Senators and Representatives of the People of the State of New York:  I had turned my steps away from your honored halls, long since, as I thought forever.  I come back to them by your command, to fulfil a higher duty and more honorable service than ever before devolved upon me.  I repay your generous confidence, by offering to you this exposition of the duties of the magistrate and of the citizen.  It is the same which John Quincy Adams gave to the Congress of the United States, in his oration on the death of James Madison.  It is the key to his own exalted character, and it enables us to measure the benefits he conferred upon his country.  If then you ask what motive enabled him to rise above parties, sects, combinations, prejudices, passions, and seductions, I answer that he served his country, not alone, or chiefly because that country was his own, but because he knew her duties and her destiny, and knew her cause was the cause of human nature.

If you inquire why he was so rigorous in virtue as to be often thought austere, I answer it was because human nature required the exercise of justice, honor, and gratitude, by all who were clothed with authority to act in the name of the American people.  If you ask why he seemed, sometimes, with apparent inconsistency, to lend his charities to the distant and the future rather than to his own kindred and times, I reply, it was because he held that the tenure of human power is on condition of its being beneficently exercised for the common welfare of the human race.  Such men are of no country.  They belong to mankind.  If we cannot rise to this height of virtue, we cannot hope to comprehend the character of John Quincy Adams, or understand the homage paid by the American people to his memory.

Need it be said that John Quincy Adams studied justice, honor and gratitude, not by the false standards of the age, but by their own true nature?  He generalized truth, and traced it always to its source, the bosom of God.  Thus in his defence of the Amistad captives he began with defining justice in the language of Justinian, “Constans et perpetua voluntas jus SUUM cuique tribuendi.”  He quoted on the same occasion from the Declaration of Independence, not by way of rhetorical embellishment, and not even as a valid human ordinance, but as a truth of nature, of universal application, the memorable words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  In his vindication of the right of debate, he declared that the principle that religious opinions were altogether beyond the sphere of legislative control, was but one modification of a more extensive axiom, which included the unbounded freedom of the press, and of speech, and of the communication of thought in all its forms.  He rested the inviolability of the right of petition, not on constitutions, or charters, which might be glossed, abrogated or expunged, but in the inherent right of every animate creature to pray to its superior.