If any of these Hopes, Mights, Insinuations, Expectations, and Inducements, should fail him, there will be a formidable gaping breach in his whole project. If all of them should fail, he has left the nation without a glimmering of hope in this thick night of terrors which he has thought fit to spread about us. If every one of them, which, attended with success, would signify anything to our revenue, can have no effect but to add to our distractions and dangers, we shall be if possible in a still worse condition from his projects of cure, than he represents us from our original disorders.
Before we examine into the consequences of these schemes, and the probability of these savings, let us suppose them all real and all safe, and then see what it is they amount to, and how he reasons on them:--
Deficiency on land and malt, less by £37,000 Foundling Hospital 20,000 American Surveys 1,800 ------- £58,800
This is the amount of the only articles of saving he specifies: and yet he chooses to assert,[81] "that we may venture on the credit of them to reduce the standing expenses of the estimate (from 3,468,161_l._) to 3,300,000_l._"; that is, for a saving of 58,000_l._ he is not ashamed to take credit for a defalcation from his own ideal establishment in a sum of no less than 168,161_l._! Suppose even that we were to take up the estimate of the "Considerations" (which is however abandoned in the "State of the Nation"), and reduce his 75,000_l._ extraordinaries to the original 35,000_l._, still all these savings joined together give us but 98,800_l._; that is, near 70,000_l._ short of the credit he calls for, and for which he has neither given any reason, nor furnished any data whatsoever for others to reason upon.