§ 5.—Pay continued—Merit, whether produceable by Sinecures, &c. Zealot. But merit?-What do you say to merit?-Surely has it all this while been altogether out of your thoughts! Sinecures the great use of them-and is it not a sufficient use ? is—to serve as rewards for merit. In this line of public service (and can there be any other equally important one?) take away Sinecures, and other liberally paid offices, you leave merit without hope of reward; and, if thus you leave merit without hope of reward, is not this excluding it? In this line, or any other, do you know of any thing better than merit ?—And can you have too much of it?— And, if you could, which you cannot, would you be ungenerous enough-illiberal enough-unjust enough-to leave it without paying for it? Graduate.-Before all things it is necessary to have a meaning. When you talk of merit-of having Sinecures to give as rewards for merit-what I do understand is— that your wish is to have public money in this shape, to dispose of as may be most agreeable to you: what I do not understand is-on what public ground, for what public cause, you claim thus to have it at your disposal. What, in my notion of the matter, is the only justifiable cause for the disposing of the matter of reward, in this or any other shape, is the production of public service: say—if in the sound of the word merit there be any thing particularly agreeable to you-say the production of meritorious, but be pleased to add, beneficial, public service: for ordinary service, ordinary reward; for extra service, extra reward: and, moreover, be pleased to remember, that in no shape, pecuniary or not pecuniary, can the matter of re ward be bestowed by government, but that it is at the expense of the whole community that it is bestowed. Production of public service-in this result then behold the only proper object, of reward bestowed on the sort of occasion here in question: bestowed by the trustees for the public;-bestowed at the expense of the public;bestowed in an indefinitely large proportion, if not in the whole, at the expense of unwilling contributors. A most pernicious,—and, at the same time, a most deplorably common, error,—is that by which the case of reward, administered as here at public expense, is confounded with the case, in which it is administered at personal expense: with the case, in which the party by whom it is administered is the party at whose expense it is administered. Administered at personal expense, excess is neither probable nor mischievous: be it ever so great, no person, other than the donor, can find in the magnitude of it any cause of complaint: and, by the supposition, no such cause does he find: administered at public expense, excess is constantly mischievous, and as constantly probable. Liberality-generosity-such are the attributes ascribed to the gift, and thence to the giver, in the case where, in respect of its magnitude, the disposition made of the good thing given in the way of reward, is an object of approbation to him by whom it is thus spoken of. Applied to reward, conferred at personal expense, these eulogistic appellatives are innoxious, and even beneficial: applied to reward, conferred at public expense, they are noxious; they are instruments of pernicious delusion; they are instruments in the hand of misrule, peculation, and depredation. Liberality at a man's own expense-liberality at other men's expense-what can be more opposite? In the first case, and in that alone, it is that self-denial can find place in the other case, instead of self-denial, nothing is to be seen but selfishness. In the first case, the only tax imposed is the tax imposed by the giver upon his own selfregarding affection, imposed for the gratification of his own sympathetic-of his own social affections: so let him do, tax those his personal affections-as high as he pleases -you need not fear his over-taxing them: should he even do so, it is his concern alone-not any body else's. : These things considered, if it be at public expense, talk not of rewarding merit-talk not of retribution— talk not of remuneration-at any rate in the character of an end in view of words of this complexion, by the indeterminateness of their import, the tendency is to mislead men's minds, and to reconcile them to misrule, in the shapes of waste, peculation, and depredation: say always production of public service, or, if you please, production of meritorious public service. By either of these phrases, indication is given of the object, which, on the occasion in question, is, or ought to be, the sole and immediate end in view: an object, which is at the same time a test of the propriety of the disposition made, and a measure of propriety for the quantity so disposed of. By the word merit, what is the object really designated? Any specific quality in the subject? No: nothing but the affection with which, by him, by whom the word is employed, the subject is regarded,-unless it be the property which the subject manifests, in giving birth to the affection so excited and directed. A libel is any thing that a man does not like: merit is any thing he does like: libel is a word invented to enable men to waste punishment at pleasure: merit is a word invented to enable them to waste reward at pleasure. For bestowing reward at public expense, on any occasion or in any shape, this then being the only proper object and immediate end in view-the only justifiable cause -viz. production of public service,—so it is that, with reference to the accomplishment of this object, rewards, in the shape now in question, viz. Sinecures and Extra-paid places, will be seen to be essentially improper: being not only not conducive to that end, but, with reference to the attainment of it, positively adverse and obstructive. Uncertainty, unproportionality, abstractiveness or seductiveness, and degradingness,-in the combination of all these qualities, may the cause of the impropriety be seen in the case of Sinecures; in the combination of all of them but the last, in the case of Extra-paid places. 1. Uncertainty:-for it is by existing, not by future contingent bread, that man is kept alive. In the list of Sinecures, be it ever so long, and be the service ever so meritorious, so it may be, that no one article,—such as, for the merit and the man in question, can be spared,-shall have fallen in, till the man is dead, the service forgotten, or some other service performed by some other man, whose service, or whose merit, i. e. whose person is more acceptable. 2. Unproportionality:-for,-on the one hand, be the value of the past service to be rewarded, and on the other hand the value of the service producible by means of the reward, what it may, so it is that, the value of the reward being fixt, and not capable of being adapted to the value of either of those services, the chances are indefinitely great, that in quantity it will be either greater or less than the proper one.* * By this circumstance, therefore, is a Sinecure distinguished from a Pension. A Pension is not, in its own nature, incapable of being adjusted-adjusted with any degree of nicety to the value of the service: a Sinecure is. No wonder: for it is not by any view of making application of them to any such purpose as that of a reward for real public service, that in any branch of the public service they have been produced. T 3. Abstractiveness or seductiveness: abstractiveness, the property of drawing a man out of the meritorious course to which he should be attached; seductiveness, the property of drawing him into a course of dissipation: leading him into a life of idleness, or engaging him in the pursuit of what commonly goes by the name of pleasure; of pleasure in those shapes in which the sudden influx of the matter of wealth now for the first time enables him to purchase it. Of this effect the magnitude will indeed depend upon the relative magnitude of the lot of reward-the Sinecure. But, in the case in question, this magnitude is in many instances notoriously enormous. 4. Degradingness: of this quality, and its inherency in the very essence of a Sinecure, mention has been already made: the shape being such, that in this shape reward cannot be received by a man, without his aggregating himself to a class of men, in whose instance nothing but condign punishment is wanting to aggregate them to the class of notorious criminals. In this quality of degradingness may be seen, as above, the only shade of difference, which, in this respect, has place between the case of a Sinecure and the case of an overpaid place, of the pay of which the excess, instead of being, for the benefit of the public, suppressed, is kept on foot, to be disposed of in the same manner that a Sinecure, so called, would be disposed of. Where the excess arises from the smallness of the quantity of time employed in the performance of the duties, the office is in fact, by the amount of the deficiency in the article of time employed in the performance of the duties of it, a Sinecure. Thus much being thus proved, viz. that to the production of meritorious public service in any line, reward, in either of the shapes in question, more particularly in that of Sinecure, is essentially ill adapted, another proposi |