Richard [his son] is the deputy with a salary of 500L. The office to be reformed according to the Bill. There is enough emoluments. In decency it could not be more. Something considerable is also to be secured for the life of young Richard to be a security for him and his mother."("Mem. and Cor. of Charles James Fox," i., p. 451.) It is thus certain that the Rockingham Ministry were doing for the Paymaster all they could "in decency," and that while posing as a reformer in reducing the expenses of that office, he was arranging for secret advantages to his family. It is said that the arrangement failed by his loss of office, but while so many of Burke's papers are withheld from the public (if not destroyed), it cannot be certain that something was not done of the kind charged by Paine. That Burke was not strict in such matters is further shown by his efforts to secure for his son the rich sinecure of the Clerkship of the Polls, in which he failed. Burke was again Paymaster in 1783-4, and this time remained long enough in office to repeat more successfully his secret attempts to secure irregular pensions for his family. On April 7, 1894, Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge sold in London (Lot 404) a letter of Burke (which I have not seen in print), dated July 16, 1795. It was written to the Chairman of the Commission on Public Accounts, who had required him to render his accounts for the time he was in office as Paymaster-General, 1783-4. Burke refuses to do so in four angry and quibbling pages, and declares he will appeal to his country against the demand if it is pressed. Why should Burke wish to conceal his accounts? There certainly were suspicions around Burke, and they may have caused Pitt to renounce his intention, conveyed to Burke, August 30, 1794, of asking Parliament to bestow on him a pension. "It is not exactly known," says one of Burke's editors, "what induced Mr. Pitt to decline bringing before Parliament a measure which he had himself proposed without any solicitation whatever on the part of Burke." (Burke's "Works," English Ed., 1852, ii., p. 252.) The pensions were given without consultation with Parliament--1200L. granted him by the King from the Civil List, and 2500L. by Pitt in West Indian 41/2 per cents. Burke, on taking his seat beside Pitt in the great Paine Parliament (December, 1792), had protested that he had not abandoned his party through expectation of a pension, but the general belief of those with whom he had formerly acted was that he had been promised a pension. A couplet of the time ran: "A pension makes him change his plan, And loudly damn the rights of man."