Abuses in the Expenditure of Government.

The labours of Mr. Hume and Sir Henry Parnell are an instance of what the ability and perseverance of a few individuals may accomplish. It is not, however, so much the good effected as the evil prevented that entitles them to the gratitude of the country. Under the long leaden and unprofitable administration of Lord Liverpool, all the great branches of public expenditure had been annually augmenting; and how far this progression would have extended, had not Mr. Hume, supported by a small phalanx of honest persons, commenced his exposures, it is impossible to say. His mode of attack could not be parried: though an unofficial man himself, he showed as intimate acquaintance with the details of the public accounts as John Wilson Croker, Peregrine Courtenay, or any other veteran placeman. Even Sir T. Gooch and Lord Wharncliffe were constrained to admit the value of his services, and the reductions effected in the public departments, prior to the formation of Earl Grey’s ministry, are chiefly attributable to him and the gentleman we have mentioned.

In the course of this section we purpose to bring together some of the more palpable abuses in the government expenditure, and for a knowledge of many of which the public is indebted to a valuable work of Sir Henry Parnell, On Financial Reform. We intend to avail ourselves of this gentleman’s publication, though we cannot say the member for Queen’s County is an object of our exclusive admiration: he is too much of a doctrinaire for us, and appears to repose too implicit confidence in the dogmas of the Ricardo school,—the disciples of which know as much about the internal state of the country, and the causes and remedies of its embarrassments, as the natives of Kamschatka. But this infirmity of the honourable Baronet does not impair the utility of the facts he has published, nor depreciate the important information collected by the Finance Committee of 1828, over which he so ably presided.

The following is Sir Henry Parnell’s list of the several departments entrusted with the business of expending the public money, pursuant to the general appropriation of it by parliament:—

The expense of the Treasury department was, in 1797, only £44,066; so that it has nearly doubled; although the revenue, the superintending of which constitutes the chief business of the treasury, was as great as in 1827. Does not this show the profusion with which salaries have been increased, and offices multiplied? There are no fewer than fifteen clerks in the treasury, who receive salaries amounting to £1000; five of these fifteen receive £1,500 a-year each and upwards. Their duties are little more than nominal; they seldom attend their offices but to look over the newspapers; many of them hold two or more offices and sinecures; yet with all their official appointments, so little are they engaged in the public service, that they may be mostly seen driving about town in their stanhopes, and whiling their time in the club-houses.

The Exchequer.—This is one of the most absurd and lucrative establishments under government. As the chief duty of the exchequer is that of superintendence, in taking care that there are no issues of public money by the Treasury contrary to parliamentary direction, it ought to be discharged by a very few officers, or altogether abolished. However, neither economy nor common sense are objects sought to be attained. The forms by which business is carried on are extremely antiquated and ridiculous, and as remote from modern practice as the conveyance of merchandize by packhorse and bells is from the cheapness and despatch of a rail-road. Our limits will only admit of a brief description of the constitution of this office, and the mummery and nonsense daily perpetrated there.

The Exchequer is divided into seven different departments; the tellers, the pells, the king’s remembrancers, the lord treasurer’s, the auditor’s office, the tally-court, and the pipe-office. The pipe-office alone has seven subsidiary absurdities; among these are the clerk of the nichills, the clerk of the estreats, and the cursitor baron; besides which, are eight sworn attornies, two board-end clerks, and eight clerks attached to the sworn attornies. From the inquiries of a parliamentary commission, it seems these are nearly all sinecurists. Two of the witnesses examined had been in the office, one eight and the other twenty-five years, and they stated, during that time, five out of the eight attornies never came near the office, living in the country at a considerable distance from London. The duties of their clerks were not more onerous. Three of them were at school long after being appointed to their situations. One of them admitted that, subsequently to his nomination, he was five years at school at Chelsea, two years in a conveyancer’s office, and that he now practised as a barrister, and might look into the office once in a month. The board-end clerks laboured under similar lack of duties; and as to the clerk of the nichills, the name is sufficient to indicate his heavy and responsible functions.

