THE RIGHT HON. CHARLES W. WYNN TO THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.
My dear B——,
I yesterday met the Chancellor in Cabinet, who immediately came to me, and expressed in the strongest manner the pain which he had felt at seeing sentiments attributed to him by Fyshe Palmer, in his speech at the Bedford meeting, which he never entertained, and which if he had, he trusts he never should have been fool enough to have so expressed.
The joke is a very bad one, and was repeated to me when I came to town in January as Mackintosh's, probably with just as little foundation as it is now attributed to the Chancellor.
Lord John's coarse and ungentlemanlike attack appeared to me very much to miss fire, and my reply was well received and listened to; but it is curious to see what common cause the newspaper reports make in hostility against me—wilfully altering, and even inserting things for which there was not the least foundation in my speech.
The Times contained the only tolerable report, which was copied in the Courier, and even from that it would appear that, instead of being extremely clamorous and inattentive to Folkestone[80] ] (so much that he was obliged repeatedly to stop, in order to procure silence), and then listening to what I said very favourably, the House had adopted a conduct exactly the reverse.
Lord Londonderry is to-day to open a plan of providing for the annual charge of five millions now paid in half-pay, pensions, &c., by granting long annuities for forty-five years, by which means a saving of two millions annually is to be made, which is to repeal the salt tax and diminish the window-tax.
Being myself no friend to the Sinking Fund, and anxious that the Government should have the credit of affording every practicable remission of taxation, I have no objection whatever to this; but I must say for those who support that system, it is somewhat ridiculous with one hand to expend five millions in relief of the burthens of posterity, and with the other to transpose a burthen from our own shoulders upon theirs.
I am still myself sanguine in my hope of the continuance of peace, as I think it clear that both powers wish to avoid war, and that the Emperor Alexander is aware of the certainty that the flame once lighted must spread further.
THE RIGHT HON. CHARLES W. WYNN TO THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.