By the favor of my fellow-citizens, I am the representative of an honest, well-ordered, virtuous city,—­of a people who preserve more of the original English simplicity and purity of manners than perhaps any other.  You possess among you several men and magistrates of large and cultivated understandings, fit for any employment in any sphere.  I do, to the best of my power, act so as to make myself worthy of so honorable a choice.  If I were ready, on any call of my own vanity or interest, or to answer any election purpose, to forsake principles (whatever they are) which I had formed at a mature age, on full reflection, and which had been confirmed by long experience, I should forfeit the only thing which makes you pardon so many errors and imperfections in me.

Not that I think it fit for any one to rely too much on his own understanding, or to be filled with a presumption not becoming a Christian man in his own personal stability and rectitude.  I hope I am far from that vain confidence which almost always fails in trial.  I know my weakness in all respects, as much at least as any enemy I have; and I attempt to take security against it.  The only method which has ever been found effectual to preserve any man against the corruption of nature and example is an habit of life and communication of councils with the most virtuous and public-spirited men of the age you live in.  Such a society cannot be kept without advantage, or deserted without shame.  For this rule of conduct I may be called in reproach a party man; but I am little affected with such aspersions.  In the way which they call party I worship the Constitution of your fathers; and I shall never blush for my political company.  All reverence to honor, all idea of what it is, will be lost out of the world, before it can be imputed as a fault to any man, that he has been closely connected with those incomparable persons, living and dead, with whom for eleven years I have constantly thought and acted.  If I have wandered out of the paths of rectitude into those of interested faction, it was in company with the Saviles, the Dowdeswells, the Wentworths, the Bentincks; with the Lenoxes, the Manchesters, the Keppels, the Saunderses; with the temperate, permanent, hereditary virtue of the whole house of Cavendish:  names, among which, some have extended your fame and empire in arms, and all have fought the battle of your liberties in fields not less glorious.  These, and many more like these, grafting public principles on private honor, have redeemed the present age, and would have adorned the most splendid period in your history.  Where could any man, conscious of his own inability to act alone, and willing to act as he ought to do, have arranged himself better?  If any one thinks this kind of society to be taken up as the best method of gratifying low personal pride or ambitious interest, he is mistaken, and knows nothing of the world.

Preferring this connection, I do not mean to detract in the slightest degree from others.  There are some of those whom I admire at something of a greater distance, with whom I have had the happiness also perfectly to agree, in almost all the particulars in which I have differed with some successive administrations; and they are such as it never can be reputable to any government to reckon among its enemies.