It is a service that rewards itself.  But their public service, though from their abilities unquestionably of more value than mine, in its quantity and in its duration was not to be mentioned with it.  But I never could drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning any matter whatever; and least of all do I know how to haggle and huckster with merit.  Pension for myself I obtained none; nor did I solicit any.  Yet I was loaded with hatred for everything that was withheld, and with obloquy for everything that was given.  I was thus left to support the grants of a name ever dear to me and ever venerable to the world in favor of those who were no friends of mine or of his, against the rude attacks of those who were at that time friends to the grantees and their own zealous partisans.  I have never heard the Earl of Lauderdale complain of these pensions.  He finds nothing wrong till he comes to me.  This is impartiality, in the true, modern, revolutionary style.

Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order and economy, is stable and eternal, as all principles must be.  A particular order of things may be altered:  order itself cannot lose its value.  As to other particulars, they are variable by time and by circumstances.  Laws of regulation are not fundamental laws.  The public exigencies are the masters of all such laws.  They rule the laws, and are not to be ruled by them.  They who exercise the legislative power at the time must judge.

It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him that mere parsimony is not economy.  It is separable in theory from it; and in fact it may or it may not be a part of economy, according to circumstances.  Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.  If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and an higher economy.  Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection.  Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.  Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection.  The other economy has larger views.  It demands a discriminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious mind.  It shuts one door to impudent importunity, only to open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit.  If none but meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever will produce.  No state, since the foundation of society, has been impoverished by that species of profusion.  Had the economy of selection and proportion been at all times observed, we should not now have had an overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.