The Eve of the Revolution | Page 8

any complaint against Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, or
of any desire to turn him out; but by the office which you tell me he
holds in North America, I believe I know the state of the case, which I
will inform you of, that you may be enabled to judge of it yourself.
Heavy complaints were last year made in Parliament of the state of our
revenues in North America which amount to between 1,000 pounds and
9,000 pounds a year, the collecting of which costs upon the
establishment of the Customs in Great Britain between 7,000 pounds
and 8,000 pounds a year. This, it was urged, arose from the making all
these offices sinecures in England. When I came to the Treasury* I

directed the Commissioners of the Customs to be written to, that they
might inform us how the revenue might be improved, and to what
causes they attributed the present diminished state of it.... The principal
cause which they assigned was the absence of the officers who lived in
England by leave of the Treasury, which they proposed should be
recalled. This we complied with, and ordered them all to their duty, and
the Commissioners of the Customs to present others in the room of
such as should not obey. I take it for granted that this is Mr. Bedford's
case. If it is, it will be attended with difficulty to make an exception, as
they are every one of them applying to be excepted out of the orders....
If it is not so, or if Mr. Bedford can suggest to me any proper means of
obviating it without overturning the whole regulation, he will do me a
sensible pleasure.
* On the resignation of Lord Bute in April, 1763, Grenville formed a
ministry, himself taking the two offices of First Lord of the Treasury
and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
There is no evidence to show that Mr. Bedford was able to do Mr.
Grenville this "sensible pleasure." The incident, apparently closed, was
one of many indications that a new policy for dealing with America
was about to be inaugurated; and although Grenville had been made
minister for reasons that were remote enough from any question of
efficiency in government, no better man could have been chosen for
applying to colonial administration the principles of good business
management. His connection with the Treasury, as well as the natural
bent of his mind, had made him "confessedly the ablest man of
business in the House of Commons." The Governors of the Bank of
England, very efficient men certainly, held it a great point in the
minister's favor that they "could never do business with any man with
the same ease they had done it with him." Undoubtedly the first axiom
of business is that one's accounts should be kept straight, one's books
nicely balanced; the second, that one's assets should exceed one's
liabilities. Mr. Grenville, accordingly, "had studied the revenues with
professional assiduity, and something of professional ideas seemed to
mingle in all his regulations concerning them." He "felt the weight of
debt, amounting at this time to one hundred and fifty-eight millions,

which oppressed his country, and he looked to the amelioration of the
revenue as the only mode of relieving it."
It is true there were some untouched sources of revenue still available
in England. As sinecures went in that day, Mr. Grosvenor Bedford's
was not of the best; and on any consideration of the matter from the
point of view of revenue only, Grenville might well have turned his
attention to a different class of officials; for example, to the Master of
the Rolls in Ireland, Mr. Rigby, who was also Paymaster of the Forces,
and to whose credit there stood at the Bank of England, as Mr.
Trevelyan assures us, a million pounds of the public money, the interest
of which was paid to him "or to his creditors." This was a much better
thing than Grosvenor Bedford had with his paltry collectorship at
Philadelphia; and the interest on a million pounds, more or less, had it
been diverted from Mr. Rigby's pocket to the public treasury, would
perhaps have equaled the entire increase in the revenue to be expected
from even the most efficient administration of the customs in all the
ports of, America. In addition, it should perhaps be said that Mr. Rigby,
although excelled by none, was by no means the only man in high place
with a good degree of talent for exploiting the common chest.
The reform of such practices, very likely, was work for a statesman
rather than for a man of business. A good man of business, called upon
to manage the King's affairs, was likely to find many obstacles in the
way of depriving the Paymaster of the Forces