To their estimate I leave the matter.  I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator:  “Nitor in adversum” is the motto for a man like me.  I possessed not one of the qualities nor cultivated one of the arts that recommend men to the favor and protection of the great.  I was not made for a minion or a tool.  As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people.  At every step of my progress in life, (for in every step was I traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honor of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home.  Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even, for me.  I had no arts but manly arts.  On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand.

Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the person whom he has not thought it below him to reproach, he might have found, that, in the whole course of my life, I have never, on any pretence of economy, or on any other pretence, so much as in a single instance, stood between any man and his reward of service or his encouragement in useful talent and pursuit, from the highest of those services and pursuits to the lowest.  On the contrary, I have on an hundred occasions exerted myself with singular zeal to forward every man’s even tolerable pretensions.  I have more than once had good-natured reprehensions from my friends for carrying the matter to something bordering on abuse.  This line of conduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly owing to natural disposition, but I think full as much to reason and principle.  I looked on the consideration of public service or public ornament to be real and very justice; and I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the nature of a wrong.  I held it to be, in its consequences, the worst economy in the world.  In saving money I soon can count up all the good I do; but when by a cold penury I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calculation.  Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I have done has been general and systematic.  I have never entered into those trifling vexations and oppressive details that have been falsely and most ridiculously laid to my charge.

Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barre and Mr. Dunning between the proposition and execution of my plan?  No! surely, no!  Those pensions were within my principles.  I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their pensions, their titles,—­all they had; and if more they had, I should have been but pleased the more.  They were men of talents; they were men of service.  I put the profession of the law out of the question in one of them.