less profusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge of
a Gothic establishment," though all its usage and accommodation had
"shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance." The outlay
was enormous. The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing
unfathomable. Waste was the rule in every branch of it. There was an
office for the Great Wardrobe, another office of the Robes, a third
of the Groom of the Stole. For these three useless offices there
were three useless treasurers. They all laid a heavy burden on the
taxpayer, in order to supply a bribe to the member of Parliament.
The plain remedy was to annihilate the subordinate treasuries. "Take
away," was Burke's demand, "the whole establishment of detail in
the household: the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Cofferer of the
Household, the Treasurer of the Chamber, the Master of the Household,
the whole Board of Green Cloth; a vast number of subordinate offices
in the department of the Steward of the Household; the whole
establishment of the Great Wardrobe; the Removing Wardrobe; the Jewel
Office; the Robes; the Board of Works." The abolition of this confused
and costly system would not only diminish expense and promote
efficiency; it would do still more excellent service in destroying the
roots of parliamentary corruption. "Under other governments a question
of expense is only a question of economy, and it is nothing more;
with us, in every question of expense, there is always a mixture of
constitutional considerations."

Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any means the only
stumbling-block in the way of pure and well-ordered government. The
administration of the estates of the Crown,--the Principality, the
Duchy of Cornwall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County Palatine
of Chester,--was an elaborate system of obscure and unprofitable
expenditure. Wales had to herself eight judges, while no more than
twelve sufficed to perform the whole business of justice in England, a
country ten times as large and a hundred times as opulent. Wales,
and each of the duchies, had its own exchequer. Every one of these
principalities, said Burke, has the apparatus of a kingdom, for the
jurisdiction over a few private estates; it has the formality and
charge of the Exchequer of Great Britain, for collecting the rents of
a country squire. They were the field, in his expressive phrase,
of mock jurisdictions and mimic revenues, of difficult trifles and
laborious fool