Note 853 — Chapter VII · (continued 2)

Mr. Farr, in his valuable essay on the statistics of the civil service (in Journal of Statist. Soc. vol. xii. pp. 103–125), calls Burke ‘one of the first and ablest financial reformers in parliament,’ p. 104. The truth, however, is, that he was not only one of the first, but the first. He was the first man who laid before parliament a general and systematic scheme for diminishing the expenses of government; and his preliminary speech on that occasion is one of the finest of all his compositions.