The business of the new office, which I shall propose
to you to suppress, is by no means too much to be returned to either of
the secretaries which remain. If this dust in the balance should be
thought too heavy, it may be divided between them both,--North America
(whether free or reduced) to the Northern Secretary, the West Indies to
the Southern. It is not necessary that I should say more upon the
inutility of this office. It is burning daylight. But before I have
done, I shall just remark that the history of this office is too recent
to suffer us to forget that it was made for the mere convenience of the
arrangements of political intrigue, and not for the service of the
state,--that it was made in order to give a color to an exorbitant
increase of the civil list, and in the same act to bring a new accession
to the loaded compost-heap of corrupt influence.
There is, Sir, another office which was not long since closely connected
with this of the American Secretary, but has been lately separated from
it for the very same purpose for which it had been conjoined: I mean the
sole purpose of all the separations and all the conjunctions that have
been lately made,--a job. I speak, Sir, of the _Board of Trade and
Plantations_. This board is a sort of temperate bed of influence, a sort
of gently ripening hothouse, where eight members of Parliament receive
salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given time, in order to
mature, at a proper season, a claim to two thousand, granted for doing
less, and on the credit of having toiled so long in that inferior,
laborious department.
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