One of the duties of the Exchequer is, yearly to send down five great rolls of parchment to the sheriffs, containing accounts of supposed debtors to the crown during the last 300 years. The sheriff is bound to summon a jury, in order to ascertain what money is due to the crown on the roll. The sending of the roll down and up again, occasions considerable expense, and is as useless a task as the labours of Sisyphus. The farcical ceremony of passing the sheriffs’ accounts is of a piece with the rest, and resembles a game on the draught-board. Under the pretence of testing the account, the practice is to throw, in the presence of the cursitor baron, small copper coins behind a hat, from one little square of the cloth on the table to another; when the sheriffs’ accounts are correct, a person cries out “tot;” when inaccurate, another person cries “nel;” and according as these words are uttered, the copper coins are shifted from one part of the chequers to another. All these antics were, probably, of use prior to the invention of arithmetic and book-keeping, but are now as irrelevant as the idle pageant of a coronation or lord mayor’s show.

The manner in which the public money is paid in to the tellers is a similar burlesque on real life. There are four tellers, and each has a little pew or cabin, in which he or his deputy sits, with a suitable complement of clerks, for the purpose of receiving the produce of the taxes nominally paid to him, but in reality to the clerks of the Bank of England, three of whom attend in an adjoining room to receive the money paid out of the Bank to be paid into the Bank again. The tellers, under the mockery of receiving the stamp, excise, and other duties, sign a parchment, written in a mixture of Latin or Saxon, or other jargon, which is as unintelligible to any one but a teller as the unknown tongues of Mr. Irving. They next pass a roll through a pipe into a room below, and there it is cut into a particular shape, and carried to the auditors of the Exchequer. A wooden tally was formerly used, which, within the last two years, has been exchanged for one of parchment. But the inconvenience and absurdity of the formality is so great, that Exchequer payments have been lately abolished, and they are now managed by clerks of the Treasury.

From Madox’s History of the Court of Exchequer, it appears, scarcely any alteration has been made in this department since the reign of Henry II. The reason is obvious enough. There are vested rights, claims of seniority, and reversionary interests in the way; and no reform can be introduced till all these expectancies are satisfied, and it has been the policy hitherto to take special care such expectancies never shall be satisfied, by promptly filling up every vacant appointment the moment it occurs. The most valuable sinecures in the Exchequer are held by peers and their relatives, and the emolument, fees, and patronage are so great, that it can hardly excite surprise the carnival doings we have described have been so carefully preserved.

For the gratification of tax payers we subjoin a statement of the sums annually swamped in the “great Exchequer job.”

Of this sum about one-fourth is paid for sinecures, so complete, that in the words of the return, “the Teller is empowered by his patent to appoint a deputy, who transacts all the business of the office. The Teller himself does not, nor has it been usual for him, to execute any part of it whatsoever.”

The Auditor is virtually a sinecure; the money porters, who perform the heavy drudgery of carrying slips of paper and parchment, are paid indifferently well; and there are five heads of offices who have deputies to act for them “in the general superintendence of the office during any occasional absence.”

The following gives an account of the salaries received for “responsibility,” and of those paid for work.

The Commissioners of 1831 recommend that the whole of the present machinery should be entirely swept away, and suggest the erection of a new office upon a new system—but then, agreeably with the established routine in such cases, the public will have to provide double—salaries for the new, and pensions and compensations for the old officials!

The Audit Office.—This is as snug and delightful a retreat as any in the public departments. Were a proper system adopted in keeping the public accounts, this office might be dispensed with. In 1806, an attempt was made to improve the audit department, and the way this was set about is a very apt specimen of the mode of reforming government abuses in those days. A chairman of the Board was created, salary £1,500; four new members, each £1,200; a secretary, a foreigner, £1,000; six inspectors, each £600; and eight additional examiners; with numerous other appointments, which increased the expense from about £14,000 to £38,000; and after all the establishment was made less efficient than under the old and less expensive system.

