446 Notes of the Month on APRIL, 



sador's own menage, he ought to put 9,000 out of his eleven in his 

 pocket every year of his life. Our ambassador at Vienna enjoys the 

 same, 11,000 a-year, in a country where living is exactly four times as 

 cheap as here ; and in consequence the salary which we give to this 

 lucky diplomatist, is the same as if we voted to him 44,000 a-year in 

 London ! Will any man in his senses say that such things ought to be ? 

 But we are told that this monstrous sum is necessary to keep up the 

 national dignity. Nonsense ; is the national dignity to be kept up by 

 dinners ? One noble lord sets about keeping up the national dignity by 

 making operas, and feeding fiddlers : another keeps it up by race-horses ; 

 another by the superiority of his renown among the rabble of foreign 

 theatres. And for all this, John Bull is forced to pledge his last shirt, 

 and walk about a pauper. The thing is totally beyond defence, and 

 must be abolished. As to the retiring pensions they are an insult 

 to common sense. A man puts all his instruments in motion, begs, 

 kneels, harangues, votes, prays, for a diplomatic situation; he gains his 

 point, looks upon it justly as a prodigious piece of luck, and goes off to 

 the Continent, leaving a hundred candidates cursing their stars. He 

 spends his half-dozen or dozen years in the midst of kings, queens, and 

 marriageable princesses, enjoying from four to ten thousand pounds 

 English a-year, which on the Continent is generally equal to four times 

 the sum. In fact the minister has appointed him to a splendid income, 

 on the painful condition of going to as many dinners and dances as he 

 likes, feasting on the fat of the land, and perhaps for his heaviest task, 

 acknowledging the receipt of a letter of condolence, or congratulation, 

 from one regal personage to another on the death of a wife or mistress. 

 Having received in this matter from fifty to a hundred thousand pounds 

 of English money, the minister finds that he has another diplomatic ge- 

 nius on hand, and he accordingly recals the ambassador. Then comes a 

 fresh demand on the nation. The ex-diplomatist demands as the public 

 penalty for losing his services, that he shall have a pension for life. It is 

 to no purpose to say, that he has been inordinately overpaid for all that 

 he ever did. He insists upon it, that the possession of a good thing this 

 year, implies a right to it the next, and that the more money wasted on 

 him in his office, the more money ought to be wasted on him when he 

 has not even the excuse of scribbling a passport. 



Mr. Gisborne complained that there were twenty-eight persons 

 receiving pensions above 1,000, twelve of whom received pensions of 

 2,000 and upwards. He also considered that 26,000 paid yearly on 

 account of the expence of our diplomatic relations with the Ottoman 

 Porte was extravagant. He contrasted the emoluments of ambassadors and 

 governors of colonies ; the former of whom were sent to pleasant places 

 and mixed in agreeable society, were well paid and allowed retiring 

 pensions while the latter were sent out to countries not very desirable 

 to inhabit, did not receive such high salaries as ambassadors, and upon 

 retiring received no superannuation allowances. The honourable mem- 

 ber concluded by moving for a return of the date of all diplomatic and 

 consular pensions, whether included or not in the return of civil and 

 military offices, with the date of appointments, and length of service, of 

 the several persons receiving such pensions. 



It must grieve so resolute a reformer as Lord Althorp, to have had 

 nothing better to say by way of answer to this appeal, than that he 

 looked upon those pensions as a sort of half-pay, which it was for the 



