The labors of his Grace’s founder merited the “curses, not loud, but deep,” of the Commons of England, on whom he and his master had effected a complete Parliamentary Reform, by making them, in their slavery and humiliation, the true and adequate representatives of a debased, degraded, and undone people.  My merits were in having had an active, though not always an ostentatious share, in every one act, without exception, of undisputed constitutional utility in my time, and in having supported, on all occasions, the authority, the efficiency, and the privileges of the Commons of Great Britain.  I ended my services by a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on their own journals of their constitutional rights, and a vindication of their constitutional conduct.  I labored in all things to merit their inward approbation, and (along with the assistants of the largest, the greatest, and best of my endeavors) I received their free, unbiased, public, and solemn thanks.

Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the crown grants which compose the Duke of Bedford’s fortune as balanced against mine.  In the name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think that none but of the House of Russell are entitled to the favor of the crown?  Why should he imagine that no king of England has been capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth?  Indeed, he will pardon me, he is a little mistaken:  all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford; all discernment did not lose its vision when his creator closed his eyes.  Let him remit his rigor on the disproportion between merit and reward in others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin of his fortune.  They will regard with much more satisfaction, as he will contemplate with infinitely more advantage, whatever in his pedigree has been dulcified by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring.  It is little to be doubted that several of his forefathers in that long series have degenerated into honor and virtue.  Let the Duke of Bedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror the counsels of the lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would tempt him, in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormous fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility and the plunder of another Church.  Let him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth and all the resources of his wealth to crush rebellious principles which have no foundation in morals, and rebellious movements that have no provocation in tyranny.