r
that this or any nation ever carried on, in order to save my country
from the iron yoke of its power, and from the more dreadful contagion of
its principles,--to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure and
untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and
good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which,
beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a
great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of
its most intense malignity.

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, meta