Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary tribunals, where men have been put to death for no other reason than that they had obtained favors from the crown.  I claim, not the letter, but the spirit of the old English law,—­that is, to be tried by my peers.  I decline his Grace’s jurisdiction as a judge.  I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a juror to pass upon the value of my services.  Whatever his natural parts may be, I cannot recognize in his few and idle years the competence to judge of my long and laborious life.  If I can help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my quantum meruit.  Poor rich man! he can hardly know anything of public industry in its exertions, or can estimate its compensations when its work is done.  I have no doubt of his Grace’s readiness in all the calculations of vulgar arithmetic; but I shrewdly suspect that he is little studied in the theory of moral proportions, and has never learned the rule of three in the arithmetic of policy and state.

His Grace thinks I have obtained too much.  I answer, that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them.  Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, there is no common principle of comparison:  they are quantities incommensurable.  Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life.  It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, indeed, sustain, but never can inspire.  With submission to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient.  As to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ as well as he a much greater fortune than he possesses.  In a more confined application, I certainly stand in need of every kind of relief and easement much more than he does.  When I say I have not received more than I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty?  No!  Far, very far, from it!  Before that presence I claim no merit at all.  Everything towards me is favor and bounty.  One style to a gracious benefactor; another to a proud and insulting foe.

His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt by charging my acceptance of his Majesty’s grant as a departure from my ideas and the spirit of my conduct with regard to economy.  If it be, my ideas of economy wore false and ill-founded.  But they are the Duke of Bedford’s ideas of economy I have contradicted, and not my own.  If he means to allude to certain bills brought in by me on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him that there is nothing in my conduct that can contradict either the letter or the spirit of those acts.  Does he mean the Pay-Office Act?  I take it for granted he does not.  The act to which he alludes is, I suppose, the Establishment Act.  I greatly doubt whether his Grace has ever read the one or the other.  The first of these systems cost me, with every assistance which my then situation gave me, pains incredible.  I found an opinion common through all the offices, and general in the public at large, that it would prove impossible to reform and methodize the office of pay-master-general.  I undertook it, however; and I succeeded in my undertaking.  Whether the military service, or whether the general economy of our finances have profited by that act, I leave to those who are acquainted with the army and with the treasury to judge.