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On this the gallery was cleared.

A division took place in the committee, and the report ordered for the next day.

UNAUDITED ACCOUNTS.

Mr. Rose moved for the production of some unaudited accounts in the department of the Secretary at War, namely, those of a gentleman named Lukin, a relation of Mr. Windham, and on whom that right honourable gentleman, while Secretary at War, had conferred an employment in the department relating to foreign troops; and also for the unaudited accounts of Mr. Wickham, while attendant on the armies of our allies on the continent, during the last war. Mr. Rose, in moving for these papers, made some allusions to the oddity of the circumstance, that Mr. Lukin, who was the relation of the right honourable gentleman at the head of the war department, should have his accounts audited and settled by the Secretary at War, instead of being referred to the auditors of public accounts; and with respect to Mr. Wickham, he observed, that it was pretty extraordinary that that right honourable gentleman, who acted as commissary on the continent during the last war, and whose accounts, to a very large amount, were yet unsettled, should be one of the loudest in cheering the proposition of the noble lord opposite to him, for establishing his new commission of audit, on the day he brought it forward; and, as so much pains had been taken by his Majesty's present ministers to cast an odium on the conduct of their predecessors, and to charge them with criminal neglect, for suffering such an accumulation of unaudited accounts to grow under their authority, he thought it right the House should see that all this accumulation had not been wholly imputable to those ministers who are now out of office; but that right honourable gentlemen who were so strenuous in impeaching the neglect of others, had themselves incurred no inconsiderable share of the blame, if any was fairly im putable.

Lord Henry Petty asked if the right honourable gentleman had moved for those accounts with any view to found charges for the inculpation of the gentlemen he had mentioned ?

Mr. Rose said, certainly not. He meant no charge nor insinuation against the gentlemen; nor had he any doubt that their accounts, when produced, would be perfectly fair and correct. He moved for the papers on public

5.

grounds,

grounds, because he thought they would be found to contain information necessary for the House, and to which, as a member, he had a right. He could assure the noble lord, that if ever he should contemplate a charge against any man, or any member of administration, while he had the honour of a seat in that House, he should bring it forward openly, candidly, manfully, and directly, and not insidiously, or by a side-wind."

Mr. Windham, with much animation, observed, that notwithstanding the right honourable gentleman's specious professions of candour and manliness, he had, on many occasions, endeavoured to let loose unwarrantable insinuations; and that, upon this occasion in particular, he had by a side-wind, and under the pretence of moving upon public grounds for public documents, offered an insinuation of the lowest class of description, and such as ought to awaken only the lowest class of feelings. It was true, one of the gentlemen he had so pointedly alluded to was his relation, and that he obtained for him the post alledged. In this he did not conceive himself to have departed from the constant usage of office; for if men, in coming into office, had relations, friends, or connections, as competent to subordinate employments as perfect strangers could be, he not only thought it admissible, but perfectly right, and, in some measure, incumbent on them to provide for persons of such a description. But did the right honourable gentleman presume to say, or would he venture even to avow an insinuation, that he (Mr. Windham) had, on this account, acted towards Mr. Lukin, his relation, with any degree of partiality or indulgence different from what he should have done by any other man? He believed the right honourable gentleman, with all his candour and boldness, would not venture such an assertion. He was not responsible for the conduct of Mr. Lukin, or the other gentleman who had been mentioned, though he was confident that he might very safely assume such a responsibility, as he was sure their conduct and their accounts would be found perfectly correct. But it so happened that the circumstances were not, as insinuated by the right honourable gentleman, that Mr. Lukin's accounts were settled while he was in office; it was a considerable time after. Mr. Lukin's anxiety to have his accounts settled in the office with which his business was transacted, and where he was always told his accounts would be settled, instead of being handed over to

the

the auditors of public accounts, liable to all the delays he would have there to encounter, was but a very natural feeling; and on his (Mr. Windham's) quitting office, Mr. Lukin certainly did solicit him to use his influence to have the settlement of those accounts expedited; but he had declined all interference, and told Mr. Lukin they must take their course in the ordinary way.

