End of the first day's speech



JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (1767-1848)

No other American President, not even Thomas Jefferson, has equaled
John Quincy Adams in literary accomplishments. His orations and
public speeches will be found to stand for a tradition of
painstaking, scholastic finish hardly to be found elsewhere in
American orations, and certainly not among the speeches of any other
President. As a result of the pains he took with them, they belong
rather to literature than to politics, and it is possible that they
will not be generally appreciated at their real worth for several
generations still to come. If, as is sometimes alleged in such
cases, they gain in literary finish at the expense of force, it is
not to be forgotten that the forcible speech which, ignoring all
rules, carries its point by assault, may buy immediate effect at the
expense of permanent respectability. And if John Quincy Adams, who
labored as Cicero did to give his addresses the greatest possible
literary finish, does not rank with Cicero among orators, it is
certain that respectability will always be willingly conceded him by
every generation of his countrymen.

Some idea of the extent of his early studies may be gained from his
father's letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, written from Auteuil,
France, in 1785. John Quincy Adams being then only in his eighteenth
year, the elder Adams said of him:--