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By the power of turning the scale as between situations standing on the same footing
in point of apparent eligibility with a view to the public service, he might lay individuals
or even neighbourhoods as it were under contribution. It certainly does not lie in
his mouth to say that by him any such oppression would actually be exercised: and to
the few into whose hands this paper may come it may perhaps appear, that the more
ready he has been to give warning of the temptation, the less likely he would be to
yield to it. But constructions thus favourable are too much to be looked for on the part
of the public at large. A power of this sort, if not in reality a dangerous one, would
be so in appearance. Dangerous or not, it would at any rate be a very invidious one
and such as on that account nothing short of absolute necessity would induce him to
charge himself with.
The more dangerous it appeared, the stronger the checks which it would
appear to require. The subsisting choice was the joint offspring of two concurring
powers, an initiative in the hands of three Supervisors, and a Commission of approbation
vested in the 12 Judges added to the Lord Chancellor the Speaker and the
first Magistrate of the Metropolis. Such was the body of controul which was deemed
necessary to confine within the limits of justice & propriety the original and still subsisting
choice: the authors of that choice all of them altogether devoid of personal interest:
all of them men of fortune: two in particular men of very large fortune: two of them
men of rank. A check less powerful could not surely with any tolerable consistency be
applied to the supposed new choice, by which that original one, without any assignable reason
that I know of, would be to be superseded. It would be setting an inferior authority
to reverse the judgment of a superior one. It would be manifesting more confidence in
an interested Projector, than in those uninterested and dignified Trustees.
A new choice could not therefore with any propriety be made without imposing a second
load upon some of the first persons of the Kingdom, whose time could very ill be spared.
It cost three years to get from them a first choice: how much more time would it cost to
get a second? What spot too would it be expected of them to choose?— The same spot?
— It would be actum agere: a solemn & expensive farce. A different spot? — but why
a different one? They must condemn their predecessors: they must condemn themselves:
for in respect of a considerable if not the greater part of the number, the body is still
composed of the same members. They must pass condemnation then on the former choice
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