ident of the United States
inspired them, he returned to the senate chamber, where he delivered
the following address:

"_Fellow citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:_

"Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled
me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was
transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present
month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I
can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I
had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes,
with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years: a
retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more
dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent
interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by
time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to
which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in
the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny
into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence,
one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature, and unpractised
in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly
conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions, all I
dare aver is, that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty
from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be
effected. All I dare hope is, that, if in accepting this task, I have
been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or
by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the
confidence of my fellow citizens: and have thence too little consulted
my incapacity, as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried
cares before me; my ERROR will be palliated by the motives which
misled me, and its consequences be judged by my country, with some
share of the partiality in which they originated.

"Such being the impressions under which I have, in obedience to the
public summons, repaired to the present station, it will be peculiarly
improper to omit in this first official act, my fervent supplications
to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe--who presides in
the councils of nations--and whose providential aids can supply every
human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and
happiness of the peo