for nearly a fortnight, and on February 7 the whole subject was
finally laid on the table. The sturdy, dogged fighter,
single-handed and alone, had beaten all the forces of the South
and of slavery. No more memorable fight has ever been made by one
man in a parliamentary body, and after this decisive struggle the
tide began to turn. Every year Mr. Adams renewed his motion to
strike out the gag rule, and forced it to a vote. Gradually the
majority against it dwindled, until at last, on December 3, 1844,
his motion prevailed. Freedom of speech had been vindicated in
the American House of Representatives, the right of petition had
been won, and the first great blow against the slave power had
been struck.

Four years later Mr. Adams fell, stricken with paralysis, at his
place in the House, and a few hours afterward, with the words,
"This is the last of earth; I am content," upon his lips, he sank
into unconsciousness and died. It was a fit end to a great public
career. His fight for the right of petition is one to be studied
and remembered, and Mr. Adams made it practically alone. The
slaveholders of the South and the representatives of the North
were alike against him. Against him, too, as his biographer, Mr.
Morse, says, was the class in Boston to which he naturally
belonged by birth and education. He had to encounter the bitter
resistance in his own set of the "conscienceless respectability
of wealth," but the great body of the New England people were
with him, as were the voters of his own district. He was an old
man, with the physical infirmities of age. His eyes were weak and
streaming; his hands were trembling; his voice cracked in moments
of excitement; yet in that age of oratory, in the days of Webster
and Clay, he was known as the "old man eloquent." It was what he