Civil Department of the Army.—The office of paymaster of the forces is a sinecure. The business is performed by a deputy and three cashiers. As each of these persons has a power of drawing money out of the Bank of England on his own order, the effect of the office being a sinecure is to diminish considerably the security of the public. It is also attended with this further inconvenience, that it multiplies the number of imprest accountants, and thus augments the difficulty of establishing a proper system of keeping the public accounts.

The account called Army Extraordinaries is liable to great abuse and mystification. Under this head, payments are made which have nothing to do with the army; the sums voted by parliament seldom exceed £900, while the sum expended commonly amounts to three millions. This scheme serves to conceal from the public a great deal of wasteful and illegal expenditure; for instance, the sum paid at home to colonial agents, and the sum drawn from abroad for colonial expenses, although they are wholly for civil colonial purposes, are paid as army extraordinaries, and without any previous vote of parliament; which is thus, according to the testimony of Sir H. Parnell, mislead by the annual production of an account with “a perfectly false title.”

The employing of Commissioners of Accounts abroad was suggested in consequence of the great accumulation of accounts during the war; but, since the conclusion of it, the motives which originated the plan have gradually ceased to have any force, and therefore the public ought to be saved the expense of such useless functionaries. Where too is the necessity for incurring the expense of having army agents? The accounts of the paymasters of regiments are examined at the War-office, and not by the agents; and all the agents do for the public is to receive money from the paymasters of the forces, and to pay with it the drafts of the regimental paymasters: the other duties are private, and for the benefit of officers of the army.

Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.—This establishment might be appropriated to much better purposes than the nursing of some dozen or so artillery and engineer officers. Long after the peace the Academy was maintained at an annual expense of £20,000 and upwards; the average cost to the public of the cadets admitted to commissions in the army, in 1820, was £920 each. The charge for civil officers, professors and masters, for the year ending in 1831, was £3402. Even this is too much; especially as the knowledge taught at the Academy is quite elementary, and might just as well be learnt at any private military school. If instruction were made to begin at the Academy just where it stops at present, that is, when the cadets are seventeen or eighteen years old, then there might be some reason in keeping it up; because the instruction afforded to officers might be of such a description in the higher branches of military art, as could not be attained elsewhere.

Department of the Navy and Dock Yards.—The first lord commissioner of the admiralty has a salary of £4,500, with an official residence, and four other commissioners £1,000 a-year with an official residence each; the first secretary £3,000, the second do 1,500; the comptroller of the navy has £2,000, with a residence, the deputy-comptroller of the navy has £1,200; besides which, are an immense number of commissioners of the navy, and commissioners of the dock-yards with salaries of £1,000 each. A most objectionable office kept up by the Tories was the treasurership of the navy—a mere sinecure; it has been consolidated by the Whigs with the vice-presidentship of the Board of Trade.

The expenditure in the Royal Dock-yards and arsenals is most lavish in storekeepers, clerks, chaplains, surgeons, measures, master-attendant, master-shipwright and others, many of whom are apparently kept up for mutual superintendence, and forming a gradation of office and multiplication of expense wholly unnecessary. Not a single trade is carried on without a master; there is a master-smith, bricklayer, sail-maker, rigger, rope-maker, painter, and others; they have each £250 a-year, and many of them have not above four or five men under their superintendence. How differently private and public business is conducted, was strikingly shown in the evidence of Mr. Barrow. There is a private builder who employs 250 shipwrights: he has one foreman, one measurer, two clerks, and ten labourers. In Woolwich yard, which comes the nearest to it, there are 248 shipwrights, eighteen clerks, six masters’ of trades, eight foremen, eight measurers, eleven cabin-keepers; besides surgeons, boatswain, wardens, and other people. The whole establishment of the officers, clerks, and other salaried persons at the dock-yard, amounts to £155,000, and the amount of wages paid for work done by artificers and labourers, &c. is £502,000. It thus appears that for every three pounds and a quarter paid to the men, there is a pound paid for superintendence.

The Paymaster of the Marines has a salary of £1,000, for the discharge of duties which might be very well annexed to the Navy-office. “As to the reasons,” says Sir H. Parnell, “that are given to the contrary, they are so plainly nothing more than ingenious pretexts for maintaining a lucrative office, that it would be a waste of time to notice them.”

