'mons who moved the vote of approbation, was General Crawford, and at that time there stood against his name, on the list of the four and a half per cent. Leeward Island duties, a pension of one thou sand two hundred pounds per annum for his life. General Crawford, no doubt, is a distinguished officer, and had been wounded in the service; but there are many, very many officers in our army, as distinguished as General Crawford, and who have been much more severely wounded. who have served many more campaigns than General Crawford, and rendered much more important services to their country; yet you may ransack all the pension lists in vain to find the sum of fifty pounds a year, much less one thousand two hundred, annexed to the names of such general officers.

To speak, then, historically of General Crawford in this transaction. He had recently become connected by marriage with the family of the Duke of Newcastle; he represented and commanded that powerful Parliamentary interest in the House of Commons; the Minister of the Crown selected him as a fit person to enjoy a pension of one thousand two hundred pounds a year for life; and the General considered the Minister of the Crown as entitled to the gratitude of his country for his expedition to Walcheren. This is all according to form and usage in the House of Commons' practice--but we, the Electors of Great Britain, are deeply interested in preventing, if we can, this fund of the four and a half per cent. from ever again being doomed to the same prostitution. p. 12-15.

We consider such statements as invaluable. They are worth a thousand general descriptions, and, as it were, theories of influence: They show the very fact--the actual working of the mechanism by which money is first unduly taken from the People's pocket, and then used in helping the Ministers to curb their liberties, and keep their own places. With such pictures this Tract abounds.

You would suppose, by this time,' says our author, that we had exhausted the hiding places of Members of Parlia •ment and their connexions; but there are nooks and corners to be yet looked into.' And accordingly, he proceeds to pry into the fee funds of the different departments of the Revenue and Offices of State, and finds, that those fees exacted from the subject for the support of those places of business deemed indispensably necessary to the public service, are converted into a treasure applicable to House of Commons' purposes. Take an instance or two again; for this author is a plain matter-of-fact man, who loves to proceed by example.

Under the head of Superannuations in the Foreign Office, you will find no less a sum than 1000l. a year for life. settled upon the wife of Robert Ward Esq. of that department. Who then is this su perannuated Robert Ward? The date of his pension is February, 1806. It is said he was then about three or four and thirty years

of age, and had been Under Secretary of State about ten or eleven months. It is known that, for thirteen years since, he has filled, and fills now, an efficient department in the Ordnance, with a salary from 2 to 3000l. per annum. How then became Mr Ward superannuated so much before his time as to entitle him to this pension of 1000l. per annum for the life of his lady? Why, I will tell you :—It is because Mr Ward was, and is, one of Lord Lonsdale's numerous members of Parliament, and because Mrs Ward is the sister of Lady Mulgrave, Lord Mulgrave having been the Minister who gave Mr Ward this pension.Again, in the Stamp-Office, you will find a provision made out of the fees in favour of a Mr Estcourt, amounting to 12007. per annum for his life, and, it is added, "as late solicitor to the Stamp-Office." And who is this retired attorney, for whom so magnificent an allowance is provided, the greatest sum the Crown can grant to a subject by Mr Burke's Civil List Act? Why, Mr Estcourt is the proprietor of the borough of Malmsbury, and returns two members to the House of Commons; and this is his claim to 1200l. per annum for life out of our pockets; and, no doubt, an unanswerable claim too, in the opinion of all Ministers.' pp. 17, 18.

By such statements of fact does this writer expose the operation of influence, and explain the unhappy estrangement of Members of Parliament from their constituents. The principal remedy which he proposes, is a recurrence to the sound provisions of Mr Burke's bill, which prevented any pension from being granted above 1200l. a year, and limited to 90,000l. a year the total pension fund: And this remedy might be at once applied, merely by cutting off all pensions upon the four and a half per cent. and other similar funds, which at present render that once celebrated bill a mere dead letter. He also proposes that the Crown should be in future restrained from making any grant out of these funds to Members of Parliament. Upon this we pause. The funds themselves, we agree, should be carried to publick account; this, we think, demonstrated above. Indeed the principal one, the West India fund, does not, by law, belong either to the Crown or the Parliament, but to the Colonies, and is only held by an act of violence. For the act granting it in 1663, expressly states, that it was raised for specific local purposes, viz. building sessions' houses, prisons, bridges, &c.; and when, in 1701, the Islands applied to Parliament to have it restored, a committee, appointed to inquire, reported that they had fully proved their case; whereupon an address was presented to the Queen, praying that it might be given up; and her Majesty immediately promised that it should.-13. Com. Journ, 800. 818. 828. Before that time, it had been included in the Acts of Parliament touching the Civil List, among the smaller branches of the hereditary revenue. See particularly, 9. Wil. 3. c. 23. § 14.

But in consequence of this proceeding, in the year 1701, it was expressly foreprized and excepted' out of these revenues, and never otherwise disposed of again by Parliament. Therefore, the Parliament first took it unlawfully from the Colonies, and applied it as they did the other hereditary revenues, wthout any one ever entertaining the idea of its being a fund under the separate controul of the Crown. Then Parliament and the Crown, finding the mother country had no sort of right to it, gave it up to the Colonies. But by a strange accident it never found its way there, and has ever since been usurped by the Crown, independent both of Parliament and the Colonies.

