moving every possible scruple, to trust our title to the reward, to the success of a second voyage,[1] which I accordingly made to Barbadoes, in the year 1764, under the appointment of the Commissioners; but, seeing the cavils which were raised against the former voyage, I requested that a paragraph might be added to my instructions, to the effect, that those instructions being fulfilled, we were without further difficulty to receive our reward. Lord Sandwich, who presided at that Board, replied, that it would be mere tautology, for the very giving of the instructions purported the same thing.—The performance of the Watch was such, that the Commissioners were forced to certify that it had kept the Longitude within a third part of the nearest limits required by the Act of Queen Anne, viz: within ten miles: but instead of issuing the reward, which they were then by law compellable to do,[2] they applied to Parliament, and obtained an Act taking away our right acquired by forty years labour under the old law, acquiesced in during that time by numberless acts of their own Board, and subjecting us to new conditions, undefined and discretionary.[3] We were at that
- ↑ Here he steps over the separate Commission, the sequel of which had so much share in his future troubles, by the unintentional affront given to that weak but irritable northern peer, the Earl of Morton.
- ↑ With that knowledge, it becomes in a manner impossible to divest the refusal of the reward, of the meanest private and personal motives. The case of John Harrison besides, becomes remarkably illustrative of Lord Chesterfield's favourite position—that the ostensible purposes of public men are seldom consistent with their real drift.
- ↑ This discouraging, or we should say, this disheartening uncertainty, was transferred by Lord Morton to his own bill from the sixth of those abortive resolutions, under the 2nd George 3rd, which were likewise his own, and ordered that when the explanatory Watches (as they might have been called) were finished, "they shall be tried in such manner as the Commissioners shall judge proper."—As this latitude of interpretation perfectly assimilated with the views of the Lunar junta (who, by the subsequent acknowledgment of Dr. Shepherd, never intended that the Mechanics should benefit by the 14th George 3rd) it was embodied by them in the clause we have quoted from. But does not the illiberal conduct of these scientific tilters, show them vulnerable in their own armour: since,