The naval accounts, as indeed all the accounts of the public offices, are kept on a confused and most inconvenient principle, from the want of a well-arranged plan of book-keeping. Each description of expenditure has its distinct set of books, making thirty-three in all, and tending greatly to the increase of expense by the multiplication of clerks. At present the payment of officers and seamen’s wages is made in the presence of four clerks, in order to have three clerks checking the accuracy of every sum paid by the fourth. As these clerks are selected from different branches, and as each keeps a book, so many books are kept in triplicate, that they amount, in the whole, to 1580 supernumerary volumes.

Increase in Peace Establishments.—The following comparison of the peace establishments of 1792 and of 1831 is very instructive.

It thus appears the peace establishment of 1831 exceeds that of 1792 nearly threefold, and that, since 1815, upwards of 250 millions have been expended on soldiers, sailors, ships, and artillery; although we have been all the time in a state of general tranquillity. The only ground on which it is attempted to justify the expenditure, so enormously great in comparison with that of any former peace establishment, is the expediency of being at all times prepared for war. So that after expending upwards of eleven hundred millions in the purchase of a secure and lasting peace; after sacrificing millions in fortifying Belgium against French aggression; after erecting splendid and costly monuments to commemorate the glorious triumphs of Waterloo: after all these efforts, glories, and sacrifices, we cannot yet sit down in safety, without bristling on all sides with cannons and bayonets. Is this, we ask, any proof of progression in human affairs? Is this the boasted “settlement of Europe?” Are these the blessings of legitimate and constitutional monarchies? Are nations, in their relations to each other, always to exemplify the condition of man in a state of nature, with couched lance, watchful eye, and trembling heart, fearing to be the victim of beasts of prey or of the tomahawk and scalping-knife of his not less savage fellow-creature? If these are all the guarantees of social happiness which aristocratic governments can give, we say,—Away with them! let us try new men, new principles, and new institutions!

A principal cause of the vast increase in the military expenditure of the country is the number and establishments of the army. From the inquiries of the Finance Committee, it appears that, in 1792, the number of all ranks in the army was 57,251; and that, according to the statement of Sir H. Parnell, they were distributed as follows:—

In 1828, the number of all ranks was 116,738; the distribution was as follows:—

The chief part of the increase is accounted for as under:—

Allowing that the extent of our foreign possessions has rendered necessary an increase in the army, this does not apply to the household troops, as they are never sent abroad in time of peace. Yet it is in this branch of the service, and in dragoons, that there has been the greatest augmentation. The following statement shows the increase of life and foot guards and cavalry at the two periods:—

These are the most expensive classes in the army, and chiefly kept for domestic use. The sums saved by the reduction of the cavalry force would be very considerable, since the expenses of every horseman are nearly as great as those of the junior clerks in the public offices, some of whom have been so unsparingly reduced that their superiors might enjoy, undiminished, their overgrown emoluments. The expense of a dragoon and horse, exclusive of forage, &c. is £57 a year, and of a life and horse guardsman £75 a year; whilst the charge for infantry of the line is only £31 per man.

The guards are chiefly intended for the maintenance of the peace in the metropolis, for the protection of the Bank, the Tower, and royal palaces. But there can be less need of this expensive corps now we have a military police, for the security of property and persons, and ready to aid the established authorities in case of civil commotion. Surely 4000 constables, trained, organised, and barracked, and under the entire control of Ministers, might enable them to dispense with at least one regiment of the household force.

Many millions have been unnecessarily expended, since the Peace, on our maritime establishments. In 1830, 30,000 seamen were voted, and £1,657,601 to defray the charges of their wages and victuals. With the exception of Russia and the United States, the naval force of every other power is less than at the breaking out of the war in 1793. Neither Spain nor Holland has any navy of consequence; and France, which at the commencement of the Revolution had eighty efficient ships of the line, has now not more than forty. What occasion, then, can there be for Great Britain to expend annually £1,300,000 on her dock-yards, and incur a naval expenditure, altogether, of more than five millions?

