Pitt was assured by the Pelhams, that as soon as the King’s antipathy could be removed, his services would be secured to the government: and he accordingly received the appointment, of Vice-treasurer of Ireland, February 22, 1746, and, May 6, was promoted to the office of Paymaster-general. In the latter capacity he showed his superiority to pecuniary corruption, by foregoing the profit which it had been usual to derive from the large balances retained in that officer’s hands, and by rejecting other lucrative perquisites of office. But he has incurred the charge of political dishonesty, by supporting measures, as a minister, analogous in character to those which, under former governments, he had so strongly condemned. On this subject we may quote the words of a recent writer on the history of parties in England. “By the absorption into the government of almost all its leaders and chief orators, the opposition was for some time reduced in Parliament to extreme insignificance. Mr. Pitt was now one of the most determined supporters of the very measures which the first ten years of his parliamentary life had been spent in condemning and opposing. Nor did he scruple to avow his change of opinion. In reference, for instance, to the claim of exemption from search for British ships when found near the coast of Spanish America, which, urged by the opposition in the time of Sir Robert Walpole, had involved the country in a war with Spain, and was afterwards abandoned at the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle by the government of which Pitt was a member, he said in the House of Commons that he had indeed once been an advocate for that claim; but it was when he was a young man; he was now ten years older, and having considered public affairs more coolly, was convinced it could not be maintained. In the same manner very much of his old jealousy of military power and of the prerogative appears to have evaporated in the cooler consideration which he had now been enabled to give to such matters. We do not profess to doubt the perfect honesty of Mr. Pitt in this change of sentiment; and we may also think that his more matured opinions were, upon the whole, more rational than those of his fervid and impetuous nonage as a politician; but the facts (which only furnish an instance of what has often happened) are worth recording as a lesson for such as are capable of understanding it.” It is to be recollected, that the remarkable events of 1745–6 may very well have modified Mr. Pitt’s opinions with respect to the maintenance of a standing army.