GOVERNOR CORNELL:

I am profoundly grateful for your pleasant words and kind wishes for my success. You speak in full view of labors that are past and duty well performed, and no doubt you generously suppose what you have safely encountered and overcome, another may not fear to meet.

But I cannot be unmindful of the difficulties that beset the path upon which I enter, and I shall be quite content if, when the end is reached, I may, like you, look back upon an official career honorable to myself and useful to the people of the State.

I cannot forbear at this time also to express my appreciation of the hearty kindness and consideration with which you have, at other times, sought to make easier my performance of official duty.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:

You have assembled to-day to witness the retirement of an officer, tried and trusted, from the highest place in the State, and the assumption of its duties by one yet to be tried. This

ceremony, simple and unostentatious, as becomes the spirit of our institutions, is yet of vast importance to you and all the people of this great Commonwealth. The interests now transferred to new hands are yours; and the duties here newly assumed should be performed for your benefit and your good. This you have the right to demand and enforce by the means placed in your hands, which you well know how to use; and if the public servant should always know that he is jealously watched by the people, he surely would be none the less faithful to his trust.

This vigilance on the part of the citizen, and an active interest and participation in political concerns, are the safeguards of his rights; but sluggish indifference to political privileges invites the machinations of those who wait to betray the people's trust. Thus, when the conduct of public affairs receives your attention, you not only perform your duty as citizens, but protect your own best interests. While this is true, and while those whom you put in place should be held to strict account, their opportunity for usefulness should not be impaired, nor their efforts for good thwarted, by unfounded and querulous complaint and cavil.

Let us together, but in our different places, take part in the regulation and administration of the government of our State, and thus become, not only the keepers of our own interests, but contributors to the progress and prosperity which will await us.

I enter upon the discharge of the duties of the office to which my fellow-citizens have called me with a profound sense of responsibility; but my hope is in the guidance of a kind Providence, which I believe will aid an honest design: and the forbearance of a just people, which, I trust, mill recognize a patriotic endeavor.