ly thirty years ago, when I endeavored to support and
stimulate the flagging energies of an institution in which I thought
there were the germs of future refinement and intellectual advantage
to the rising generation of Manchester, and since I have been here
on this occasion I have learned with much gratification that it is
now counted among your most flourishing institutions. There was also
another and more recent occasion when the gracious office fell to me
to distribute among the members of the Mechanics' Institution those
prizes which they had gained through their study in letters and in
science. Gentlemen, these were pleasing offices, and if life
consisted only of such offices you would not have to complain of
it. But life has its masculine duties, and we are assembled here to
fulfill some of the most important of these, when, as citizens of a
free country, we are assembled together to declare our determination
to maintain, to uphold the constitution to which we are debtors, in
our opinion, for our freedom and our welfare.

Gentlemen, there seems at first something incongruous that one
should be addressing the population of so influential and
intelligent a county as Lancashire who is not locally connected with
them, and, gentlemen, I will frankly admit that this circumstance
did for a long time make me hesitate in accepting your cordial and
generous invitation. But, gentlemen, after what occurred yesterday,
after receiving more than two hundred addresses from every part of
this great county, after the welcome which then greeted me, I feel
that I should not be doing justice to your feelings, I should not do
my duty to myself, if I any longer consider my presence here
to-night to be an act of presumption. Gentlemen, though it may not
be an act of presumption, it still is, I am told, an act of great
difficulty. Our opponents assure us that the Conservative party has
no political program; and, therefore, they must look with much
satisfaction to one whom you honor to-night by considering him the
leader and representative of your opinions when he comes forward, at
your invitation, to express to you what that program is. The
Conservative party are accused of having no program of policy. If by
a program is meant a plan to despoil churches and plunder landlords,
I admit we have no program. If by a program is meant a policy which
assails or menaces every institution and every interest, every class
and every calling