his culture. He begins on the verge of manhood to pant for distinction, bids farewell to the revellers, girds up his loins, and strikes into his pace.
John Quincy Adams had found his stride when he wrote to his father from London, December 29, 1795:
When I am clearly convinced that my duty commands me to act, if the love of ease, or the love of life, or the love of fame itself, dear as it is, could arrest my hand, or give me a moment's hesitation in the choice, I should certainly be fit for no situation of public trust whatever. . . . So much for the principle. But I may go a little further. The struggle against a popular clamor is not without its charms in my mind.
In the next year, following the example of John Wesley, he began rising at four o'clock; and so eager was his mind, so tireless his industry, so completely had he taken himself in hand, that he rose not later than four-thirty for the next fifty years—fifty years spent almost without interruption in public service, fighting the Jacksonian democrats, fighting for internal improvements, fighting the extension of slavery, fighting for free speech, till he sank in harness in his eighty-first year on the floor of the House of Representatives.
His training in law and diplomacy had fitted him for statesmanship, and as a statesman chiefly he lives. But Brooks Adams makes much of his philosophical temper and of his talent for scientific in-
