ometimes put a whole company into
their proper feelings: and whole nations are acted on in the same
manner.

As to the offices of which any civil government may be composed, it
matters but little by what names they are described. In the routine of
business, as before observed, whether a man be styled a president, a
king, an emperor, a senator, or anything else, it is impossible that any
service he can perform, can merit from a nation more than ten thousand
pounds a year; and as no man should be paid beyond his services, so
every man of a proper heart will not accept more. Public money ought to
be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honour. It is
not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labour and
poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not
a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that
mass.

Were it possible that the Congress of America could be so lost to their
duty, and to the interest of their constituents, as to offer General
Washington, as president of America, a million a year, he would not, and
he could not, accept it. His sense of honour is of another kind. It
has cost England almost seventy millions sterling, to maintain a family
imported from abroad, of very inferior capacity to thousands in the
nation; and scarcely a year has passed that has not produced some new
mercenary application. Even the physicians' bills have been sent to
the public to be paid. No wonder that jails are crowded, and taxes and
poor-rates increased. Under such systems, nothing is to be looked for
but what has already happened; and as to reformation, whenever it come,
it must be from the nation, and not from the government.

To show that the sum of five hundred thousand pounds is more than
sufficient to defray all the expenses of the government, exclusive of
navies and armies, the following estimate is added, for any country, of
the same extent as England.

In the first place, three hundred representatives fairly elected, are
sufficient for all the purposes to which legislation can apply, and
preferable to a larger number. They may be divided into two or three
houses, or meet in one, as in France, or in any manner a constitution
shall direct.

As representation is always considered, in free countries, as the most
honourable of all stations, the allowance made to it is merely to defray
the expense which the representatives incur by that service, and n