1858.] OF THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES.          981

Mr. Belt offered the following order:

Ordered, That the thanks of this House are due, and they
are hereby tendered to James W. Clayton, the Chief Clerk of
this House, for the faithful and efficient manner in which he
has discharged the laborious and important duties of his
office; and to C. W. Crocker, the Reading Clerk, and other
officers of this House for the satisfactory manner in which the
various duties of their several positions have been discharged.

Which was adopted.

The Speaker delivered the following address:

Gentlemen of the House of Delegates of Maryland, the
time for our separation has arrived, and duty as well as grati-
tude prompts me to address you a parting word, for the kind-
ness which you have exhibited towards me, by the adoption
of the resolution which it has been your pleasure to pass, in
relation to the administration of the office, to which your par-
tiality in the beginning of the session called me, I beg you
to accept my most grateful acknowledgements. Whatever
success has attended my efforts faithfully to discharge the
arduous duties of my position, I feel I am greatly indebted
to the prompt support and ready courtesy extended to me by
the body over which I have had the honor to preside.

Although we came together, many of us as strangers, en-
tertaining as we did diverse views of many of the important
measures which have been brought to our consideration, still
in a becoming spirit of concession and gentlemanly regard
each for the other, we have passed through the brief term for
active legislation allowed us by the constitution, with the
consciousness of having done nothing intentionally upon
which, in after time, we can look back with any feeling of
regret.

As for myself, gentlemen, permit me to assure you, that if
in the moments of excitement, which the scenes around me
have been calculated often to produce, I have by the utterance
of a single word, or the fair interpretation of a single action,
inflicted the slighest wound upon the feelings of any one with
whom 1 have had the pleasure of being associated here, nothing
has been further from my design, and 1 now sincerely invoke
that forgetfulness of the wrong which I believe your gener-
osity will award to the frankness of the confession.

Permit me in conclusion, gentlemen, to wish you a safe
return to those who anxiously await you, and to express the
hope that all public labors which you may hereafter be called
upon to discharge, may be as faithfully met and as success-
fully performed as those which have been imposed upon you
here as representatives of the people of Maryland.

It only remains for me to bid you a cordial adieu.