The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III | Page 6

the compass of their object, be well assured that everything about us
will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the
dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid,
home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation
of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great
empire must fall by mean reparations upon mighty ruins.
I confess I feel a degree of disgust, almost leading to despair, at the
manner in which we are acting in the great exigencies of our country.
There is now a bill in this House appointing a rigid inquisition into the
minutest detail of our offices at home. The collection of sixteen
millions annually, a collection on which the public greatness, safety,
and credit have their reliance, the whole order of criminal jurisprudence,
which holds together society itself, have at no time obliged us to call

forth such powers,--no, nor anything like them. There is not a principle
of the law and Constitution of this country that is not subverted to favor
the execution of that project.[3] And for what is all this apparatus of
bustle and terror? Is it because anything substantial is expected from it?
No. The stir and bustle itself is the end proposed. The eye-servants of a
short-sighted master will employ themselves, not on what is most
essential to his affairs, but on what is nearest to his ken. Great
difficulties have given a just value to economy; and our minister of the
day must be an economist, whatever it may cost us. But where is he to
exert his talents? At home, to be sure; for where else can he obtain a
profitable credit for their exertion? It is nothing to him, whether the
object on which he works under our eye be promising or not. If he does
not obtain any public benefit, he may make regulations without end.
Those are sure to pay in present expectation, whilst the effect is at a
distance, and may be the concern of other times and other men. On
these principles, he chooses to suppose (for he does not pretend more
than to suppose) a naked possibility that he shall draw some resource
out of crumbs dropped from the trenchers of penury; that something
shall be laid in store from the short allowance of revenue-officers
overloaded with duty and famished for want of bread,--by a reduction
from officers who are at this very hour ready to batter the Treasury with
what breaks through stone walls for an increase of their appointments.
From the marrowless bones of these skeleton establishments, by the use
of every sort of cutting and of every sort of fretting tool, he flatters
himself that he may chip and rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to
diet into some similitude of health and substance the languishing
chimeras of fraudulent reformation.
Whilst he is thus employed according to his policy and to his taste, he
has not leisure to inquire into those abuses in India that are drawing off
money by millions from the treasures of this country, which are
exhausting the vital juices from members of the state, where the public
inanition is far more sorely felt than in the local exchequer of England.
Not content with winking at these abuses, whilst he attempts to squeeze
the laborious, ill-paid drudges of English revenue, he lavishes, in one
act of corrupt prodigality, upon those who never served the public in
any honest occupation at all, an annual income equal to two thirds of
the whole collection of the revenues of this kingdom.

Actuated by the same principle of choice, he has now on the anvil
another scheme, full of difficulty and desperate hazard, which totally
alters the commercial relation of two kingdoms, and, what end soever it
shall have, may bequeath a legacy of heartburning and discontent to
one of the countries, perhaps to both, to be perpetuated to the latest
posterity. This project is also undertaken on the hope of profit. It is
provided, that, out of some (I know not what) remains of the Irish
hereditary revenue, a fund, at some time, and of some sort, should be
applied to the protection of the Irish trade. Here we are commanded
again to task our faith, and to persuade ourselves, that, out of the
surplus of deficiency, out of the savings of habitual and systematic
prodigality, the minister of wonders will provide support for this nation,
sinking under the mountainous load of two hundred and thirty millions
of debt. But whilst we look with pain at his desperate and laborious
trifling, whilst we are apprehensive that he will break his back in
stooping to pick up chaff and straws, he recovers himself at an elastic
bound, and with