and seamen of the navy. The last payment out of the droits we shall notice is one in 1829, to John Calvert, Esq., £9,166, to defray the expenses incurred in fitting up and finishing the house of his Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence. With the exception of the very inadequate payments to captors, we have mentioned the principal purposes to which the droits have been appropriated since the commencement of the late war. The following statement, abstracted from a return to parliament, will show the total produce of this great naval or rather ministerial fund, from 1793 to 1818: - A SUMMARY ACCOUNT of all Monies received as Droits of the Crown and of the Admiralty, from the 1st of February, 1793, to the 29th of May, 1818.-Ordered to be printed, June, 1818. 1,286,042 6 10 Commissioners for the care of Dutch droits ...... Total..... 1,293,313 19 £8,494,719 12 7 A period of peace is not favourable to an accumulation of Admiralty droits. Accordingly we find, from the date of the above return up to the last annual return to Parliament, the proceeds from naval droits have not averaged more than £120,000 per annum. FOUR-AND-A-HALF PER CENT. DUTIES. Notwithstanding the efforts of political writers to expose the manifold abuses of an antiquated system, an immense number remain, of which the public have no knowledge, and of which they have scarcely any means of obtaining information. Where, for instance, previously to the expositions afforded by this publication, could satisfactory information be obtained relative to the crown lands, the civil list, droits of Admiralty, and the other branches of the hereditary revenues of which we are about to treat? Correct information on these subjects can only be acquired from parliamentary reports and papers, to which few persons have access, and still fewer leisure to peruse and digest their voluminous contents. Unquestionably this was a defect in the political knowledge of the people, which we have attempted to remedy, and we have little doubt that the mystery which has heretofore involved the crown revenues, and concealed their amount and application from the community, will be hereafter dissolved. After the Admiralty droits, the next considerable branch of revenue, at the disposal of ministers, was the Four-and-a-Half per Cent. LeewardIsland Duties. This fund produces from forty to fifty thousand pounds a-year, and consists of a tax of 4 per cent. imposed on produce in the island of Barbadoes and Leeward Isles. It was created by a colonial law of Barbadoes, nearly two hundred years ago, and, by the terms of the act, was to be applied to the erection of public buildings, the repair of courts, and other colonial purposes. In the reign of Charles II. it was seized by the courtiers, and continued to be abused till the reign of Queen Anne; when, on a representation of the abuses of the fund, it was formally renounced by the queen and parliament in favour of the island of Barbadoes, and the original purposes of the act creating it. It again fell into abuse; the natural children of the king and royal dukes, the members of both houses of parliament, their relatives and connexions, having got almost entire possession of the fund. The parties in the smuggling transaction related above are inscribed here. The gallant Sir Home is dead, but his pension of £500 survives, being a reversion payable to his widow. The Countess of Mansfield, the mother of the anti-reforming peer who made so stout a stand against the second reading of the Reform Bill on its first introduction, is quartered on the Barbadoes planters for £1000 per annum. The late General Crauford was a pensioner, till his death, on this fund, to the amount of £1200 a-year. The way in which this officer entitled himself to £1200 a-year for life is deserving of attention. Many people yet remember the fatal expedition to Walcheren, when forty thousand men were suffered to perish in that pestilential climate, owing to the incapacity of Lord Castlereagh and the duplicity of Mr. Canning. When this business became matter of discussion in the House of Commons; when it was made apparent to every man in England that it was to the squabbles and ignorance of these men that this great national calamity was to be attributed; it was, nevertheless, resolved, by a majority of two hundred and seventy-five, to negative the censure which was moved by Lord Porchester against ministers on that occasion. But the triumph of ministers did not stop here. A vote of approbation of the ministers was absolutely moved and adopted by a majority of two hundred and fifty-five. The member who had the effrontery to move this vote of approbation was General Crauford. But this officer had a further claim on ministerial gratitude: he had recently become connected by marriage with the Duke of Newcastle; he represented and commanded the parliamentary interest of that nobleman; he had eight votes to give to ministers on any occasion. Many other names, not without celebrity, are inscribed on the 4 per cent. duties. The famous pension to Edmund Burke continues to be paid out of this fund. It is entered to "the executors of Mrs. Burke £2500," and the date of the grant being the 24th of October, 1795, the public, up to this time, has paid, in principal money, £87,500. How much the world has benefited by the labours of Mr. Burke may be collected from the sublime events daily transpiring in Europe. The sole object of this celebrated renegade in his later writings and speeches was to stop the progress of knowledge and liberty-to perpetuate the old feudal despotisms--and he might as well have attempted to stop the progress of the great deep. All he effected was to delay their fall, and so far as he contributed to that he was instrumental in the useless sacrifice of millions of lives. Events have proved this to be the issue of all the efforts of this infatuated oracle-for oracle he is thought by some-and the services of both him and his followers will appear to posterity as ill-timed as the vain endeavours of those who, in the later ages of idolatry, sought to oppose the subversion of a barbarous worship. The defect of Burke and his admirers is their blindness to the fact that the world is undergoing as great a revolution as when the popular mind was converted from Paganism to Christianity. Lady Augusta de Ameland received a pension of £1292 from the 44 per cent. fund to the period of her death in 1830. All we know of her ladyship is that she was united to the Duke of Sussex, in Italy, by a sort of Gretna-Green marriage, and afterwards repudiated in consequence of that offspring of German pride and feudality-the royal marriage-act. Next follow the five Misses Fitz-Clarence, £2500 -the natural daughters of the king, by Mrs. Jordan. The Duchess of Gloucester, £1000; the Princess of Hesse-Homberg, £1000; Lord Hood, £1500; Sir William Sydney Smith, £1250; the Earl of Chatham, 3000; and, in trust for Lady G. Tekell, £300; and for the seven children of Lady Lucy R. Taylor, £139: 10 each. Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope brings up the rear with a pension of £900; she is the niece of the "Heaven-born minister," and the same lady, we believe, who astonishes travellers by acting the Amazon, dressing in man's attire, and living somewhere about Mount Sinai or Tadmor, in the deserts of Arabia. These, we apprehend, are sufficient for specimens. We have passed over several names totally unknown to us, and, we believe, the public. So eager have the higher orders been to be established on this fund, that pensions have been granted upon it in reversion, and others charged upon it have not yet become payable. Of this latter class is the memorable provision for Lady Grenville, of £1500 per annum for life, in the event of her surviving Lord Grenville. Since Lady Grenville obtained this grant, she has succeeded to the great possessions of her brother, Lord Camelford. Lord Grenville holds a sinecure of £4000 out of the taxes as Auditor of the Exchequer. His eldest brother, the late Marquis of Buckingham, besides his great estates, held the enormous sinecure of the Tellership of the Exchequer, worth £30,000 per annum. Lord Braybrooke and Lord Carysfort, who married sisters of Lord Grenville, hold, each of them, through the interest of the family, sinecures that are worth some thousands a-year; and yet, after all, the devoted planters of Barbadoes are to be mortgaged for £1500 more for life. As there has lately been a great strain upon the borough establishment, we really wonder the Grenvilles have not been summoned to its aid: there is no family on whose services the Oligarchy has so just a claim; for they are completely bound up with the system of the last forty years; and now that it is perilled all the veterans, the Sidmouths, Eldons, and the rest, who have retired loaded with spoil, ought to be again brought into active service-without pay! The whole amount of pensions payable out of the Leeward Island duties is £27,466, and £15,338 more in salaries. The entire produce of these duties from 1760 to the present is about £2,546,484, more than two-thirds of which sum have been lavished on court favourites and the members and supporters of the Oligarchy. Ministers having been frequently rated concerning the application of this jobbing fund, an act was passed, in 1825, prohibiting the grant of pensions from it in future, and providing that the surplus should be appropriated to the support of the ecclesiastical establishment in the West Indies. By this transmutation, nothing was gained to the public; and the ministers lost no portion of their influence, only their patronage became spiritual, instead of secular. A scion of Mother Church was planted in a distant land, which, no doubt, will emulate its parent in all her manifold virtues. As we have omitted, in our exposition of the Church of England, to give an account of the staff, corps, and endowments of this distant branch of the church establishment, we shall insert it in this place: These worthy gentlemen, after ten years' service, are to have retiring allowances: their salaries have hitherto been paid out of the taxes; the 4 per cent. fund being so deeply mortgaged in pensions, there is no surplus from it applicable to the purpose.* And the proceeds arising from the smuggling transactions in sugar and ginger, in which the Wellington ministers were detected, do not appear to have been applied either to the support of the West-India church-establishment or any other public object. But this is another of those secret modes of raising the wind with which the public is totally unacquainted, and which it will be necessary to explain. It had been usual to remit the 4 per cent. duty in the produce of the Leeward Islands, in sugar and ginger; which, like other commo * Parliamentary Paper, No. 561, Session 1830. dities from the British plantations, were sold for home-consumption. at the long price-the duty included; and the duty paid over, as by private merchants, to the customs. This continued until the year 1828; previously to which, it has been seen, the surplus of the 4 per cent. duty had been appropriated to the support of the West-India church establishment. Ministers appear not to have relished the loss of their old fund; they had, it is true, exchanged lay for ecclesiastical patronage, but they seem to have been anxious to secure both. For this purpose, they hit upon a most extraordinary expedient. They first submitted a case to the Attorney and Solicitor Generals, requesting their opinion whether sugars, granted to the king in kind, and not specially subject to any duty, are liable to the payment of any customduty? The lawyers, no doubt foreseeing what sort of answer would be most agreeable to their clients, replied in the negative. Upon this, directions were forthwith given to admit the sugars sent in payment of the Leeward-Islands duty without charging the duty of customs, which had been heretofore paid as on all other imported sugars. By this contrivance, Ministers obtained the command of a fund unknown to their predecessors, amounting to betwixt thirty and forty thousand pounds per annum-the amount of duty remitted, and precisely to the same amount the general revenue of the country suffered by the defalcation in the produce of the customs appropriated by parliament to the public service, To what extent this evasion of the payment of parliamentary duties, and the raising of money by the power of prerogative, might have been pushed it is impossible to foresee. Ministers might not only have imported sugars in payment of the 4 per cent. duty, custom free, but they might, also, by stretching their principle a little further, have imported sugars generally, for sale, duty free, and, by retailing them at the usual price, and appropriating the duty, raised a fund for pensions and grants to any amount. The more we reflect on this affair, the more we are astonished. The idea of the ministers of a great country turning smugglers; of resorting to the age of the Tudors and Plantagenets for precedents; of seeking to evade, under shelter of the quibbling opinions of lawyers, the payment of duties imposed by themselves, and devoted to the national service, staggers belief. It establishes, with infinitely greater force than any argument of ours, the vast importance attached, by the servants of the Crown, to those secret and uncontrolled sources of influence we have been exposing, and how essential they deem the exclusive management of them to the working of the machinery of government. To shew that our exposition of the transaction is not exaggerated, we shall insert the opinion entertained of it by Sir James Graham, and expressed in the following resolution submitted by him to the House of Commons, on the 2d of July, 1830: "That to exempt from duty any article of merchandize imported for the Crown, but not intended for the use of the Sovereign, is an Treasury Minute, dated 15th April, 1828. |