i88 
TRAVELS IN 
Majest;y's late ministers, in discussing its merits on the question 
of the peace of Amiens, justified the surrender on the ground of 
its being an expensive settlement, I shall be more particular on 
this head, in order to prove to them, what indeed I imagine 
thej are now sufficiently convinced of, how much they had 
mistaken the subject ; and that the cant of economy was but 
a poor justification for the sacrifice of a place of such im- 
portance. 
The Cape of Good Hope is the only military station that 
we ever possessed, and perhaps the only garrison that exists, 
where the soldier can be subsisted for the sum of money 
which is deducted out of his pay in consideration of his being 
furnished with a daily ration or fixed proportion of victuals. 
In other places, government, by feeding the soldier in this 
manner, sustains a very considerable loss : that is to say, the 
ration costs more money than that which is deducted from 
his pay; but it is a necessary loss, as the soldier could not 
possibly subsist himself out of his pay in any part of the 
world, unless in those places where provisions are as cheap as 
at the Cape of Good Hope. Here each ration costs the go- 
vernment something less than sixpence, which was the amount 
of the stoppage deducted in lieu of it. But each individual 
soldier could not have supplied his own ration for eightpence 
or ninepence at the very least, so that the gain made by govern- 
ment, in furnishing the rations, was also a saving, as well as a 
great accommodation, to the soldiers. At home, and in dif- 
ferent parts abroad, as I have been informed, the ration 
stands the government in different sums from tenpence to 
half-a-crown. 
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