Transcriber's Note:
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WITH SOME FEW
REFLECTIONS
Extorted by, and on, the distracted State of the Times.
By JOHN, EARL of STAIR.
——And beshrew my soul,
But I do love the favour and the form
Of this most fair occasion; by the which
We will untread the steps of damned flight,
And, like a 'bated and retiring flood,
Leaving our rankness and irregular course,
Stoop low within these bounds we have o'erlook'd,
And calmly run on in obedience.
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR J. STOCKDALE,
opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly.
MDCC LXXXIV.
Entered at Stationers' Hall.
Each day's experience proves the fallibility of conjecture, even whenestablished on apparently the surest foundations.
Having stated, indeed materially and substantially proved, that theannual peace[Pg 6] expenditure of the state, if decently, not profusely, noreven amply provided for, could not be performed for less than sixteenmillions five hundred thousand pounds; and having asserted, with truth,that the annual receipts have scarcely, on the most productive years ofthe public revenue, exceeded twelve millions; and the necessarycorollary, arising out of these propositions, being an annual surplus orsinking fund to the amount (if at all proportional) of at least fifteenhundred thousand pounds, as a provision for great civil emergencies orfuture wars, without which no system of finance can be eitherrespectable or assuredly permanent; and it following of necessaryconsequence from these premises, that the proper peace revenue, fromsomething more than twelve millions, which is its present amount, oughtto be raised[Pg 7] to eighteen millions yearly:—these matters, I say, beingas I have represented them, I firmly believed the public affairs of thiscountry were tolerably embarrassed, and weakly imagined Ministers mightfind full employment in extricating them, without courting, and eagerly,through right and through wrong, aspiring and grasping at the managementof affairs fully in as great a state of confusion as our own. But I findI greatly under-rated the cravings of the appetite of our late rulers,who seem to have had stomach for all difficulties, however remote fromthe natural and needful course of their public functions, and howeveraverse the parties interested were to trust their concerns to theirdirection. In consequence of this canine hunger