s Chapel. I was
prepared and disciplined to this political warfare. The first session I
sat in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial,
financial, constitutional, and foreign interests of Great Britain and
its empire. A great deal was then done; and more, far more, would have
been done, if more had been permitted by events. Then, in the vigor of
my manhood, my constitution sunk under my labor. Had I then died, (and
I seemed to myself very near death,) I had then earned for those who
belonged to me more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are of
power to estimate. But, in truth, these services I am called to account
for are not those on which I value myself the most. If I were to call
for a reward, (which I have never done,) it should be for those in which
for fourteen years without intermission I showed the most industry and
had the least success: I mean in the affairs of India. They are those on
which I value myself the most: most for the importance, most for the
labor, most for the judgment, most for constancy and perseverance in the
pursuit. Others may value them most for the _intention_. In that,
surely, they are not mistaken.

Does his Grace think that they who advised the crown to make my retreat
easy considered me only as an economist? That, well understood, however,
is a good deal. If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have
made political economy an object of my humble studies from my very early
youth to near the end of my service in Parliament, even before (at least
to any knowledge of mine) it had employed the thoughts of speculative
men in other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its infancy
in England, where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great and
learned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and deigned
to communicate with me now and then on some particulars of their
immortal works. Something of these studies may appear incidentally in
some of the earliest things I published. The House has been witness to
their effect, and has profited of them, more or less, for above
eight-and-twenty years.

To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his Grace of
Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator: "_Nitor in
adversum_" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the
qualities nor cultivated one of the arts that recommend men to the favor
and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion o