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.
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