first made those principles triumphant. If you chuse them for your delegates, you know to what policy you lend your sanction-what men you exalt to power. Should you prefer me, your choice falls upon one who, if obscure and unambitious, will at least give his own age no reason to fear him, or posterity to curse himone whose proudest ambition it is to be deemed the friend of Liberty and of Peace. INTRODUCTION. DISTRESSES OF THE COUNTRY IN 1816-METHOD OF SUCCESSFULLY SUPPORTING THE PEOPLE IN PARLIA MENT. THE return of peace did not bring back prosperity to any portion of the inhabitants of this country. Whether it was that a war of twenty-three years duration had carried all the functions of the body politic to an unnatural state, only to be maintained by the stimulants which war supplies, in place of more wholesome support; or that the drains of the heavy expenditure, created by the hostilities carried on all over the globe, had exhausted our resources; or that the mere transition from one state to another, operated on the political system, giving it the sudden shock that a sudden relief from pain or from want would communicate to the natural frame; certain it is, that there had never during the whole contest just closed, been more general embarrassment felt, than |