ons
in the substance of what is herein said. If I were now writing the
book for the first time, I should do what so many of the later
contributors to the series have very wisely and advantageously done: I
should demand more space. But this was the first volume published, and
at a time when the enterprise was still an experiment insistence upon
such a point, especially on the part of the editor, would have been
unreasonable. Thus it happens that, though Mr. Adams was appointed
minister resident at the Hague in 1794, and thereafter continued in
public life, almost without interruption, until his death in (p. vi)
February, 1848, the narrative of his career is compressed within
little more than three hundred pages. The proper function of a work
upon this scale is to draw a picture of the man.

With the picture which I have drawn of Mr. Adams, I still remain
moderately contented--by which remark I mean nothing more egotistical
than that I believe it to be a correct picture, and done with whatever
measure of skill I may happen to possess in portraiture. I should like
to change it only in one particular, viz.: by infusing throughout the
volume somewhat more of admiration. Adams has never received the
praise which was his due, and probably he never will receive it. In
order that justice should be done him by the public, his biographer
ought to speak somewhat better of him than his real deserts would
require. He presents one of those cases where exaggeration is the
servant of truth; for this moderate excess of appreciation would only
offset that discount from an accurate estimate which his personal
unpopularity always has caused, and probably always will cause, to be
made. He was a good instance of the rule that the world will for the
most part treat the individual as the individual treats the world.
Adams was censorious, not to say uncharitable in the extreme, (p. vii)
always in an attitude of antagonism, always unsparing and denunciatory.
The measure which he meted has been by others in their turn meted to
him. This habit of ungracious criticism was his great fault; perhaps
it was almost his only very serious fault; it cost him dear in his
life, and has continued to cost his memory dear since his death.
Sometimes we are not sorry to see men get the punishments which they
have brought on themselves; yet we ought to be sorry for Mr. Adams.
After all, his fault-finding was in part the result of his respect for
virtue