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code from every ingredient not congenial with the precepts of an enlightened age, and the sentiments of a virtuous people, seeks by appeals to reason and by its liberal examples, to infuse into the law which governs the civilized world a spirit which may diminish the frequency, or circumscribe the calamities of war, and meliorate the social and beneficient relations of peace a government, in a word, whose conduct, within and without, may bespeak the most noble of all ambitions that of promoting peace on earth, and good will to man."

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LIFE OF

JAMES MONROE,

BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

LIFE

OF

JAMES MONROE.*

AMONG the peculiarities affecting the condition of human existence, in a community formed within the period allotted to the life of man, is the state of being exclusively belonging to the individuals who assisted in the formation of that community. Three thousand years have elapsed since the Monarch of Israel, who, from that time, has borne the reputation of the wisest of men, declared that there was no new thing under the sun. And then, as now, the assertion, confined to the operations of nature, to the instincts of animal life, to the primary purposes, and innate passions of human kind, was, and is, strictly true. Of all the illustrations of the sentiment given by him, the course is now as it was then. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. To the superficial observation of the human eye, the Sun still ariseth

*Eulogy delivered before the Corporation of Boston, 1831.

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