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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Education of Henry Adams
+
+Author: Henry Adams
+
+Posting Date: December 15, 2011 [EBook #2044]
+Release Date: January, 2000
+[Last updated: July 30, 2013]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Richard Fane
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Education of Henry Adams
+
+by Henry Adams
+
+
+
+
+
+THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
+
+        CONTENTS
+        EDITOR'S PREFACE
+        PREFACE
+     I. QUINCY (1838-1848)
+    II. BOSTON (1848-1854)
+   III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
+    IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
+     V. BERLIN (1858-1859)
+    VI. ROME (1859-1860)
+   VII. TREASON (1860-1861)
+  VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861)
+    IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
+     X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
+    XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
+   XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863)
+  XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
+   XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
+    XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868)
+   XVI. THE PRESS (1868)
+  XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
+ XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
+   XIX. CHAOS (1870)
+    XX. FAILURE (1871)
+   XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
+  XXII. CHICAGO (1893)
+ XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898)
+  XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
+   XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
+  XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901)
+ XXVII. TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
+XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
+  XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
+   XXX. VIS INERTIAE (1903)
+  XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
+ XXXII. VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
+XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
+ XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904)
+  XXXV. NUNC AGE (1905)
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE
+
+  THIS volume, written in 1905 as a sequel to the same author's
+"Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," was privately printed, to the number
+of one hundred copies, in 1906, and sent to the persons interested, for
+their assent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was
+thus explained at the end of Chapter XXIX: --
+
+  "Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured
+by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a
+unit--the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as
+a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams
+to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens
+Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he
+might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as
+true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once
+in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a
+volume which he mentally knew as 'Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a
+Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity.' From that point he proposed to fix
+a position for himself, which he could label: 'The Education of Henry
+Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.' With the help of
+these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and
+backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should
+know better."
+
+  The "Chartres" was finished and privately printed in 1904. The
+"Education" proved to be more difficult. The point on which the author
+failed to please himself, and could get no light from readers or
+friends, was the usual one of literary form. Probably he saw it in
+advance, for he used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was
+to complete St. Augustine's "Confessions," but that St. Augustine, like
+a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a
+small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to
+multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end.
+
+  Probably he was, in fact, trying only to work into it his
+favorite theory of history, which now fills the last three or four
+chapters of the "Education," and he could not satisfy himself with his
+workmanship. At all events, he was still pondering over the problem in
+1910, when he tried to deal with it in another way which might be more
+intelligible to students. He printed a small volume called "A Letter to
+American Teachers," which he sent to his associates in the American
+Historical Association, hoping to provoke some response. Before he
+could satisfy himself even on this minor point, a severe illness in the
+spring of 1912 put an end to his literary activity forever.
+
+  The matter soon passed beyond his control. In 1913 the
+Institute of Architects published the "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres."
+Already the "Education" had become almost as well known as the
+"Chartres," and was freely quoted by every book whose author requested
+it. The author could no longer withdraw either volume; he could no
+longer rewrite either, and he could not publish that which he thought
+unprepared and unfinished, although in his opinion the other was
+historically purposeless without its sequel. In the end, he preferred
+to leave the "Education" unpublished, avowedly incomplete, trusting
+that it might quietly fade from memory. According to his theory of
+history as explained in Chapters XXXIII and XXXIV, the teacher was at
+best helpless, and, in the immediate future, silence next to
+good-temper was the mark of sense. After midsummer, 1914, the rule was
+made absolute.
+
+  The Massachusetts Historical Society now publishes the
+"Education" as it was printed in 1907, with only such marginal
+corrections as the author made, and it does this, not in opposition to
+the author's judgment, but only to put both volumes equally within
+reach of students who have occasion to consult them.
+
+HENRY CABOT LODGE
+
+September, 1918
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+  JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU began his famous Confessions by a
+vehement appeal to the Deity: "I have shown myself as I was;
+contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was
+so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast seen it,
+Eternal Father! Collect about me the innumerable swarm of my fellows;
+let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my unworthiness; let
+them blush at my meannesses! Let each of them discover his heart in his
+turn at the foot of thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let
+any one of them tell thee if he dares: 'I was a better man!'"
+
+  Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the
+eighteenth century, and has been commonly thought to have had more
+influence than any other teacher of his time; but his peculiar method
+of improving human nature has not been universally admired. Most
+educators of the nineteenth century have declined to show themselves
+before their scholars as objects more vile or contemptible than
+necessary, and even the humblest teacher hides, if possible, the faults
+with which nature has generously embellished us all, as it did Jean
+Jacques, thinking, as most religious minds are apt to do, that the
+Eternal Father himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting
+under his eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.
+
+  As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent
+guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature offers scarcely one
+working model for high education. The student must go back, beyond Jean
+Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a model even of self-teaching.
+Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has
+discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience,
+turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss
+it.
+
+  As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he
+erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and
+largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself,
+and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of
+education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the
+clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor
+adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The
+tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities
+or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and
+the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the
+patchwork fitted on their fathers.
+
+  At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his
+teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject
+of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is
+economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of
+obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the
+tools and models may be thrown away.
+
+  The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other
+geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the
+study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it is the only
+measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition; it must have the
+air of reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it
+had life. Who knows? Possibly it had!
+
+February 16, 1907
+
+
+
+
+THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+QUINCY (1838-1848)
+
+  UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the
+house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs,
+or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount
+Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third
+house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born,
+and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church
+after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.
+
+  Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
+and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under
+the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly
+branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the
+coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer;
+but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the
+field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed
+through life, with the safeguards of an old, established traffic.
+Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one
+needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years
+earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young man's
+success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great compared
+with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of
+starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so
+colonial,--so troglodytic--as the First Church, the Boston State House,
+Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and
+Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so
+queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long
+after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child
+of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to
+find himself required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been
+consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such
+cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one of which
+neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of time knew the
+rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not consulted and was not
+responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents,
+he would certainly have told them to change nothing as far as concerned
+him. He would have been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child,
+born in the year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest
+game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could
+not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual
+plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he had
+been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do it again,
+the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his life as a whole
+he was a consenting, contracting party and partner from the moment he
+was born to the moment he died. Only with that understanding--as a
+consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society of
+his age--had his education an interest to himself or to others.
