I have been in office almost My hands were twenty years. power never soiled with a bribe, nor am I conscious to myself that of favor in partial be to me induce to able or poverty hath been from either of them; and as I have no reason to expect any favor test of the you so I am neither afraid nor ashamed to stand the I have served strictest inquiry you can make concerning my conduct. according to the best of my knowlthe public faithfully anddo honestly, Cosby, appeal to it for my justification. edge ;uld T dare and by handing to office his of Morris deprived now , ceremony without

ELECTION

the young James de Lancey a notice of his appointment as chief justice. Morris was removed from the chief justiceship on the 21st of August, 1733. Five years previously he had terminated his long service in the New York assembly. Thus, after more than forty years of connection with public affairs, interrupted only by brief suspensions from office during his early career, he was now retired to private life. From the beginning of Cosby's arbitrary proceedings in the Van Dam matter, the indignation of the people had been powerfully stirred. Always opposed to the institution of the Court of Chancery, the extemporization of that tribunal by Cosby for the special purpose of procuring a judgment in his own favor was an outrage deeply offensive to their sense of decency and right; and the rude expulsion of Chief Justice Morris from the bench, because of his unwillingness to be a party to such a flagrant transaction, was, in their eyes, a deliberate and insolent attempt at despotic power. Morris was universally regarded as a victim of official tyranny, and the people were not slow to find in his personality a rallying point for the effective expression of their feeling.