Page:Letters of Junius, volume 2 (Woodfall, 1772).djvu/263

Rh England, by an equally strange occurrence of unforeseen circumstances, (though not quite so unfortunately for his Majesty) is in equal want of timber. The world knows in what a hopeful condition you delivered the navy to your successor, and in what a condition we found it in the moment of distress. You were determined it should continue in the situation in which you left it. It happened, however, very luckily for the privy purse, that one of the above wants promised fair to supply the other. Our religious, benevolent, generous sovereign has no objection to selling his own timber to his own admiralty, to repair his own ships, nor to putting the money into his own pocket. People of a religious turn naturally adhere to the principles of the church; whatever they acquire falls into mortmain.—Upon a representation from the admiralty of the extraordinary want of timber for the indispensable repairs of the navy, the surveyor-general was directed to make a survey of the timber in all the royal chases and forests in England. Having obeyed his orders with accuracy and attention, he reported that the finest timber he had any where met with, and the properest, in every respect, for the purposes of the navy, was in Whittlebury