+
+  As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game
+at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the
+players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise
+has no moral and little incident. A story of education--seventy years
+of it--the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other
+values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel;
+but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in
+dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and
+walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his
+own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning
+how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
+
+  This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
+years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a
+vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked before, to
+get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age he puzzled over
+the question whether, on the doctrine of chances, he was at liberty to
+accept himself or his world as an accident. No such accident had ever
+happened before in human experience. For him, alone, the old universe
+was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created. He and his
+eighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut
+apart--separated forever--in act if not in sentiment, by the opening of
+the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard
+steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from
+Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were
+nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six years
+old; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met
+his eyes.
+
+  Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
+knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a
+yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when he
+took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color. The second
+followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841, he developed
+scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as dead, reviving only
+under the careful nursing of his family. When he began to recover
+strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been stronger
+than any other pleasure or pain, for while in after life he retained
+not the faintest recollection of his illness, he remembered quite
+clearly his aunt entering the sickroom bearing in her hand a saucer
+with a baked apple.
+
+  The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be
+that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that the
+sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
+recollection of the child was that of discomfort. The moment he could
+be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from the little
+house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents were to
+occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring Mount Vernon
+Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and he never forgot
+his acute distress for want of air under his blankets, or the noises of
+moving furniture.
+
+  As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in
+childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any
+fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever
+affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they
+might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or
+unfitted them for success; but this fever of Henry Adams took greater
+and greater importance in his eyes, from the point of view of
+education, the longer he lived. At first, the effect was physical. He
+fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height, and
+proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of mind
+seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. He was not good
+in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought
+to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of
+doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the
+judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open;
+the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of
+responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui;
+the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society--all these
+are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to
+individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the
+fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the
+whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for
+his purpose. His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
+
+  As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
+and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as
+it was given; accepting its local standards without a difficulty, and
+enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his age. He seemed to
+himself quite normal, and his companions seemed always to think him so.
+Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and came
+to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that
+eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.
+
+  The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
+revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his
+greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime.
+Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy
+looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless
+generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to
+be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no
+reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the
+duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but
+hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and
+generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his
+long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to
+love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.
+
+  Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
+been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics
+had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was
+harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility--a cold that froze
+the blood, and a heat that boiled it--so that the pleasure of
+hating--one's self if no better victim offered--was not its rarest
+amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not
+a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was
+real and made the strongest motive of education. The double exterior
+nature gave life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat,
+town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and
+thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement,
+school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with six feet
+of snow in the middle; frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or
+runners; thaws when the streets became dangerous to cross; society of
+uncles, aunts, and cousins who expected children to behave themselves,
+and who were not always gratified; above all else, winter represented
+the desire to escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity.
+Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the
+endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing,
+and breathed by boys without knowing it.
+
+  Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
+New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable
+climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry
+Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest--smell
+of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of
+new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs,
+syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on
+the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the
+children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from
+pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a
+spelling-book--the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the boy's
+tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color as sensual
+pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest. The New England
+light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color. The boy was a full
+man before he ever knew what was meant by atmosphere; his idea of
+pleasure in light was the blaze of a New England sun. His idea of color
+was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense
+blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy
+hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens
+and purples of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the
+American colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or
+antipathies, were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick,
+muddy thaws of Boston winter. With such standards, the Bostonian could
+not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. After a
+January blizzard, the boy who could look with pleasure into the violent
+snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its intense light and
+shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He could reach it only by
+education.
+
+  Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
+separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was
+tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or waded in
+the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or fished
+for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the salt-marshes, or
+took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or chased muskrats and
+hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the
+autumn hills, summer and country were always sensual living, while
+winter was always compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of
+nature; winter was school.
+
+  The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams
+was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran
+though life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring,
+irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing emphasis
+to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was
+accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer,
+town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who
+pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster--that is, a man
+employed to tell lies to little boys. Though Quincy was but two hours'
+walk from Beacon Hill, it belonged in a different world. For two
+hundred years, every Adams, from father to son, had lived within sight
+of State Street, and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken
+kindly to the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited his
+double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his great-grandfather, who
+had died a dozen years before his own birth: he took for granted that
+any great-grandfather of his must have always been good, and his
+enemies wicked; but he divined his great-grandfather's character from
+his own. Never for a moment did he connect the two ideas of Boston and
+John Adams; they were separate and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams
+went with Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an
+old man of seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him,
+but except that he heard his grandfather always called "the President,"
+and his grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to suppose that his
+Adams grandfather differed in character from his Brooks grandfather who
+was equally kind and benevolent. He liked the Adams side best, but for
+no other reason than that it reminded him of the country, the summer,
+and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way
+inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The
+reason was clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy had no
+Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life
+and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The
+flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light his own
+fires in the early morning was still on the mantelpiece of his study.
+The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or of an evening
+toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms, water-supplies, lighting,
+heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts, were unknown at
+Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom, a water-supply, a furnace, and
+gas. The superiority of Boston was evident, but a child liked it no
+better for that.
+
+  The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
+Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
+country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed the
+mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The President's
+place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more interesting
+of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in fashion. It
+showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked of colonial age,
+but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he
+never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish
+breath. He never could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century
+style. He was never able to adopt it, any more than his father or
+grandfather or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
+particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was worse;
+but because, for some remote reason, he was born an eighteenth-century
+child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth century. What style it
+had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis Seize chairs
+and sofas. The panels belonged to an old colonial Vassall who built the
+house; the furniture had been brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801
+or 1817, along with porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic
+remnants; and neither of the two eighteenth-century styles--neither
+English Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize--was comfortable for a boy,
+or for any one else. The dark mahogany had been painted white to suit
+daily life in winter gloom. Nothing seemed to favor, for a child's
+objects, the older forms. On the contrary, most boys, as well as
+grown-up people, preferred the new, with good reason, and the child
+felt himself distinctly at a disadvantage for the taste.
