The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, that my exertions,
whatever they have been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could
possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them.
Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, there
is no common principle of comparison: they are quantities
incommensurable. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal
life. It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, indeed,
sustain, but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not
had more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how to
employ as well as he a much greater fortune than he possesses. In a more
confined application, I certainly stand in need of every kind of relief
and easement much more than he does. When I say I have not received more
than I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty? No! Far, very
far, from it! Before that presence I claim no merit at all. Everything
towards me is favor and bounty. One style to a gracious benefactor;
another to a proud and insulting foe.
His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt by charging my acceptance of
his Majesty's grant as a departure from my ideas and the spirit of my
conduct with regard to economy. If it be, my ideas of economy wore false
and ill-founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford's ideas of economy I
have contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to certain
bills brought in by me on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him
that 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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