But his "sincere and silent vote" was not valuable enough to
command a high price from his patrons. Once only was he able to help
them with his pen, when he drew up, at the request of Lords Thurlow
and Weymouth, his _Memoire Justificatif_, in French, in which "he
vindicated against the French manifesto the justice of the British
arms." It was a service worthy of a small fee, which no doubt he
received. He had to wait till 1779, when he had been five years in
Parliament, before his cousin Mr. Eliot, and his friend Wedderburne,
the Attorney-General, were able to find him a post as one of the Lords
Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. The Board of Trade, of which
he became one of the eight members, survives in mortal memory only
from being embalmed in the bright amber of one of Burke's great
speeches. "This board, Sir, has had both its original formation and
its regeneration in a job. In a job it was conceived, and in a job its
mother brought it forth.... This board is a sort of temperate bed of
influence: a sort of gently ripening hothouse, where eight members of
Parliament receive salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given
time, in order to mature at a proper season a claim to two thousand,
granted for doing less" (_Speech on Economical Reform_).
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