Rich and great people can take care of themselves; but the poor and defenceless - the men with small cottages and large families - the men who must work six days every week if they are to live in anything like comfort for a week, - these men want defenders; they want men to maintain their position in Parliament; they want men who will protest against any infringement of their rights.

This old aristocracy and Church-ridden, and tradition-ridden country will never grow wiser. Whilst we are fighting for supremacy in Europe, the [United] States are working, and not fighting for it, but winning it all over the world.

As you know, I am neither Roman Catholic, Protestant Episcopalian, nor Presbyterian, nor am I an Irishman.

We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments.

So then because some towns in England are not represented, America is to have no representative at all. They are our children; but when children ask for bread we are not to give a stone.

We have had a great depression in agriculture, caused mainly by several seasons of bad harvests, and some of our traders have suffered much from a too rapid extension in prosperous years.

It was in the year 1820, when I was nearly nine years old, that I first went to a regular school.