It is fair, therefore, to take his address on Democracy, given 6 October, 1884, as a careful and deliberate expression of his political faith. Yet it must be borne in mind that he was somewhat hampered by his official position as well as inspired by it. He stood for the great democratic country, was its spokesman, but he was not speaking to his own countrymen, and might easily be misconstrued by foreigners if he attempted to weigh Democracy in balances designed for apothecaries’ stuff, and not for hay wagons. As he himself said four years later: “I was called upon to deliver an address in Birmingham, and chose for my theme ‘Democracy.’ In that place I felt it incumbent on me to dwell on the good points and favorable aspects of democracy as I had seen them practically illustrated in my native land. I chose rather that my discourse should suffer through inadequacy than run the risk of seeming to forget what Burke calls ‘that salutary prejudice called our country,’ and that obligation which forbids one to discuss family affairs before strangers. But here among ourselves it is clearly the duty of whoever loves his country to be watchful of whatever weaknesses and perils there may be in the practical working of a system never before set in motion under such favorable auspices, or on so large a scale.”[90] One need not be nicer than his author, and it is clear from what Lowell wrote afterward that he was somewhat surprised at the importance attached to this utterance at Birmingham. In truth, it was the natural and in a measure the unstudied expression of a man whose convictions were not lightly held, had been tested by long experience, and were the warp and woof of his political loom. Studied the address was, so far as it became him not to disregard his official self, and above all not to suffer his creed to be modified by his surroundings; but, bating all this, the speech was the mellow judgment of a man who was about to retire from a post where he had been an intermediary between the two freest nations on earth, and it represented his deliberate thought upon the foundations of that freedom.