there is nothing in my conduct that can contradict either the
letter or the spirit of those acts. Does he mean the Pay-Office Act? I
take it for granted he does not. The act to which he alludes is, I
suppose, the Establishment Act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has
ever read the one or the other. The first of these systems cost me, with
every assistance which my then situation gave me, pains incredible. I
found an opinion common through all the offices, and general in the
public at large, that it would prove impossible to reform and methodize
the office of pay-master-general. I undertook it, however; and I
succeeded in my undertaking. Whether the military service, or whether
the general economy of our finances have profited by that act, I leave
to those who are acquainted with the army and with the treasury to
judge.

An opinion full as general prevailed also, at the same time, that
nothing could be done for the regulation of the civil list
establishment. The very attempt to introduce method into it, and any
limitations to its services, was held absurd. I had not seen the man who
so much as suggested one economical principle or an economical expedient
upon that subject. Nothing but coarse amputation or coarser taxation
were then talked of, both of them without design, combination, or the
least shadow of principle. Blind and headlong zeal or factious fury were
the whole contribution brought by the most noisy, on that occasion,
towards the satisfaction of the public or the relief of the crown.

Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that time
required something very different from what others then suggested or
what his Grace now conceives. Let me inform him, that it was one of the
most critical periods in our annals.

Astronomers have supposed, that, if a certain comet, whose path
intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forgot what)
sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course,
into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet
of the Rights of Man, (which "from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and
war," and "with fear of change perplexes monarchs,") had that comet
crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could
have prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway of
heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French
Revolution.

Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostili