is to justify you to yourselves. I know of no selfish purpose, unless
a proper desire for esteem he such, which would lead me to attempt to
undeceive you, so far as any of you may have been imposed upon. I
certainly do not expect to change my residence from the State in which
I was reared; and I long since avowed the intention never again to
receive official trust from any other authority than that of the
people of the State of which I am a citizen. It has been represented
to you that you were showering attentions upon one who was hostile to
your interests, and regardless of your rights. I am grateful to you
for the constant evidence you have given that you discredited the
statement, and I am therefore the more anxious that you should not
remain in doubt. The public record contains all I have said and done,
and in it nothing can be found to sustain the statement. Of this I am
quite sure, because it has always been with me a principle to exercise
public functions in the spirit of the Constitution and the purposes of
the Union. If I know myself, I have never given a vote from a feeling
of hostility to any portion of our common country; but have always
kept in view the common obligation for the common welfare, and desired
by maintaining the constitution in each and every particular, to
perpetuate the blessings it was designed to secure, and to transmit
the inheritance received from our fathers unmutilated and
uncontaminated to remotest posterity. In some positions it has
devolved upon me to study interests in Maine, with a view to secure
for them proper provision, and I feel that I am justified in saying
they were considered as became one who had sworn to protect the
Constitution, and who had a function to perform in relation to a
sovereign State of the Union. Heretofore I have been prompted merely
by what I believed to be duty to you from me as an officer under the
Constitution. Hereafter, though the principles on which I will act
cannot vary, I should be less than a man if I did not feel deeper