Expenditure of the Colonies.—These are a tremendous burthen on the resources of the mother country, chiefly to provide governorships, secretaryships, registrarships, agencies, and sinecures for the Aristocracy and their connexions. No parliamentary document shews what the whole expense is that is paid by English taxes on account of the colonies. It is generally estimated that from two to three millions are paid for the army, navy, and various civil charges; but in addition to this the public pay full two millions more for sugar and timber than they ought to pay, in consequence of the increased prices occasioned by the protection given to the colonists by the higher duties imposed on these articles when imported from foreign countries.

There are only three ways that the Colonies can be of any advantage. 1. In furnishing a military force; 2. In supplying the parent state with a revenue; 3. In affording commercial advantages.

Instead of furnishing a military force, the colonies are always a great drain upon our military resources, particularly in war, when they occupy a large portion of the army and fleet in their defence. With respect to revenue, it has been declared, by the act of the 18 Geo. III. that no taxes or duties shall be levied on the colonies, except for their use. As to commercial advantages, if the colonial trade were quite free, our commercial relations with the colonies would resemble the intercourse between ourselves and independent countries; and, with our unrivalled superiority in capital, manufactures, machinery, and skill, what have we to fear from unrestricted competition? What have we lost by the independence of the United States? Nothing: the nobility have lost provincial governorships; but the population of both countries has been enriched and benefited by the vast augmentation in their mercantile intercourse.

The rage for colonies has been one of the great big blunders of our national policy, originating in the vain glory of conquest and aristocratic cupidity. England has neither conferred nor derived social happiness from territorial acquisitions. We may have imparted strength to others, but have received in return only the disease of monopolies and vast individual accumulations. How, indeed, could the results have been more favorable? A great nation, possessing within herself the resources of wealth and civilization, what advantage can she derive from exhausting her energies in rearing to maturity and fostering ingratitude in the unfledged offspring of future empires? Between old and infant communities there is not reciprocity of interest; the latter participate in the benefits of the experience, laws, institutions, warlike power, and riches of the former without yielding countervailing advantages: it is strength allying itself to weakness—the full-grown oak bending to the palsying embrace of the creeping ivy.

So convinced are we of the fatuity of our conduct in this respect, that we are sometimes inclined to think that we should have been a happier community had our sway never extended over the border. Scotland has benefited by the Union: her soil has been fertilised by our capital, and her greedy sons have enriched themselves by sinecures and pensions, the produce of English taxes; but what has England gained from the connexion? The generous and intellectual character of her Saxon race has not been improved by amalgamation with Scotch metaphysics, thrift, and servility. Again, what benefits have we derived from the conquest of Ireland? Her uncultivated wastes, too, will be made fruitful by English money, unless the connexion be prematurely severed: but what boon in return can she confer on England? Her miserable children have poured out their blood in our wars of despotism; our rich Aristocracy have been made richer by the rental of her soil; and the aggregate power of the empire has been augmented: but we seek in vain for the benefits communicated to the mass of the English population. Certainly we do not recognise them in the degraded situation of the “men of Kent,” depressed by competition with the Hibernian peasantry; neither have the moral habits of our rural and manufacturing population been bettered by commingling with the wretched and half-civilized emigrants from Munster and Connaught.

But these, at best, are only unprofitable lamentations; it is vain to repine at remediless evils; the union of England, Scotland, and Ireland, is, we presume, indissoluble: we are married, as the saying is, for better and worse, and we must make the best of an unprofitable alliance.

The chief advantage to be derived from colonies is in rendering them a desirable refuge to a redundant population. But the Aristocracy decline making them subservient to the purposes of an extensive plan of emigration, because of the expense; it would be a sacrifice not for the benefit of themselves, but of the industrious orders, and this they begrudge; they prefer subduing the clamours of a starving people by special commissions and improved man-traps rather than by providing the means by which the unemployed labourer and artisan may transport his superfluous industry to the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shores of Australia.

