to be lost by political opposition to Mr. Adams.

It was a cruel and discouraging fatality which brought about that a
man so suicidally upright in the matter of patronage should find that
the bitterest abuse which was heaped upon him was founded in an
allegation of corruption of precisely this nature. When before the
election the ignoble George Kremer anonymously charged that (p. 181)
Mr. Clay had sold his friends in the House of Representatives to Mr.
Adams, "as the planter does his negroes or the farmer his team and
horses;" when Mr. Clay promptly published the unknown writer as "a
base and infamous calumniator, a dastard and a liar;" when next
Kremer, being unmasked, avowed that he would make good his charges,
but immediately afterward actually refused to appear or testify before
a Committee of the House instructed to investigate the matter, it was
supposed by all reasonable observers that the outrageous accusation
Was forever laid at rest. But this was by no means the case. The
author of the slander had been personally discredited; but the slander
itself had not been destroyed. So shrewdly had its devisers who saw
future usefulness in it managed the matter, that while Kremer slunk
away into obscurity, the story which he had told remained an assertion
denied, but not disproved, still open to be believed by suspicious or
willing friends. With Adams President and Clay Secretary of State and
General Jackson nominated, as he quickly was by the Tennessee
Legislature, as a candidate for the next Presidential term, the
accusation was too plausible and too tempting to be allowed to fall
forever into dusty death; rather it was speedily exhumed from its
shallow burial and galvanized into new life. The partisans of (p. 182)
General Jackson sent it to and fro throughout the land. No denial,
no argument, could kill it. It began to gain that sort of half belief
which is certain to result from constant repetition; since many minds
are so constituted that truth may be actually, as it were,
manufactured for them by ceaseless iteration of statement, the many
hearings gaining the character of evidence.

It is long since all students of American history, no matter what are
their prejudices, or in whose interest their researches are
prosecuted, have branded this accusation as devoid of even the most
shadowy basis of probability, and it now gains no more credit than
would a story that Adams, Clay, and Jackson had conspired t