It would be easy to show how in all ages the refusal of gifts has been recognized as the sign of virtue, if not the requirement of duty. The story of St. Louis of France is beautiful and suggestive. Leaving on a crusade, he charged the Queen, who remained behind, “not to accept presents for herself or her children.”[110] Such was one of the injunctions by which this monarch, when far away on a pious expedition, impressed himself upon his country. My own strong convictions on this Presidential pretension were aroused in a conversation which it was my privilege to enjoy with John Quincy Adams, as he sat in his sick-chamber at his son’s house in Boston, a short time before he fell at his post of duty in the House of Representatives. In a voice trembling with age and with emotion, he said that no public man could take gifts without peril; and he confessed that his own judgment had been quickened by the example of Count Romanzoff, the eminent Chancellor of the Russian Empire, who, after receiving costly gifts from foreign sovereigns with whom he had negotiated treaties, felt a difficulty of conscience in keeping them, and at last handed over their value to a hospital, as he related to Mr. Adams, then Minister at St. Petersburg.[111] The latter was impressed by this Russian example, and through his long career, as Minister abroad, Secretary of State, President, and Representative, always refused gifts, unless a book or some small article in its nature a token and not a reward or bribe. The Constitution testifies against the taking of gifts by officers of the United States, when it provides that “no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present or emolument from any king, prince, or foreign State.” The acceptance of a present or emolument from our own citizens was left without constitutional inhibition, to be constrained by the public conscience and the just aversion to any semblance of bargain and sale, or bribery, in the public service.