present Administration
... will open wide all the flood-gates of corruption. Will a change
produce reform? Pause and ponder! Slavery, the Indians, the public
lands, the collection and disbursement of public money, the tariff,
and foreign affairs:--what is to become of them?"

On January 29, 1841, Henry A. Wise uttered "a motley compound of
eloquence and folly, of braggart impudence and childish vanity, of
self-laudation and Virginian narrow-mindedness." After him Hubbard, of
Alabama, "began grunting against the tariff." Three days later Black,
of Georgia, "poured forth his black bile" for an hour and a half. The
next week we find Clifford, of Maine, "muddily bothering his trickster
invention" to get over a rule of the House, and "snapping like a
mackerel at a red rag" at the suggestion of a way to do so. In July,
1841, we again hear of Atherton as a "cross-grained numskull ...
snarling against the loan bill." With such peppery passages in great
abundance the Diary is thickly and piquantly besprinkled. They are not
always pleasant, perhaps not even always amusing, but they display the
marked element of censoriousness in Mr. Adams's character, which it is
necessary to appreciate in order to understand some parts of his
career.

If Mr. Adams never had the cheerful support of popularity, so (p. 301)
neither did he often have the encouragement of success. He said that
he was paying in his declining years for the good luck which had
attended the earlier portion of his life. On December 14, 1833, he
calculates that he has three fourths of the people of Massachusetts
against him, and by estranging the anti-Masons he is about to become
obnoxious to the whole. "My public life will terminate by the
alienation from me of all mankind.... It is the experience of all ages
that the people grow weary of old men. I cannot flatter myself that I
shall escape the common law of our nature." Yet he acknowledges that
he is unable to "abstract himself from the great questions which
agitate the country." Soon after he again writes in the same vein: "To
be forsaken by all mankind seems to be the destiny that awaits my last
days." August 6, 1835, he gives as his reason for not accepting an
invitation to deliver a discourse, that "instead of having any
beneficial influence upon the public mind, it would be turned as an
instrument of obloquy against myself." So it had been, as he enumerates,
with his exertions against Free