“He looked in years.  But in his years were seen
   A youthful vigor, an autumnal green.”

The Republic had been extended and consolidated; but human slavery, which had been incorporated in it, was extended and consolidated also, and was spreading, so as to impair the strength of the great fabric on which the hopes of the nations were suspended.  Slavery therefore must be restrained, and, without violence or injustice, must be abolished.  The difficult task of removing it had been postponed by the statesmen of the Revolution, and had been delayed and forgotten by their successors.  There were now resolute hearts and willing hands to undertake it, but who was strong enough, and bold enough to lead?  Who had patience to bear with enthusiasm that overleaped its mark, and with intolerance that defeated its own generous purposes?  Slaveholders had power, nay, the national power; and strange to say, they had it with the nation’s consent and sympathy.  Who was bold enough to provoke them, and bring the execration of the nation down upon his own head?  Who would do this, when even abolitionists themselves, rendered implacable by the manifestation of those sentiments of justice and moderation, without which the most humane cause, depending on a change of public opinion, cannot be conducted safely to a prosperous end, were ready to betray their own champion into the hands of the avenger?  That leader was found in the person of John Quincy Adams.  He took his seat in the House of Representatives in 1831, without assumption or ostentation.  Abolitionists placed in his hand petitions for the suppression of slavery in the District of Columbia, the seat of the federal authorities.  He offered them to the House of Representatives, and they were rejected with contumely and scorn.  Suddenly the alarm went forth, that the aged and venerable servant was retaliating upon his country by instigating a servile war, that such a war must be avoided, eyen at the cost of sacrificing the freedom of petition and the freedom of debate, and that if the free States would not consent to make that sacrifice, then the Union should be dissolved.  This alarm had its desired effect.  The House of Representatives, in 1837, adopted a rule of discipline, equivalent to an act, ordaining that no petition relating to slavery, nearly or remotely, should be read, debated or considered.  The Senate adopted a like edict.  The State authorities approved.  Slavery was not less strongly entrenched behind the bulwark of precedents in the courts of law than in the fixed habits of thought and action among the people.  The people even in the free States denounced the discussion of slavery, and suppressed it by unlawful force.  John Quincy Adams stood unmoved amid the storm.  He knew that the only danger incident to political reform, was the danger of delaying it too long.  The French Revolution had made this an axiom of political science.  If, indeed, the discussion of slavery was so hazardous