+
+  Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
+grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams grandfather.
+Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both were kind to
+children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth than to the
+nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference between them except
+that one was associated with winter and the other with summer; one with
+Boston, the other with Quincy. Even with Medford, the association was
+hardly easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken to pass a few days
+with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became so
+violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought back in
+disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously homesick again.
+
+  The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
+wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even there
+the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel universe
+combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers
+and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child,
+every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From
+cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction
+through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity,
+has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is
+the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy;
+but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the
+colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has
+the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has
+always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like
+a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own
+family, in such a relation, was never easy.
+
+  All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his
+first serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of
+will, in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy, but
+instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting, left
+rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected from a
+natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint. He could not
+have been much more than six years old at the time--seven at the
+utmost--and his mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with the
+President during the summer. What became of the rest of the family he
+quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door
+one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going
+to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage;
+that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy
+had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no
+means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability
+by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by
+successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and
+was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long
+staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the
+door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he
+took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by
+awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation
+at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an
+old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near
+a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to
+school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion
+of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before
+reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this
+reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not
+stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after
+another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously
+the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did
+the President release his hand and depart.
+
+  The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights
+of boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him
+dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had this
+effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind, the child
+must have recognized that the President, though a tool of tyranny, had
+done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence. He had shown no
+temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, and had made no display of
+force. Above all, he had held his tongue. During their long walk he had
+said nothing; he had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the
+duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown
+no concern in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy's
+existence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling
+itself little about his grandson's iniquities, and much about the
+iniquities of President Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age
+feel the whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be
+the vicarious victim of his own sins, and he gave his grandfather
+credit for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt
+instinctive respect. He admitted force as a form of right; he admitted
+even temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would at
+that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as
+every one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any
+Puritan land.
+
+  Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
+rancor, for during these three or four summers the old President's
+relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether his
+older brothers and sisters were still more favored he failed to
+remember, but he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity which,
+when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shocked him, for it
+must have sometimes tried the President's patience. He hung about the
+library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers;
+searched the old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew the
+sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything in the
+corners, and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where a row of
+tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars which were
+supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never did. The Madam bore
+with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which her husband purloined for
+these hatcheries; but she made protest when he carried off her best
+cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that he might see
+the roots grow, but which, she said, he commonly forgot like the
+caterpillars.
+
+  At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
+some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless they have
+been improved off the ground; but his was a restless mind, and although
+he took his hobbies seriously and would have been annoyed had his
+grandchild asked whether he was bored like an English duke, he probably
+cared more for the processes than for the results, so that his grandson
+was saddened by the sight and smell of peaches and pears, the best of
+their kind, which he brought up from the garden to rot on his shelves
+for seed. With the inherited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, the
+little boy Henry conscientiously brought up to him in his study the
+finest peaches he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect.
+Naturally he ate more by way of compensation, but the act showed that
+he bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it is even possible that he
+may have felt a certain self-reproach for his temporary role of
+schoolmaster--seeing that his own career did not offer proof of the
+worldly advantages of docile obedience--for there still exists
+somewhere a little volume of critically edited Nursery Rhymes with the
+boy's name in full written in the President's trembling hand on the
+fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible, given to each child at
+birth, with the proper inscription in the President's hand on the
+fly-leaf; while their grandfather Brooks supplied the silver mugs.
+
+  So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
+house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill," five
+minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view eastward over
+Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his twelfth year, the child
+passed his summers there, and his pleasures of childhood mostly centred
+in it. Of education he had as yet little to complain. Country schools
+were not very serious. Nothing stuck to the mind except home
+impressions, and the sharpest were those of kindred children; but as
+influences that warped a mind, none compared with the mere effect of
+the back of the President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays,
+in line with that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years
+younger, seemed to children about the same age. Before railways entered
+the New England town, every parish church showed half-a-dozen of these
+leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat on the main aisle in the best
+pews, and had sat there, or in some equivalent dignity, since the time
+of St. Augustine, if not since the glacial epoch. It was unusual for
+boys to sit behind a President grandfather, and to read over his head
+the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather, who had "pledged
+his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" to secure the independence
+of his country and so forth; but boys naturally supposed, without much
+reasoning, that other boys had the equivalent of President
+grandfathers, and that churches would always go on, with the
+bald-headed leading citizens on the main aisle, and Presidents or their
+equivalents on the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child:
+"You'll be thinkin' you'll be President too!" The casuality of the
+remark made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot
+it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to him,
+that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea.
+What had been would continue to be. He doubted neither about Presidents
+nor about Churches, and no one suggested at that time a doubt whether a
+system of society which had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams
+more.
+
+  The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but more
+decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles,
+looking out on her garden with the box walks, and seemed a fragile
+creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note or a message, and
+took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate face under what
+seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refined figure; her
+gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there, but
+to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk with
+little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old
+binding, labelled "Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More."
+Try as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her
+cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age, he
+felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far from Boston.
+She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua Johnson, an American
+merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland; and Catherine
+Nuth, of an English family in London. Driven from England by the
+Revolutionary War, Joshua Johnson took his family to Nantes, where they
+remained till the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years
+old when brought back to London, and her sense of nationality must have
+been confused; but the influence of the Johnsons and the services of
+Joshua obtained for him from President Washington the appointment of
+Consul in London on the organization of the Government in 1790. In 1794
+President Washington appointed John Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague.
+He was twenty-seven years old when he returned to London, and found the
+Consul's house a very agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty.
+
+  At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
+than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling
+Americans, either official or other. The Legation was a shifting point,
+between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the City, near
+the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting that it proved
+fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a Romney portrait, but
+among her many charms that of being a New England woman was not one.
