Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant
of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious
funds of culture and population, that everywhere the reservoirs were
fallen into a miserable decay.[39] But after those domestic enemies had
provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not
leave it, until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their
avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not
either totally destroyed, or cut through with such gaps as to require a
serious attention and much cost to reestablish them, as the means of
present subsistence to the people and of future revenue to the state.
What, Sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do, on the view of
the ruins of such works before them?--on the view of such a chasm of
desolation as that which yawned in the midst of those countries, to the
north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They
would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would
have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every
shilling derived from the producing to reanimate the powers of the
unproductive parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty,
whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity,
they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors, whose crimes
were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance,--that they
must silence their inauspicious tongues,--that they must hold off their
profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have
proclaimed, with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every
country the first creditor is the plough,--that this original,
indefeasible claim supersedes every other demand.
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