Late American Statesmen, No. II [pp. 95-119]

"- e I t t,
LA TE AMERICA N STA TESMEN.
paralysis, as the election approached, by which, if his faculties
were not impaired, his fitness for the presidency was subjected
to serious question.
Mr. Adams's character demands far closer study. So far as
the conditions of political education were concerned, no one of
his colleagues could contest his superiority; and so far as concerned devotion to political life, there was no one of them by
whom he was surpassed. In public action he found his sole
delight. When not engaged in it, he became dispirited, he
was disturbed about his health, no object could for any length
of time command his attentioh. But when the call to any public duty sounded, lassitude disappeared, maladies vanished, and
he entered on the service in the full possession of his remarkable
powers. For remarkable powers he possessed. They were not
oratorical. His voice was harsh, his manner ungracious, and tho
vehement, his vehemence was always bound up in his own individuality, neither projecting himself into others nor absorbing
others into himself. Nor, tho his early literary training was excellent, had he peculiar literary gifts. His lectures on rhetoric are
now forgotten; his epic on the conquest of Ireland, which he
wrote on his short retirement after the close of his presidential
term, is a mixture of the inflated and the grotesque. Sense of
humor he had none; and therefore an incongruity never struck
him as absurd. But he possessed an eye which nothing within its
range escaped, however much it might transmute the objects it
witnessed and reported; a memory in which the reports thus
received were indelible; pertinacious powers of research; a gift
almost unparalleled of summoning up at any moment all relevant resources; a marvellous control over'his physical system,
keeping it in severe training, and disciplining it in such a way
as to draw from it the greatest practicable amount of work;
courage that never flinched; a strong religious sense, which, cooperating with the remarkable conditions of his preparation for
office, gave a sombre conscientiousness to his ambition, as if he
were elected divinely for the work; scourging himself constantly
in solitude for his shortcomings, yet convinced of the righteousness of each step he took and of the unrighteousness of those
who opposed him. His long and eventful history can be explained only by one key. That key is the intense individualism
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