with encouragement. A contested election in such a city as
this is no light thing. I paused on the brink of the precipice. These
three gentlemen, by various merits, and on various titles, I made no
doubt were worthy of your favor. I shall never attempt to raise myself
by depreciating the merits of my competitors. In the complexity and
confusion of these cross pursuits, I wished to take the authentic public
sense of my friends upon a business of so much delicacy. I wished to
take your opinion along with me, that, if I should give up the contest
at the very beginning, my surrender of my post may not seem the effect
of inconstancy, or timidity, or anger, or disgust, or indolence, or any
other temper unbecoming a man who has engaged in the public service. If,
on the contrary, I should undertake the election, and fail of success, I
was full as anxious that it should be manifest to the whole world that
the peace of the city had not been broken by my rashness, presumption,
or fond conceit of my own merit.

I am not come, by a false and counterfeit show of deference to your
judgment, to seduce it in my favor. I ask it seriously and unaffectedly.
If you wish that I should retire, I shall not consider that advice as a
censure upon my conduct, or an alteration in your sentiments, but as a
rational submission to the circumstances of affairs. If, on the
contrary, you should think it proper for me to proceed on my canvass, if
you will risk the trouble on your part, I will risk it on mine. My
pretensions are such as you cannot be ashamed of, whether they succeed
or fail.

If you call upon me, I shall solicit the favor of the city upon manly
ground. I come before you with the plain confidence of an honest servant
in the equity of a candid and discerning master. I come to claim your
approbation, not to amuse you with vain apologies, or with professions
still more vain and senseless. I have lived too long to be served by
apologies, or to stand in need of them. The part I have acted has been
in open day; and to hold out to a conduct which stands in that clear and
steady light for all its good and all its evil, to hold out to that
conduct the paltry winking tapers of excuses and promises,--I never
will do it. They may obscure it with their smoke, but they never can
illumine sunshine by such a flame as theirs.

I am sensible that no endeavors have been left untried to injure me in
your opinion. But the use of character is to be a shield a