means of
present subsistence to the people and of future revenue to the State.

What, sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do on the view of
the ruins of such works before them? on the view of such a chasm of
desolation as that which yawned in the midst of those countries to the
north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They
would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would
have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every
shilling derived from the producing, to re-animate the powers of the
unproductive, parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty,
whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity,
they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors whose crimes were
their claims, that they must keep an awful distance; that they must
silence their inauspicious tongues; that they must hold off their
profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have proclaimed
with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every country the
first creditor is the plow,--that this original, indefeasible claim
supersedes every other demand.

This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said.