This fund, then, if there be justice in Parliament, and law in Westminster-Hall, must ere long be rescued from its present perversion, and cease to afford the materials of corrupt influence. But we also deem the rest of these separate funds most fit to be taken, upon compensation, if necessary, from the Crown, and appropriated by Parliament to the public service. If this be done, our author's proposal to prevent grants and pensions to Members of Parliament, can only apply to the old pension fund of 90,000l. a year. Now, he knows too well the existing law of Parliament to be ignorant that, at present, no person can sit in the House of Commons who holds a pension during pleasure. Therefore, to this class of grants, by far the most dangerous in the view of influence, his remarks have no application. Does he then mean to exclude from all Royal bounty persons who have ever sat in Parliament? No one can accuse him of so visionary a project, and indeed a project so useless in any practical view. He must, therefore, confine his plan to persons holding pensions for life; and we hesitate about excluding them. They are quite independent, except from the ties of gratitude; and we hardly think that any considerable gain would be made to the cause of liberty by their exclusion. We observe that Mr Bennet has given notice of a bill on this subject; but, as at present advised, we hardly see the necessity of such a measure. To strike at grants to the relations and connexions of Members, is manifestly chimerical in the highest degree; and the enactment of the proposed disqualification, would only drive the bounty of the Crown into that channel.

Our author next broaches a most important subject-the Abuses in the Collection of the Revenue, which make it subservient to the grand purposes of Parliamentary influence. He points to one instance in the front rank of this department, and where reform is as easy as it is safe-the Receiverships of Land-tax, the Distributors of Stamps There are, at least, one Receiver and one Distributor in each county and they have, for

mere sinecure places, salaries from five and six hundred, to three, four, and nearly five thousand a year. To' have the benefit of the deposites, country bankers, in every town in England, would gladly execute, without salaries, the only actual duties of these placemen, those performed by their deputies; and beside cutting off so much patronage, now bestowed on connexions, domestic and political, of Members of Parliament, a clear saving would be effected to the public of 300,000l. a year. As for the immense patronage of the Customs and Excise, all that the author proposes, is a strict adherence to the rule laid down, or rather recommended, in the Finance Reports of 1799, namely, that succession by gradation and seniority should be rigorously at tended to. At present, he observes, instead of this system being pursued, which has been found to answer so perfectly with the East-India Company, we find, in every commercial town of any importance, the Customhouse absolutely overrun with persons wholly destitute of all experience or capacity for their employment, and who are placed there only because their friends support the Member for that or some other town, and he supports the Minister.

The question of a Place bill is very satisfactorily handled in the next portion of this pamphlet; and we entirely agree with all the author's positions, excepting the remarks on pensions for life, which we have already considered. He likens them to the parish relief, which disqualifies voters at elections, and calls these pensioners State Paupers-an ingenious, but not a very solid view of the question; first, because in truth paupers are not generally disqualified, but only in towns-in counties they are allowed to vote; secondly, because the ground of this disqualification is the legal presumption arising from it, that the pauper is a person of mean and dependent circumstances, who hardly can have a will of his own; and, thirdly, because it would be manifestly unjust to exclude such pensioners as our Admirals and Generals and retired Judges, who have, by their professional services, earned those annuities, and equally impossible to draw the line between such service and political service; for example, that of the Godolphins and Chathams. In all the rest of his remarks on this important head, we agree; and they merit deep attention in these times.

And now I come to our seventy-six members of the House of Commons, who divide the sum of 156,000l. per annum.-Here we have, happily, precedents taken from the best of times before our eyes,-precedents such as must satisfy the most timid, the most ap prehensive of innovation,-that there is nothing to alarm them in the reform to be proposed. In the act of Parliament which passed in the reign of Queer and which settled the Crown of this realm

on our present Royal Family after the death of Queen Anne without issue, it was enacted, that after the Hanoverian family should comę to the throne, no person who held any office under the Crown, or who enjoyed any pension during pleasure under the Crown, should be capable of sitting as a member in the House of Commons. Some three or four years afterwards, this subject was reconsidered; and in another act of Queen Anne, which created the regency in the event of that Queen's death and the absence of the Hanoverian successor, the former disqualifying enactment as to places was repealed, and in its room was substituted this provision, viz. that from the passing of such act of Regency, all persons holding particular places under the Crown therein specified, should be incapable of becoming members of the House of Commons; that all pensioners during pleasure should be also excluded; that all members holding any other places whatsoever not therein specified, should vacate their seats as members. upon their acceptance of such places. but that they should be eligible again at the pleasure of their constituents: and furthermore it was enacted, that if any new offices should be created after the passing of that Act, all persons ho ding such offices should be incapable of sitting as members of the House of Commons.

Thus passed this Bill of Reform, and it is the law at the present day. It had for its author the Prime Minister, Lord Godolphinthe Chancellor Lord Cowper-and it had the support of Lord Somers-three as honest, able, and disinterested public men as this or any other country ever saw. Our present Chancellor, Lord Eldon is very fond of saying he is always anxious to act as he thinks Lord Somers would have done in similar situations: and nothing can do more honour to himself, or more justice to the memory of Lord Sorcers, than this sentiment. The question, then, which I put to Lord Eldon, and to every man in England, is this-If Lord Godolphin, Lord Cowper, and Lord Somers, with all their experience, and with their known attachment to the Hanover succession-at that time, when the title of the Hanover family to the throne was more than disputed by a most powerful party in the State-when the East India Company and Bank of England were in their infancy, and the National Debt, in comparison, trifle-if those great men then thought that the power of the Crown in the House of Commons was too great, and that it ought to be regulated and reduced, as it was by their bill of reform. to what extent may we not imagine their regulation and reduction to have gone, had they lived in times when, by the collection of the taxes alone, the amount of four millions of money annually was at the disposal of the members of the House of Commons, when all such other powers of English and Indian influence, as are before enumerated, have centered in the hands of that body, and are by them claimed and used as their own undoubted property? It is with this bill of Lord Godolphin's then, this Act of Reform, that we must now go to work. We are no wild theorists in attempting to apply the principle of these great authorities, and c