remonstrances at random behind them.  Their promises and their offers, their flatteries and their menaces, were all despised; and we were saved the disgrace of their formal reception only because the Congress scorned to receive them; whilst the State-house of independent Philadelphia opened her doors to the public entry of the ambassador of France.  From war and blood we went to submission, and from submission plunged back again to war and blood, to desolate and be desolated, without measure, hope, or end.  I am a Royalist:  I blushed for this degradation of the crown.  I am a Whig:  I blushed for the dishonor of Parliament.  I am a true Englishman:  I felt to the quick for the disgrace of England.  I am a man:  I felt for the melancholy reverse of human affairs in the fall of the first power in the world.

To read what was approaching in Ireland, in the black and bloody characters of the American war, was a painful, but it was a necessary part of my public duty.  For, Gentlemen, it is not your fond desires or mine that can alter the nature of things; by contending against which, what have we got, or shall ever get, but defeat and shame?  I did not obey your instructions.  No.  I conformed to the instructions of truth and Nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me.  A representative worthy of you ought to be a person of stability.  I am to look, indeed, to your opinions,—­but to such opinions as you and I must have five years hence.  I was not to look to the flash of the day.  I knew that you chose me, in my place, along with others, to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every fashionable gale.  Would to God the value of my sentiments on Ireland and on America had been at this day a subject of doubt and discussion!  No matter what my sufferings had been, so that this kingdom had kept the authority I wished it to maintain, by a grave foresight, and by an equitable temperance in the use of its power.

The next article of charge on my public conduct, and that which I find rather the most prevalent of all, is Lord Beauchamp’s bill:  I mean his bill of last session, for reforming the law-process concerning imprisonment.  It is said, to aggravate the offence, that I treated the petition of this city with contempt even in presenting it to the House, and expressed myself in terms of marked disrespect.  Had this latter part of the charge been true, no merits on the side of the question which I took could possibly excuse me.  But I am incapable of treating this city with disrespect.  Very fortunately, at this minute, (if my bad eyesight does not deceive me,) the worthy gentleman[49] deputed on this business stands directly before me.  To him I appeal, whether I did not, though it militated with my oldest and my most recent public opinions, deliver the petition