+The defect was serious. Her future mother-in-law, Abigail, a famous New
+England woman whose authority over her turbulent husband, the second
+President, was hardly so great as that which she exercised over her
+son, the sixth to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be
+made of stuff stern enough, or brought up in conditions severe enough,
+to suit a New England climate, or to make an efficient wife for her
+paragon son, and Abigail was right on that point, as on most others
+where sound judgment was involved; but sound judgment is sometimes a
+source of weakness rather than of force, and John Quincy already had
+reason to think that his mother held sound judgments on the subject of
+daughters-in-law which human nature, since the fall of Eve, made Adams
+helpless to realize. Being three thousand miles away from his mother,
+and equally far in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797,
+and took her to Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation.
+During three or four exciting years, the young bride lived in Berlin;
+whether she was happy or not, whether she was content or not, whether
+she was socially successful or not, her descendants did not surely
+know; but in any case she could by no chance have become educated there
+for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the overthrow of the Federalist
+Party drove her and her husband to America, and she became at last a
+member of the Quincy household, but by that time her children needed
+all her attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in
+Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband was made Senator in 1803,
+and in 1809 was appointed Minister to Russia. She went with him to St.
+Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles Francis, born in 1807; but
+broken-hearted at having to leave her two older boys behind. The life
+at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her; they were far too poor to
+shine in that extravagant society; but she survived it, though her
+little girl baby did not, and in the winter of 1814-15, alone with the
+boy of seven years old, crossed Europe from St. Petersburg to Paris, in
+her travelling-carriage, passing through the armies, and reaching Paris
+in the Cent Jours after Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next
+went to England as Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of
+the Regent. In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and
+she lived for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer
+for President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miserable
+years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in 1829, she had
+earned the right to be tired and delicate, but she still had fifteen
+years to serve as wife of a Member of the House, after her husband went
+back to Congress in 1833. Then it was that the little Henry, her
+grandson, first remembered her, from 1843 to 1848, sitting in her
+panelled room, at breakfast, with her heavy silver teapot and
+sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which still exist somewhere as an heirloom of
+the modern safety-vault. By that time she was seventy years old or
+more, and thoroughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world. To the
+boy she seemed singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding
+over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her
+Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great
+affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian than she had
+been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow of the Tower
+of London.
+
+  Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old
+husband, the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of
+the coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture. The boy
+knew nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the venerable
+Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe stress and little
+pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might come some of
+those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations, those rebellions
+against law and discipline, which marked more than one of her
+descendants; but he might even then have felt some vague instinctive
+suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin,
+the fall from grace, the curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New
+England stock, but half exotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true
+Bostonian, but even as a child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint
+of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had
+hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old, when his parents left him
+there at school in 1817, and he never forgot the experience. He was to
+be nearly as old as his mother had been in 1845, before he quite
+accepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted him.
+
+  A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
+physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a certain
+delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home in the
+eighteenth century and should, in proper self-respect, have rebelled
+against the standards of the nineteenth. The atmosphere of his first
+ten years must have been very like that of his grandfather at the same
+age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle of Bunker Hill, and even
+as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. The tone of
+Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in
+self-abasement before the majesty of English standards; far from
+concealing it as a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength. The
+eighteenth century ruled society long after 1850. Perhaps the boy began
+to shake it off rather earlier than most of his mates.
+
+  Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather
+abruptly with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a
+certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and gathered,
+from such words as he could catch, that the President, who happened to
+be then staying there, on his way to Washington, had fallen and hurt
+himself. Then he heard the word paralysis. After that day he came to
+associate the word with the figure of his grandfather, in a
+tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side of the spare bedroom
+fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr. Parkman or P. P. F. Degrand,
+on the other side, both dozing.
+
+  The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
+came on February 21, 1848--and the month of February brought life and
+death as a family habit--when the eighteenth century, as an actual and
+living companion, vanished. If the scene on the floor of the House,
+when the old President fell, struck the still simple-minded American
+public with a sensation unusually dramatic, its effect on a
+ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away with the life of his
+grandfather, could not be slight. One had to pay for Revolutionary
+patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers; Presidents; diplomats; Queen
+Anne mahogany and Louis Seize chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits.
+Such things warp young life. Americans commonly believed that they
+ruined it, and perhaps the practical common-sense of the American mind
+judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions
+of the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its surroundings of
+national respect and family pride. By another dramatic chance it
+happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Lunt, was an unusual
+pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual type, such
+as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited from the old
+Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined appearance, his
+dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English
+and his fine appreciation, gave to the funeral service a character that
+left an overwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many
+great functions--funerals and festival--in after-life, till his only
+thought was to see no more, but he never again witnessed anything
+nearly so impressive to him as the last services at Quincy over the
+body of one President and the ashes of another.
+
+  The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
+ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the boy was
+taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy. Like all Mr.
+Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece of oratory, such as only
+an admirable orator and scholar could create; too good for a
+ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but already the boy knew
+that the dead President could not be in it, and had even learned why he
+would have been out of place there; for knowledge was beginning to come
+fast. The shadow of the War of 1812 still hung over State Street; the
+shadow of the Civil War to come had already begun to darken Faneuil
+Hall. No rhetoric could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his
+subject. How could he say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians in the
+heart of mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark of all the
+Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and fifty years before,
+had been their inherited quarrel with State Street, which had again and
+again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and
+civil war, wholesale banishments and confiscations, until the history
+of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston? How could he
+whisper the word Hartford Convention before the men who had made it?
+What would have been said had he suggested the chance of Secession and
+Civil War?
+
+  Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
+face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early Christian.
