Multitudes who, in 1848, did reverence to the "Patriot Father and the Patriot Sage," would have rejoiced ten years before to have caught him in the slave region.
We are taught in a most impressive manner, how ex- ceedingly destitute are many of our public men of inde- pendent feelings and opinions. Whether Adams was a " miscreant traitor,'' or " a great and patriotic citizen^'' was a question to be determined, not by bringing his conduct to the test of any moral standard, but by the present feelings of the multitude. When he was supposed to be unpopular, no vituperation was too coarse—when known 27* to be very popular, no praise was too gross, although ridiculously false.
The American people have by acclamation adjudged John Quincy Adams a Patriot, a judgment from which not one politician of any name has dared to appeal. This judgment sets aside, condemns, and repudiates almost every test of patriotism prescribed by the demagogues of the day. It has now been decided by a tribunal which these men admit to be infallible, that a man may be a pat- riot, nay, an " illustrious patriot" according to the official gazette, who openly repudiates the sentiment, " our coun- try, right or wrong"—who on a question of international law, sides with a foreign government against his own—who gives " aid and comfort" to the enemy by denouncing as unjust the war waged against him, and by striving to with- hold supplies from the array sent to fight him—who mourns over the degeneracy of his country and doubts whether she is to be numbered " among the first liberators, or the last oppressors of the race of immortal man"—who, notwithstanding all " the compromises of the Constitution,' denounces human bondage as a crime against God, and proposes so to change the Constitution as to effect the im- mediate abolition of hereditary slavery throughout the American Confederacy, and pouring contempt upon the lying Democracy of the day, claims for the black man the same rights of suffrage that are accorded to his white fellow- citizen.