IS it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land Tax Act which raises your revenue?* that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army?* or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline?*
No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
* Taxation on land goes back to Norman times, but the Land Tax Acts were a series of seventeenth-century regulations culminating the the Land Tax Act of 1692. From then onwards the tax was voted in annually, until 1798 when it became permanent. The Finance Act of 1963 abolished the Land Tax.
* The Committee of Supply was a so-called ‘Committee of the Whole [House of Commons]’ in which MPs ‘resolved the House’ into a committee (without the Speaker) and debated the allocation of money from the Treasury.
* The Mutiny Act of 1689 laid out the articles of war for the armed forces, extended to militias from 1757.