+What was he?--where was he going? Even then he felt that something was
+wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston. Quincy had always been
+right, for Quincy represented a moral principle--the principle of
+resistance to Boston. His Adams ancestors must have been right, since
+they were always hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong,
+Quincy must be right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came
+back on the eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of
+Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and politician. He
+could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty years had
+in store, and no one could teach him; but sometimes, in his old age, he
+wondered--and could never decide--whether the most clear and certain
+knowledge would have helped him. Supposing he had seen a New York
+stock-list of 1900, and had studied the statistics of railways,
+telegraphs, coal, and steel--would he have quitted his
+eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his
+semi-clerical training, and the rest, in order to perform an expiatory
+pilgrimage to State Street, and ask for the fatted calf of his
+grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank?
+
+  Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
+Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages, looking
+back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+BOSTON (1848-1854)
+
+  PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January 1,
+1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in Boston,
+about two million dollars, to his seven surviving children: four
+sons--Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney; three
+daughters--Charlotte, married to Edward Everett; Ann, married to
+Nathaniel Frothingham, minister of the First Church; and Abigail Brown,
+born April 25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to Charles Francis
+Adams, hardly a year older than herself. Their first child, born in
+1830, was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnson
+grandmother; the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his
+President grandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles
+Francis; while the fourth, being of less account, was in a way given to
+his mother, who named him Henry Brooks, after a favorite brother just
+lost. More followed, but these, being younger, had nothing to do with
+the arduous process of educating.
+
+  The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but the
+family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and almost
+wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have sought long in
+much larger and older societies for three brothers-in-law more
+distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett, Dr. Frothingham,
+and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equally long for seven
+brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all bore more or less the
+stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts Bay, but the shades of
+difference amounted to contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly
+more than Mr. Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had
+broken bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a
+seat in Congress where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's
+administration; support which, as a social consequence, led to the
+marriage of the President's son, Charles Francis, with Mr. Everett's
+youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck of parties which
+marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many promising
+careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but he had risen with
+the Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister to England, and had
+returned to America with the halo of a European reputation, and
+undisputed rank second only to Daniel Webster as the orator and
+representative figure of Boston. The other brother-in-law, Dr.
+Frothingham, belonged to the same clerical school, though in manner
+rather the less clerical of the two. Neither of them had much in common
+with Mr. Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father,
+and by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal
+relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
+cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter, and
+slept through their uncle's sermons, without once thinking to ask what
+the sermons were supposed to mean for them. For two hundred years the
+First Church had seen the same little boys, sleeping more or less
+soundly under the same or similar conditions, and dimly conscious of
+the same feuds; but the feuds had never ceased, and the boys had always
+grown up to inherit them. Those of the generation of 1812 had mostly
+disappeared in 1850; death had cleared that score; the quarrels of John
+Adams, and those of John Quincy Adams were no longer acutely personal;
+the game was considered as drawn; and Charles Francis Adams might then
+have taken his inherited rights of political leadership in succession
+to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors. Between him and State
+Street the relation was more natural than between Edward Everett and
+State Street; but instead of doing so, Charles Francis Adams drew
+himself aloof and renewed the old war which had already lasted since
+1700. He could not help it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the
+popular memory, his son and his only representative could not make
+terms with the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed all the
+great Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams had principles of his own,
+as well as inherited, but even his children, who as yet had no
+principles, could equally little follow the lead of Mr. Webster or even
+of Mr. Seward. They would have lost in consideration more than they
+would have gained in patronage. They were anti-slavery by birth, as
+their name was Adams and their home was Quincy. No matter how much they
+had wished to enter State Street, they felt that State Street never
+would trust them, or they it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must
+hunger for it in vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as
+archangel with the flaming sword, to order them away from the door.
+
+  Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this
+among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even when only
+ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his heart was stone,
+against State Street; his education was warped beyond recovery in the
+direction of Puritan politics. Between him and his patriot grandfather
+at the same age, the conditions had changed little. The year 1848 was
+like enough to the year 1776 to make a fair parallel. The parallel, as
+concerned bias of education, was complete when, a few months after the
+death of John Quincy Adams, a convention of anti-slavery delegates met
+at Buffalo to organize a new party and named candidates for the general
+election in November: for President, Martin Van Buren; for
+Vice-President, Charles Francis Adams.
+
+  For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
+office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement, but even
+apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road through life,
+was decisive for twenty years to come. There was never a side-path of
+escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as indelible as the stamp of 1776,
+but in the eighteenth or any earlier century, the stamp mattered less
+because it was standard, and every one bore it; while men whose lives
+were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all,
+to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This
+was their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was
+easy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it
+gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral
+standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could
+not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and
+that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the
+graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any
+previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited
+dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely
+needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back
+into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.
+
+  Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was
+chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father
+alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully through life's
+quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but, for
+his father, the channel lay clear, while for himself an unknown ocean
+lay beyond. His father's business in life was to get past the dangers
+of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds at least. The task done, he
+might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered
+little to his success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on
+battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity. The
+generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well with the old
+forms of education; that which had its work to do between 1870 and 1900
+needed something quite new.
+
+  His father's character was therefore the larger part of his
+education, as far as any single person affected it, and for that
+reason, if for no other, the son was always a much interested critic of
+his father's mind and temper. Long after his death as an old man of
+eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good deal of
+difference in their points of view. To his son Henry, the quality that
+distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family
+group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed the
+only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a
+hundred years, every newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious
+excuse, derided or abused the older Adamses for want of judgment. They
+abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted
+to assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the
+traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental
+poise--absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness--the faculty of
+standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone--a balance of
+mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor
+admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of
+personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. This
+unusual poise of judgment and temper, ripened by age, became the more
+striking to his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties
+themselves, which were in no way exceptional either for depth or range.
+Charles Francis Adams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind
+was not bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or
+imaginative or oratorical--still less mathematical; but it worked with
+singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery
+of form. Within its range it was a model.
+
+  The standards of Boston were high, much affected by the old
+clerical self-respect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual social
+charm. Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett, Dr. Frothingham. Dr. Palfrey,
+President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Boston ministers of the same
+school, would have commanded distinction in any society; but the
+Adamses had little or no affinity with the pulpit, and still less with
+its eccentric offshoots, like Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the
+philosophy of Concord. Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary
+group, led by Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but
+Mr. Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian.
+Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence, especially in
+medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science. He stood alone.
+He had no master--hardly even his father. He had no scholars--hardly
+even his sons.
+
+  Almost alone among his Boston contemporaries, he was not
+English in feeling or in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of acute
+hostility to England had something to do with this family trait; but in
+his case it went further and became indifference to social distinction.
+Never once in forty years of intimacy did his son notice in him a trace
+of snobbishness. He was one of the exceedingly small number of
+Americans to whom an English duke or duchess seemed to be indifferent,
+and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenient presence.
+This was, it is true, rather the tone of English society in his time,
+but Americans were largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams
+had every possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even
+if he did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or
+vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity or
+self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of pride!
+
+  The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy
+Adams, but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied by
+mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment. No one
+ever charged Charles Francis Adams with this fault. The critics charged
+him with just the opposite defect. They called him cold. No doubt, such
+perfect poise--such intuitive self-adjustment--was not maintained by
+nature without a sacrifice of the qualities which would have upset it.
+No doubt, too, that even his restless-minded, introspective,
+self-conscious children who knew him best were much too ignorant of the
+world and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the
+model before their eyes. A coarser instrument would have impressed them
+more. Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must
+necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the
+world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
+Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not amused by perfect
+balance. Had Mr. Adams's nature been cold, he would have followed Mr.
+Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of
+party discipline and self-interest. Had it been less balanced than it
+was, he would have gone with Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr.
+Edmund Quincy, and Theodore Parker, into secession. Between the two
+paths he found an intermediate one, distinctive and characteristic--he
+set up a party of his own.
+
+  This political party became a chief influence in the education
+of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected
+his character at the moment when character is plastic. The group of men
+with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and whose social centre was the
+house in Mount Vernon Street, numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey,
+Richard H. Dana, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in
+spite of his clerical education, was to a boy often the most agreeable,
+for his talk was lighter and his range wider than that of the others;
+he had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take of dinner-table exchange.
+Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be clergyman,
+professor, or statesman, while, like every other true Bostonian, he
+yearned for the ease of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall or the
+Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the opposite; he
+affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous
+seaman, and only as one got to know him better one found the man of
+rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a
+day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the burden, as though
+he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for
+his mind and will were robust, but he might have said what his lifelong
+friend William M. Evarts used to say: "I pride myself on my success in
+doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don't like to do."
+Dana's ideal of life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on the
+front benches of the House of Commons until he should be promoted to
+the woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that should place him
+above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but he
+forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his longings
+with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the four men, Dana
+was the most marked. Without dogmatism or self-assertion, he seemed
+always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled a
+well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked close to
+its subject, as a lawyer's should; but disguise and silence it as he
+liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth generation.
+
+  In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him,
+but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different from his
+three associates--altogether out of line. He, too, adored English
+standards, but his ambition led him to rival the career of Edmund
+Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had made so brilliant a start,
+but rather in the steps of Edward Everett than of Daniel Webster. As an
+orator he had achieved a triumph by his oration against war; but Boston
+admired him chiefly for his social success in England and on the
+Continent; success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo
+never acquired by domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and
+instinct, felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated it
+the more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the
+passions of politics. He was rarely without a pocket-full of letters
+from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having sacrificed to principle
+his social position in America, he clung the more closely to his
+foreign attachments. The Free Soil Party fared ill in Beacon Street.
+The social arbiters of Boston--George Ticknor and the rest--had to
+admit, however unwillingly, that the Free Soil leaders could not mingle
+with the friends and followers of Mr. Webster. Sumner was socially
+ostracized, and so, for that matter, were Palfrey, Dana, Russell,
+Adams, and all the other avowed anti-slavery leaders, but for them it
+mattered less, because they had houses and families of their own; while
+Sumner had neither wife nor household, and, though the most socially
+ambitious of all, and the most hungry for what used to be called polite
+society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in Boston.
+Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, and even in Beacon Street he
+could always take refuge in the house of Mr. Lodge, but few days passed
+when he did not pass some time in Mount Vernon Street. Even with that,
+his solitude was glacial, and reacted on his character. He had nothing
+but himself to think about. His superiority was, indeed, real and
+incontestable; he was the classical ornament of the anti-slavery party;
+their pride in him was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.
+
+  The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any older
+man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation of Mr. Sumner
+in the household was far closer than any relation of blood. None of the
+uncles approached such intimacy. Sumner was the boy's ideal of
+greatness; the highest product of nature and art. The only fault of
+such a model was its superiority which defied imitation. To the
+twelve-year-old boy, his father, Dr. Palfrey, Mr. Dana, were men, more
+or less like what he himself might become; but Mr. Sumner was a
+different order--heroic.
+
+  As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father
+gave him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library,
+and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his Latin Grammar and
+listened to these four gentlemen discussing the course of anti-slavery
+politics. The discussions were always serious; the Free Soil Party took
+itself quite seriously; and they were habitual because Mr. Adams had
+undertaken to edit a newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen, who
+came to discuss its policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams
+was editing the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, and made the boy
+read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father sometimes
+complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and Massachusettensis, Henry
+had shown very little consciousness of punctuation; but the boy
+regarded this part of school life only as a warning, if he ever grew up
+to write dull discussions in the newspapers, to try to be dull in some
+different way from that of his great-grandfather. Yet the discussions
+in the Boston Whig were carried on in much the same style as those of
+John Adams and his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and
+the same habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him
+for his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no more
+from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were all types of
+the past.
+
+  Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still
+directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants
+were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were
+clergymen and each profession were a church. In politics the system
+required competent expression; it was the old Ciceronian idea of
+government by the best that produced the long line of New England
+statesmen. They chose men to represent them because they wanted to be
+well represented, and they chose the best they had. Thus Boston chose
+Daniel Webster, and Webster took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the
+cheques raised for him by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses,
+Amorys, Searses, Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to
+represent them. Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession to
+Webster. Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to Everett. Charles
+Sumner aspired to break the succession, but not the system. The Adamses
+had never been, for any length of time, a part of this State
+succession; they had preferred the national service, and had won all
+their distinction outside the State, but they too had required State
+support and had commonly received it. The little group of men in Mount
+Vernon Street were an offshoot of this system; they were statesmen, not
+politicians; they guided public opinion, but were little guided by it.
