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has shuddered,” he said, “at what might happen to old Europe if this grand experiment should succeed. But you, the workers—you, striving after a better time—you, struggling upwards toward the light with slow and painful steps—you have no cause to look with jealousy upon a country which, menaced by the great nations of the globe, is that one where labor has met with the highest honor, and where it has reaped its greatest reward.” This fearful struggle, he went on, is between one section where “labor is honored more than elsewhere in the world” and another section where “labor is degraded and the laborer is made a chattel.” He closed his speech with prophetic words: “Impartial history will tell that, when your statesmen were hostile or coldly neutral, when many of your rich men were corrupt, when your press—which ought to have instructed and defended—was mainly written to betray, the fate of a continent and its vast population being in peril, you clung to freedom with an unfaltering trust that God in his infinite mercy will yet make it the heritage of all His children.” 22 It is interesting to look, with the eyes of Adams, upon these expressions of a noble public opinion. Thus wrote he in his diary: “January 17, 1863. It is quite clear that the current is now setting very strongly with us among the body of the people.… January 30. Things are improving here. The manifestation made at Exeter Hall last night is reported as one of the most extraordinary ever made in London, and proves, pretty conclusively the spirit of the middle classes here as elsewhere. It will not change the temper of the higher classes but it will do something to moderate the manifestation of it.” Speaking of a large and respectable delegation of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, he wrote: “They left me with

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