Page:Armatafragment00ersk.djvu/171

This page needs to be proofread.

( 161 )

¬them as lightly as possible by the most refined policy in the administrations of all inferior departments, and to suffer no abuses whatsoever to prevail in them : this is not the work of a day, but of painful and long-continued labour in the legislative body, and throughout all the magistracies of the country* ¬" That this duty has been wholly lost sight of in a most vital part of your concerns, you have yourself admitted and lamented. — Nothing indeed can be so extravagantly absurd and preposterous as the management or rather the creation of your poor, by which your government suffers to escape from it, (without any relief to its subjects, but on the contrary op- pressingand corrupting them,) an annual revenue of nearly half your general taxes when your late war began, since you have stated that above seven millions are every year collected on that account. — To advise you, in this case, requires no local knowledge; an inhabitant of the moon, dropped down from it upon your surface, would, ¬m in ¬