+
+  The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation
+in such air. He took for granted that this sort of world, more or less
+the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay, was
+the world which he was to fit. Had he known Europe he would have
+learned no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe, Guizot, and de
+Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel, Macaulay, and John
+Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same upper-class bourgeoisie
+that felt instinctive cousinship with the Boston of Ticknor, Prescott,
+and Motley. Even the typical grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts on the
+real capacity of the middle class, and who at times thought himself
+eccentric, found friendship and alliances in Boston--still more in
+Concord. The system had proved so successful that even Germany wanted
+to try it, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class government
+was the ideal of human progress.
+
+  Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all
+Europe to military practices, never for a moment shook the true faith.
+No one, except Karl Marx, foresaw radical change. What announced it?
+The world was producing sixty or seventy million tons of coal, and
+might be using nearly a million steam-horsepower, just beginning to
+make itself felt. All experience since the creation of man, all divine
+revelation or human science, conspired to deceive and betray a
+twelve-year-old boy who took for granted that his ideas, which were
+alone respectable, would be alone respected.
+
+  Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as
+simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there
+the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure,
+because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all
+she asked--Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt
+was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct
+knowledge of facts to reach perfection:
+
+  "Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
+    Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
+  Given to redeem the human mind from error,
+    There were no need of arsenals nor forts."
+
+Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian
+clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and
+intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who
+controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled. They
+proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine, but
+taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading a virtuous, useful,
+unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient for salvation. For
+them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste of thought;
+nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or had
+offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was
+worked out.
+
+  Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the
+grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy
+went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and
+he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he
+prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his
+brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the
+Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first
+possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious
+instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in
+later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion
+of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal
+defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the
+most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew,
+should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to
+have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and
+should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed
+human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing,
+seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for
+in a long life. The faculty of turning away one's eyes as one
+approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of
+Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in politics; but in
+politics a certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and
+philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms more
+simple than the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker, and of the
+boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed his father and
+scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no
+old problems, and to raise many new ones. The less aggressive protest
+of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an old-world point of view, less
+serious. It was naif.
+
+  The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with
+the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not
+worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no
+other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more
+literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the
+literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table
+discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost
+every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again.
+The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her
+brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women. The oldest
+son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkers in Boston
+society, and perhaps the most popular man in the State, though apt to
+be on the unpopular side. Palfrey and Dana could be entertaining when
+they pleased, and though Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in
+hand, he was willing to be amused, and smiled grandly from time to
+time; while Mr. Adams, who talked relatively little, was always a good
+listener, and laughed over a witticism till he choked.
+
+  By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read
+much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially when
+it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the "Epistles"
+of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the youth. So he read
+Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took
+possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too
+modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon
+became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these
+were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father's
+library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted
+into the mental indolence of history. So too, he read shelves of
+eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of
+Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined.
+Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; but
+the boy was thirty years old before his education reached Wordsworth.
+
+  This is the story of an education, and the person or persons
+who figure in it are supposed to have values only as educators or
+educated. The surroundings concern it only so far as they affect
+education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like Hume,
+Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may study in their works; here all
+appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very nearly the average
+of most boys in physical and mental stature. The influence was wholly
+political and literary. His father made no effort to force his mind,
+but left him free play, and this was perhaps best. Only in one way his
+father rendered him a great service by trying to teach him French and
+giving him some idea of a French accent. Otherwise the family was
+rather an atmosphere than an influence. The boy had a large and
+overpowering set of brothers and sisters, who were modes or replicas of
+the same type, getting the same education, struggling with the same
+problems, and solving the question, or leaving it unsolved much in the
+same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted or what to do for
+it, but all were conscious that they would like to control power in
+some form; and the same thing could be said of an ant or an elephant.
+Their form was tied to politics or literature. They amounted to one
+individual with half-a-dozen sides or facets; their temperaments
+reacted on each other and made each child more like the other. This was
+also education, but in the type, and the Boston or New England type was
+well enough known. What no one knew was whether the individual who
+thought himself a representative of this type, was fit to deal with
+life.
+
+  As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent
+children, given free rein by their parents, or indifferent to check,
+should have come to more or less grief. Certainly no one was strong
+enough to control them, least of all their mother, the queen-bee of the
+hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burden fell, on whose strength they
+all depended, but whose children were much too self-willed and
+self-confident to take guidance from her, or from any one else, unless
+in the direction they fancied. Father and mother were about equally
+helpless. Almost every large family in those days produced at least one
+black sheep, and if this generation of Adamses escaped, it was as much
+a matter of surprise to them as to their neighbors. By some happy
+chance they grew up to be decent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand
+escaped from the burning, always looked back with astonishment at their
+luck. The fact seemed to prove that they were born, like birds, with a
+certain innate balance. Home influences alone never saved the New
+England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin
+him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school
+helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as
+to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was
+almost a method in itself. Yet the day-school of that time was
+respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never
+complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys
+and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not
+amuse him. His memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to
+conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines
+of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only
+in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough
+machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried.
+Schoolmasters never gave time.
+
+  In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the
+prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days,
+from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs
+turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional.
+Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence was exceptional. For
+success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared,
+the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German, and
+Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special
+branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he
+could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by
+the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on
+them at school. These four tools were necessary to his success in life,
+but he never controlled any one of them.
+
+  Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less
+complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his companions.
+Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an
+hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school
+ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked
+down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own
+ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in
+life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.
