Without some preliminary trials of our strength we ought not
to commit our country upon an alternative where to recede would be
infamy, and to persist might be destruction."
In this strain he spoke long, urging all the reasons for delay which an
ingenious mind could devise, and clothing his argument with the charm of
a fine literary style.
He ceased. There was a pause. No one seemed willing to break the
silence, until it began to be embarrassing, and then painful.
Many eyes were turned toward John Adams, who for eighteen months had
been the chief spokesman of the party for independence. He had advocated
the measure before Thomas Paine had written "Common Sense," and when it
had not one influential friend in Philadelphia. Early in the previous
year, when it first became known by the accidental publicity of a letter
that he favored the Declaration of Independence, the solid men of
Philadelphia shunned him as if he had had the leprosy.
"I walked the streets of Philadelphia," he once wrote, "in solitude,
borne down by the weight of care and unpopularity," and Dr. Rush
mentions that he saw him thus walking the streets alone, "an object of
nearly universal scorn and detestation."
But he was on the gaining side.
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