ccount of it. We have already seen that Burke steadily set
his face against parliamentary reform; he habitually declared that
the machine was well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the
materials were sound. The statesman who resists all projects for the
reform of the constitution, and yet eagerly proclaims how deplorably
imperfect are the practical results of its working, binds himself to
vigorous exertions for the amendment of administration. Burke devoted
himself to this duty with a fervid assiduity that has not often been
exampled, and has never been surpassed. He went to work with the zeal
of a religious enthusiast, intent on purging his Church and his faith
of the corruptions which lowered it in the eyes of men. There was no
part or order of government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, as
to escape his acute and persevering observation.

Burke's object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, was less to
husband the public resources and relieve the tax-payer--though this
aim could not have been absent from his mind, overburdened as England
then was with the charges of the American war--than to cut off the
channels which supplied the corruption of the House of Commons. The
full title of the first project which he presented to the legislature
(February 1780), was, A Plan for the Better Security of the
Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the
Civil and other Establishments. It was to the former that he
deemed the latter to be the most direct road. The strength of the
administration in the House was due to the gifts which the Minister
had in his hands to dispense. Men voted with the side which could
reward their fidelity. It was the number of sinecure places and
unpublished pensions, which along with the controllable influence of
peers and nabobs, furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever:
the avarice and the degraded public spirit of the recipients supplied
the required fulcrum. Burke knew that in sweeping away these
factitious places and secret pensions, he would be robbing the
Court of its chief implements of corruption, and protecting the
representative against his chief motive in selling his country. He
conceived that he would thus be promoting a far more infallible means
than any scheme of electoral reform could have provided, for reviving
the integrity and independence of the House of Commons. In his
eyes, the evil resided not in the constituencies, but in their
repr