§ A petition of the gentlemen, clergy, and freeholders, of the county of Surrey, was presented to the house, by lord W. Russell, and read; setting forth, "that the petitioners beg leave to express their unfeigned gratitude to the house for the measures they have taken towards detecting, and bringing to justice, those servants of the crown who have broken the law, violated their trust, and used the public money for purposes of private emolument and ambition, and they implore the house not to desist from the prosecution of those inquiries which they have so honourably and so successfully begun; and they intreat the house to bear in mind how patiently the people of England have sustained the immense burthens imposed upon them, the sufferings they have endured, and are now enduring, the enormously advanced prices of the necessaries of life, and, above all, their generous, unsuspecting confidence at all times in those in whose hands the earnings of their industry were deposited; and that, thankful as the petitioners are to the house for having recorded upon their journals the flagrant breaches of trust committed by unfaithful servants, they beg leave most humbly to represent to the house the necessity of guarding against a repetition of similar frauds, peculations, and abuses; and that the petitioners, there- 11 fore, entreat the house to investigate thoroughly not only the remaining articles contained in the tenth report of the commissioners of navel enquiry, but also the suspicious matters brought forward in their eleventh report, and likewise every other irregularity which may hereafter be discovered by any further reports of the said commissioners; and that they will also institute similar inquiries into the expenditure of every other branch of the executive government; and that in the progress of these important investigations, which the expectations of the people require to be rigorously and impartially pursued, the petitioners are persuaded, that the house acting up to the spirit of their resolutions of the 8th and 10th of April, will follow no ether counsels than those which shall be dictated by their own integrity and discernment; and they hope that the detection of men, who are now found to have been in the constant habits of misapplying the public money, will warn the house not to rely too much upon the specious professions of their colleagues for the punishment of offences, through which they have themselves derived a corrupt support to their own power; and that the petitioners trust, rather, the period is at length come at which the representatives of the people, returning to the examples and the maxims of former times, will shew themselves determined to pursue hereafter a system of vigilance and jealousy, instead of reposing an implicit and indiscriminate confidence in the advisers of the crown."