Mr. Wickham (who, on account of some infirmity in his leg, was allowed to speak sitting) felt it necessary, after the pointed allusion made to himself, to explain his conduct. The official situation in which he was placed during the continental war was not, as stated by the right honourable gentleman, that of a commissary: he was attached to the army of the Archduke as his Majesty's plenipotentiary, and was charged with negociations for subsidizing troops. For the pay of those troops, he was officially acquainted that a large sum of money was deposited in the bank of Hamburgh, upon which drafts were to be given monthly for that purpose. In the treaties which he had formed for those subsidiary forces, every thing relating to pay, from the general down to the private, and every thing respecting forage and other contingencies, were minutely stipulated; and he had repeatedly written home to his government, urging the necessity of sending out able commissaries, to be constantly attached to these foreign regiments, and to see that their musters were correct, with powers to draw upon the Hamburgh bank. In answer to which, his instructions were, that the responsibility of drawing for money would not be vested in any commissary; but that he (Mr. Wickham) must take the superintendance of such issues, and after receiving the necessary certificates, signed by the commissaries, he must then, under his own hand, empower the commissaries to draw upon the bank at Hamburgh. This was a duty not of his seeking, but imposed upon him without even asking his assent; it formed a very laborious increase to the arduous duties with which he had been already charged. He undertook it, however, cheerfully, as he would have done one more arduous, for the public service. But he felt himself placed in a predicament in which no man of honour or feeling in his situation would wish to stand; not, as officially accredited, the plenipotentiary of his Majesty, in a diplomatic department, but as a check or controul upon the acting commissaries, and with a share of care and responsibility superadded to his other avocations.

Ile

He had long felt the most carnest solicitude to have his accounts audited. He knew many other gentlemen in the same predicament, and some who, after waiting a series of years, had been obliged to go abroad on foreign stations, leaving their accounts still unpassed: and it was from his personal feelings of satisfaction, as well as his public sense of the utility and advantages of the system proposed by the noble Chancellor of the Exchequer for expediting the auditing of public accounts, that he had been zealous in cheering that system in a manner so peculiarly unpleasing to the right honourable gentleman.

Mr. Fox, after some animadversions on the candour, manliness, and purity, of the right honourable gentleman opposite to him, begged to observe, that the expenditures about which he seemed now so solicitous, and the delay of accounting for which had excited so much of his disapprobation, must have been some years officially known to the right honourable gentleman. If there was any thing im proper or illegal in the manner of those expenditures being accounted for, why, he would ask, had not the right ho nourable gentleman, in his great anxiety for rectitude, long since moved for their production ?

The papers were ordered.

Mr. Whitbread gave notice that he would on Monday move for a committee to inspect the lords' journals, relative to the proceedings in the impeachment of Lord Viscount Melville.

CHELSEA HOSPITAL BILL.

On the motion for the third reading of this bill,

Lord Castlereagh said, he felt such strong objections to the measure, that he hoped the House would indulge him in allowing him to state his opinion, in this late stage, as shortly as possible. The noble lord then inveighed against the bill, as a measure originally objectionable, from the number of utterly inadmissible clauses with which it was charged; but, as now reduced to a skeleton by the expung ing of those clauses, it contained no one feature of any fundamental principle, for improving the situation of the sol dier, which was not before in the power of his Majesty. So far then it was a mere caput mortuum; but in every thing else it was worse than nothing; for it would not only trench upon the prérogative of the Crown, like the other military bills of the right honourable gentleman, by taking away from the discretion of his Majesty those regulations which VOL. III. 1805-6. R

should

should come from the Crown as boons and favours of the Sovereign to encourage good conduct in the soldier, but by giving that soldier a definitive, positive, and legal claim to those boons and favours stipulated at his enlistment, it would encourage indiscipline, and a spirit of independence of the approbation of his superiors, at all times the very soul of discipline; and in this respect it would prove also a hot-bed for the produce of law-suits. No such attempt to tamper with the army of the country had ever been attempted since the time of the Long Parliament, previous to the Revolution of 1641. The bill too, as it stood, held out a fallacious enactment to the recruit. Another objection was, that there had been no estimate whatever laid before the House as to the probable expence, nor any explanation given by the right honourable gentleman as to his own view of the subject, or in what manner he proposed to carry the bill into effect. Thus the House was called upon to vole in the dark, and to hold itself up to the ridicule of the country, along with the authors of the measure, and to involve in their disgrace and contempt those members, as parties to the measure, who had strenuously opposed it. The right honourable gentleman, who for three years past had made the alledged imperfections and absurdities of the existing military system the constant theme of his animadversion, and who, it might have been reasonably supposed, would be prepared with a faultless system of his own, to offer the moment he had an opportunity; yet now, after a delay of three or four months of deliberation and invention; after having caused his colleague, the Secretary at War, to bring forward no less than four successive mutiny bills, upon as many different estimates, to give further time for the grand measure, after all came forward with a system so complicated, so unintelligible, so unsatisfactory even to himself, so impracticable, and so subversive of that old established and long-tried system, by which the military glory of this realm had been maintained, as to excite universal disapprobation out of doors, and that of a great portion of the best-informed members within those walls. But the noble lord said, he did not mean to give the right honourable gentleman, who brought forward this bill, an exclusive monopoly for that systematic absurdity to the participation of which his colleagues had established so many obvious and unquestionable claims: the same system of slovenly cobbling and bungling marked all their measures

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