endeavored to turn that short-lived advantage to myself into a permanent benefit to my country.  Far am I from detracting from the merit of some gentlemen, out of office or in it, on that occasion.  No!  It is not my way to refuse a full and heaped measure of justice to the aids that I receive.  I have through life been willing to give everything to others,—­and to reserve nothing for myself, but the inward conscience that I had omitted no pains to discover, to animate, to discipline, to direct the abilities of the country for its service, and to place them in the best light to improve their age, or to adorn it.  This conscience I have.  I have never suppressed any man, never checked him for a moment in his course, by any jealousy, or by any policy.  I was always ready, to the height of my means, (and they wore always infinitely below my desires,) to forward those abilities which overpowered my own.  He is an ill-furnished undertaker who has no machinery but his own hands to work with.  Poor in my own faculties, I ever thought myself rich in theirs.  In that period of difficulty and danger, more especially, I consulted and sincerely cooeperated with men of all parties who seemed disposed to the same ends, or to any main part of them.  Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted:  when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail.  At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—­I do not say I saved my country; I am sure I did my country important service.  There were few, indeed, that did not at that time acknowledge it,—­and that time was thirteen years ago.  It was but one voice, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an honorable provision should be made for him.  So much for my general conduct through the whole of the portentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the general sense then entertained of that conduct by my country.  But my character as a reformer, in the particular instances which the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so connected in principle with my opinions on the hideous changes which have since barbarized France, and, spreading thence, threaten the political and moral order of the whole world, that it seems to demand something of a more detailed discussion.

My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may think, the suppression of a paltry pension or employment, more or less.  Economy in my plans was, as it ought to be, secondary, subordinate, instrumental.  I acted on state principles.  I found a great distemper in the commonwealth, and according to the nature of the evil and of the object I treated it.  The malady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms.  Throughout it was full of contra-indicants.  On one hand, government, daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness.  Nor was this dissolution