Although the Oligarchs are so parsimonious when the welfare of the people is concerned, they are reckless enough about expense when it ministers only indirectly to their own gratification and ambition. It appears, from the inquiries of the Finance-Committee, that the collective expenditure of five of our colonies has exceeded, on an account of ten and more years, the colonial revenues applicable to the discharge of it, so as to have constituted a deficiency of £2,524,000, and that this deficiency was paid by the Treasury, although the surplus expenditure had been incurred without previous communication with ministers; nor does it appear ministers had any previous knowledge either of the amount of the colonial revenues or the charges upon them. Can any thing more strikingly show the careless and lavish system on which the affairs of the nation have been conducted? We subjoin an abstract of the returns to parliament of the colonies to which we have alluded. It will be seen that the surplus revenue of the crown colonies above the civil expenditure amounted to £1,453,842, and this was all which remained applicable to a military expenditure of £3,733,939, leaving £2,280,097 to be paid out of the assessed taxes, the excise, and custom-duties of the people of England.

Of these colonies, three of them—Ceylon, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope—are chiefly of use to the East-India Company, who ought to defray the charges of their military protection. Many other of our colonies are equally valueless as objects of national utility. Of what use is the retention of the Ionian Islands, with Malta and Gibraltar in our hands? The settlements at Sierra Leone and on the west coast of Africa ought to be abandoned, having entirely failed in the attainment of the object intended. No reason can be shown why Canada, Nova-Scotia, and other possessions on the continent of America, would not be as available to British enterprise, if they were made independent states. Neither our manufactures, commerce, nor shipping would be injured by such a measure. On the other hand, what has the nation lost by Canada? According to Sir H. Parnell, fifty or sixty millions have been already expended; the annual sum payable out of English taxes is full £600,000 a-year; and there has been a plan in progress for two or three years to fortify Canada, at an estimated cost of three millions. Either the Boroughmongers or the people must have been absolutely mad to tolerate for so many years such useless waste of public resources.

The Slave-Trade.—On this subject Sir H. Parnell says,—“The great sum of £5,700,000 has already been expended in carrying into effect the measures of government for co-operating with other countries in putting down the slave-trade, and the annual current expenses amount to nearly £400,000. But the attempt appears to have altogether failed. The governments of France, Spain, and Portugal, according to the Parliamentary Papers, make no efforts whatever to enforce the laws for putting down the traffic; and the persons in authority in Cuba and Brazil not only neglect to execute the laws, but in some cases have been engaged in it themselves. So that our treaties and laws, where such parties are concerned, are so much waste paper, and spending money to try to give effect to them is perfect folly. The African Institution say, in their twentieth report, ‘The slave-trade has increased during the last year; and, notwithstanding the number of prizes taken, it continues to rage with unabated fury.’ Surely here are sufficient reasons for saving £400,000 a-year, now expended to so little purpose.”—Financial Reform, pp. 231, 232. Human suffering is equally painful to bear, whether inflicted on this or the other side of the globe, on black or white men, and we should be sorry, even for the sake of economy, that any measures should be adopted tending to revive the hellish traffic in Negroes. But, after all, we ought to look at home. The horrors of the ‘middle passage’ did not transcend those of the infernal factory system: in the former adults were the chief victims sacrificed to the Moloch of wealth; in the latter it is helpless infancy. If one remonstrate with any of the Crœsuses of the North on the cruelty of exacting such long and severe hours of labour from children and apprentices, their only defence is,—“If we did not do it, others would—we should be undersold in the market.” So with them it is a mere question of political economy—of profit and accumulation of capital—not of humanity. But we shall take leave to tell these lords of the loom that they have another alternative; they might be content with amassing something less, as a passport into the aristocratic circle, than a million or a million and a half of money by mutilating, misshaping, and abridging the lives of God’s creatures: but this they will not do; they will persist in realizing their cent. per cent., and rather than forego it will have their ‘pound of flesh,’—they will see orphans’ eye-balls start from their sockets, and their tendons crack, through unwholesome long-protracted toil—and this too in a country where society is hourly threatened with dissolution—where internal peace and the security of property are endangered by the multitude of unemployed artizans!

