BURKE AND THE PRESENT' MINISTRY.
[TO THE 'EDITOR OP THR " SPECTATOR." J
enclose.a paragraph from Burke which may seem to you, as it has seemed to others, strangely appropriate to the present day. Many Men must have thought in the past six
years how rare a virtue is common honesty.—I am, Siv,- Cambridge. W. H. D. Rovez.
"Sir, it is not a pleasant consideration ; but nothing in the- world can read so awful and so instructive a lesson, as the conduct of the ministry in this business, upon the mischief of not having. large and liberal ideas in the management of great affairs. Never. have the servants of the state looked at tha whole of your compli- cated interests in one connected view. They have taken things„ by bits and scraps, some atone time and one pretence, and BOIDE, at another, just as they pressed, without any sort of regard to- their relations or dependencies. They never had any kind of system, right or wrong, but only invented occasionally some- miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of diffi- culties, into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put. to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an Act, which, they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honourably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, so paltry a sum as threepence in the eyes of a financier, or so insignificant an article. as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a. commercial empire that circled, the whole globe."—licaxx.
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