Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/107

 had specified in Parliament, and he was driven by the demand of the House to condescend from mere generalities to some kind of particulars.

After he had spoken amid signs of much impatience, Dr. Petty replied in a speech of studied moderation. Having first commented on the vagueness of the charges, and the entire absence of anything approaching to specific counts in the huge indictment and the total lack of evidence, he described the difficulty of the task he had had to perform, the grasping character of many of the men he had had to satisfy, and the impossibility of not making some enemies in so vast an undertaking. He then insisted that the lands he had got had become his, either as direct payment for his work, or as purchases legitimately made by the permission of the Council, after the other claimants had been satisfied; and he again asserted that, if a strict account were to be taken, the State would be found to be still his debtor, and that he had nothing to conceal.

'I never,' he said, 'was surveyor by office, but undertaker by contract, and rather a contriver of the way and method how many surveyors should work, than a surveyor myself.... I never meddled with leases or debentures till this surveyorship, such as it was, was at an end; and then, and when the distribution also was over, I got an express and legal leave to buy more debentures than I did.... I confess, Sir,' he went on, 'there is a singularity in the modes of one or two of my satisfactions, but this singularity is a prejudice to no man but myself; a convenience to some; and an advantage to the State. The practices I have used as Commissioner and Surveyor,' he continued, 'are such as I can glory in; that is to say to have admeasured 22 Counties in thirteen months' time, with the chaine and instrument; to have done this by the ministry of about one thousand hands, without any suit of law, either with my superiors, or with