near obtaining the nomination instead (p. 106)
of Monroe, and he was firmly resolved to secure it so soon as Mr.
Monroe's eight years should have elapsed. He, therefore, finding much
leisure left upon his hands by the not very exacting business of his
office, devoted his ingenuity to devising schemes for injuring the
prestige of Mr. Adams. Mr. Clay also had been greatly disappointed
that he had not been summoned to be Secretary of State, and so made
heir apparent. His personal enmity was naturally towards Mr. Monroe;
his political enmity necessarily also included Mr. Adams, whose
appointment he had privately sought to prevent. He therefore at once
set himself assiduously to oppose and thwart the administration, and
to make it unsuccessful and unpopular. That Clay was in the main and
upon all weighty questions an honest statesman and a real patriot must
be admitted, but just at this period no national crisis called his
nobler qualities into action, and his course was largely influenced by
selfish considerations. It was not long before Mr. Calhoun also
entered the lists, though in a manner less discreditable to himself,
personally, than were the resources of Crawford and Clay. The daily
narrations and comments of Mr. Adams display and explain in a manner
highly instructive, if not altogether agreeable, the ambitions (p. 107)
and the manoeuvres, the hollow alliances and unworthy intrigues, not
only of these three, but also of many other estimable gentlemen then
in political life. The difference between those days and our own seems
not so great as the _laudatores temporis acti_ are wont to proclaim
it. The elaborate machinery which has since been constructed was then
unknown; rivals relied chiefly upon their own astuteness and the aid
of a few personal friends and adherents for carrying on contests and
attaining ends which are now sought by vastly more complex methods.
What the stage-coach of that period was to the railroads of to-day, or
what the hand-loom was to our great cotton mills, such also was the
political intriguing of cabinet ministers, senators, and
representatives to our present party machinery. But the temper was no
better, honor was no keener, the sense of public duty was little more
disinterested then than now. One finds no serious traces of vulgar
financial dishonesty recorded in these pages, in which Mr. Adams has
handed down the political life of the second and third decades of our
century with a p