ama was at an end:--

Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable
with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at
least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The
personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the
past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with
the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal
connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a
word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord
Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and
extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a
duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish
nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the
solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has
been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the
historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative
period--perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has
been predominantly a history of emancipation--that is of enabling
man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social,
moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless,
have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I
rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has
done battle for the right.

Another period has opened and is opening still--a period possibly
of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those
classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and
never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These
have been confined in their actions to the classes above them,
because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the
true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present
political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble
than these--the love of liberty, of liberty for all without
distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute
preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it
what it may, of a narrower scope.(315)

A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents "with sentiments of
gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced," he proceeds:--

Though in regard to p