=360. Abolitionist Petitions to Congress.=—The Southerners, alarmed at the thought of the bad effects upon their interests that debate on these petitions might have, secured the passage of resolutions tabling them. But they found it hard to silence such an advocate as John Quincy Adams, who had not disdained to serve his country in the House of Representatives after having held the highest office open to a citizen. Adams was not an abolitionist, but he did believe in the right of all citizens to petition Congress, and until his death, in 1848, he championed the cause of liberty in the most eloquent way. Soon, too, the Southerners had the difficult task of disposing of the abolitionist pamphlets sent through the mails. As a result of their efforts to suppress freedom of speech and kindred rights, the cause they were opposing gained in strength. It had its martyr in E. P. Lovejoy, murdered in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, and its fiery orator in Wendell Phillips[158] of Boston. It had the future with it also, but this only the more far-sighted of the Southerners could see. The mass of them saw only that an institution bequeathed to them by their fathers and, as they believed, essential to their comfort and prosperity, was being assailed by men who, as a rule, had had little close contact with it. In consequence, they naturally made the best resistance they could. They would have been more than human if they had not resisted, but it must be confessed that their speeches and actions were often so extreme in character as to defeat their ends. On the other hand, the abolitionists were partly responsible, in their turn, for the extreme stand taken by the Southerners, for they were very intemperate in their strictures. Because they abhorred slavery, they thought it logical to abhor slaveholders and the Constitution of the United States, which permitted slavery. They were opposed to all efforts to settle the slavery question by political action. They upheld every kind of reform, no matter how extreme, and were continually at loggerheads among themselves. In other words, they were impractical, and their methods in the early years of the agitation were abhorrent to the average American citizen. Nevertheless, they aroused the public conscience on the subject of slavery, and, as leaders of a crusade, their most influential members, men and women, have perhaps never been surpassed. FINANCIAL DISTURBANCES.