Expense of Civil Government.—The expense of conducting the civil government of the country, including the king, the three secretaries of state, lord-lieutenant of Ireland, the Mint, and judicial establishments, is about £2,000,000. The progressive increase of expense, in some departments, is as follows:—

Thus, it appears, the charge of these three departments has more than doubled since 1796—a period of hostilities.

Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.—The vice-regal government of Ireland costs the country £100,000 per annum. This is extravagant, as it is well known that Irish affairs are chiefly managed at Whitehall. The keeping up this mimic sovereign tends to keep up those symbols of separation and hostility which a more rational policy would endeavour to obliterate. For any other purpose, in the present state of intercourse, we might as well have, once more, a lord-president at York—a king in Edinburgh—or a separate court for the marches of Wales, at Ludlow, or Monmouth. What then can be urged to justify the lord-lieutenancy? It has been alleged indeed by Irish secretaries, who receive £4000 a-year, that it is beneficial to the tradesmen of Dublin, among whom the money granted for the vice-regal establishment is expended. So then the community must be robbed of £100,000, that the Dublin shopkeepers may profit the odd farthings. This is the favourite round of arguing by corruptionists; they always deem it a sufficient justification for pillaging the people, if a portion of the spoil be returned to them in the way of alms or Christmas doles. By acting on this principle, the pride and interests of aristocratical government are both favoured; and the people, injured by its rapacity, are insulted by its compassion. But in this way the influence of the lord-lieutenant’s salary is, as regards the prosperity of a great city, contemptible: his whole salary, if spent in Dublin, is not equal to half the receipts of one of the ten thousand gin-shops in London. If, however, the effect was greater, the process is dishonest. If the lord-lieutenancy is necessary as an instrument of government—which has never been satisfactorily proved—it ought to be retained; if not, there is no earthly reason why the shopkeepers of Dublin should be supported by taxing the shopkeepers of the other towns of the empire. The viceroyship is a precious jewel in the eyes of the Aristocracy, and that it will not willingly be abandoned, we believe; but where pretexts are seen through easily, it is, perhaps, prudent to abstain from them. The man who merely robs you, does not offend you so much as the man who both robs you and insults your understanding by an awkward attempt at deceiving you.

Expenses of a Coronation.—The ministers of George IV. asked Parliament for a grant of only £100,000, to defray the expenses of his coronation; but the ceremony turned out something like palace-building, the actual cost greatly exceeding the estimate, amounting to £238,000. The jewels of the crown were valued at £65,000, and 10 per cent. interest was paid to Rundell and Bridge for the loan of them. Either for the gratification of the monarch or his courtiers, the crown was kept four years, at an annual charge to the public of £6500; and it was only in consequence of a seasonable motion of Mr. Hume the royal bauble was at last divested of its borrowed plumage.

Upon the coronation of William IV. the Whigs certainly curtailed materially both the folly and expense of the feudal pageant, to the no small mortification of the antiquated admirers of chivalry, Punch, and Bartholomew fair. But it is time the oiling and kissing and other tom-foolery, perpetrated in the Abbey by the right reverend bishops, were omitted, and the whole reduced to a simple and economical process of inauguration. The king, the magistrates, and public officers take the needful oaths on the accession, and a coronation confirms nothing; it affords no stronger guarantee either on the part of the king or the people; it is an unmeaning ceremony, fit only to be exhibited among slaves, or a priest-ridden rabble, by an Eastern despot. It is something still more objectionable. Formerly it might be of use, when it was really what it professed to be—a solemn compact between the king and his lieges; but it has since degenerated into a mere mockery of sacred things, of religious rites, vows, and pledges.

Kingly governments are sinking fast in general estimation, and it is bad policy to depreciate monarchy lower by obtruding it in its most absurd and revolting forms. Instead of expending a large sum on a senseless spectacle, we would beg in lieu to suggest that the commencement of every new reign be commemorated by the building of a bridge, the construction of a rail-road, the completion of a Thamestunnel, the foundation of an university, or any other undertaking of national utility.