It is the key to his own exalted character, and it enables us to measure the benefits he conferred upon his country.

If then you ask what motive enabled him to rise above parties, sects, combinations, prejudices, passions, and seductions, I answer that he served his country, not alone, or chiefly because that country was his own, but because he knew her duties and her destiny, and knew her cause was the cause of human nature.
If you inquire why he was so rigorous in virtue as to be often thought austere, I answer it was because human nature required the exercise of justice, honor, and gratitude, by all who were clothed with authority to act in the name of the American people.

If you ask why he seemed, sometimes, with apparent inconsistency, to lend his charities to the distant and the future rather than to his own kindred and times, I reply, it was because he held that the tenure of human power is on condition of its being beneficently exercised for the common welfare of the human race.
Such men are of no country.

They belong to mankind.

If we cannot rise to this height of virtue, we cannot hope to comprehend the character of John Quincy Adams, or understand the homage paid by the American people to his memory.
Need it be said that John Quincy Adams studied justice, honor and gratitude, not by the false standards of the age, but by their own true nature?
He generalized truth, and traced it always to its source, the bosom of God.