+
+  Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen
+were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy resources
+for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were more familiar than
+parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and swim and were sent to
+dancing-school; they played a rudimentary game of baseball, football,
+and hockey; a few could sail a boat; still fewer had been out with a
+gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray wild duck; one or two may have
+learned something of natural history if they came from the neighborhood
+of Concord; none could ride across country, or knew what shooting with
+dogs meant. Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after
+1850. For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all
+pleasures, winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From
+none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of
+use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century,
+the source of life, and as they came out--Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer,
+Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest--they were devoured; but as
+far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were
+passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in
+the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and
+"The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and
+pears. On the whole he learned most then.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
+
+  EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of
+leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one
+learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be
+unlearned. The surface was ready to take any form that education should
+cut into it, though Boston, with singular foresight, rejected the old
+designs. What sort of education was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had
+no idea, but he escaped the evils of other standards by having no
+standard at all; and what was true of school was true of society.
+Boston offered none that could help outside. Every one now smiles at
+the bad taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe--the society of the
+forties--but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water
+between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged to neither,
+and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor industrial nor
+social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed as English
+boys and girls, but had less means of acquiring form as they grew
+older. Women counted for little as models. Every boy, from the age of
+seven, fell in love at frequent intervals with some girl--always more
+or less the same little girl--who had nothing to teach him, or he to
+teach her, except rather familiar and provincial manners, until they
+married and bore children to repeat the habit. The idea of attaching
+one's self to a married woman, or of polishing one's manners to suit
+the standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered the mind of
+a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his parents. From women
+the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing else. He might not even
+catch the idea that women had more to give. The garden of Eden was
+hardly more primitive.
+
+  To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
+darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to most
+boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard must enjoy
+great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and Henry Adams had
+neither; but no boy escaped some contact with vice of a very low form.
+Blackguardism came constantly under boys' eyes, and had the charm of
+force and freedom and superiority to culture or decency. One might fear
+it, but no one honestly despised it. Now and then it asserted itself as
+education more roughly than school ever did. One of the commonest
+boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century,
+was a game of war on Boston Common. In old days the two hostile forces
+were called North-Enders and South-Enders. In 1850 the North-Enders
+still survived as a legend, but in practice it was a battle of the
+Latin School against all comers, and the Latin School, for snowball,
+included all the boys of the West End. Whenever, on a half-holiday, the
+weather was soft enough to soften the snow, the Common was apt to be
+the scene of a fight, which began in daylight with the Latin School in
+force, rushing their opponents down to Tremont Street, and which
+generally ended at dark by the Latin School dwindling in numbers and
+disappearing. As the Latin School grew weak, the roughs and young
+blackguards grew strong. As long as snowballs were the only weapon, no
+one was much hurt, but a stone may be put in a snowball, and in the
+dark a stick or a slungshot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a
+knife. One afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting. The boy
+Henry, following, as his habit was, his bigger brother Charles, had
+taken part in the battle, and had felt his courage much depressed by
+seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson--"Bully Hig," his
+school name--struck by a stone over the eye, and led off the field
+bleeding in rather a ghastly manner. As night came on, the Latin School
+was steadily forced back to the Beacon Street Mall where they could
+retreat no further without disbanding, and by that time only a small
+band was left, headed by two heroes, Savage and Marvin. A dark mass of
+figures could be seen below, making ready for the last rush, and rumor
+said that a swarm of blackguards from the slums, led by a grisly terror
+called Conky Daniels, with a club and a hideous reputation, was going
+to put an end to the Beacon Street cowards forever. Henry wanted to run
+away with the others, but his brother was too big to run away, so they
+stood still and waited immolation. The dark mass set up a shout, and
+rushed forward. The Beacon Street boys turned and fled up the steps,
+except Savage and Marvin and the few champions who would not run. The
+terrible Conky Daniels swaggered up, stopped a moment with his
+body-guard to swear a few oaths at Marvin, and then swept on and chased
+the flyers, leaving the few boys untouched who stood their ground. The
+obvious moral taught that blackguards were not so black as they were
+painted; but the boy Henry had passed through as much terror as though
+he were Turenne or Henri IV, and ten or twelve years afterwards when
+these same boys were fighting and falling on all the battle-fields of
+Virginia and Maryland, he wondered whether their education on Boston
+Common had taught Savage and Marvin how to die.
+
+  If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not
+incomplete. The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery
+leaders as well as to their followers. Most of them suffered from it.
+Mobs were always possible. Henry never happened to be actually
+concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was sure to be on
+hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he heard Garrison or
+Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble. Wendell Phillips on a
+platform was a model dangerous for youth. Theodore Parker in his pulpit
+was not much safer. Worst of all, the execution of the Fugitive Slave
+Law in Boston--the sight of Court Square packed with bayonets, and his
+own friends obliged to line the streets under arms as State militia, in
+order to return a negro to slavery--wrought frenzy in the brain of a
+fifteen-year-old, eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted to
+miss no reasonable chance of mischief.
+
+  One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and
+the Boston Massacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an
+eighteenth-century politician, and afterwards only a possibility;
+beyond Boston the first step led only further into politics. After
+February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all those that, since
+1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world. The Madam stayed in
+Washington, after her husband's death, and in her turn was struck by
+paralysis and bedridden. From time to time her son Charles, whose
+affection and sympathy for his mother in her many tribulations were
+always pronounced, went on to see her, and in May, 1850, he took with
+him his twelve-year-old son. The journey was meant as education, and as
+education it served the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a
+boy's thought in 1850. He could not remember taking special interest in
+the railroad journey or in New York; with railways and cities he was
+familiar enough. His first impression was the novelty of crossing New
+York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the Camden and
+Amboy Railroad. This was a new world; a suggestion of corruption in the
+simple habits of American life; a step to exclusiveness never
+approached in Boston; but it was amusing. The boy rather liked it. At
+Trenton the train set him on board a steamer which took him to
+Philadelphia where he smelt other varieties of town life; then again by
+boat to Chester, and by train to Havre de Grace; by boat to Baltimore
+and thence by rail to Washington. This was the journey he remembered.
+The actual journey may have been quite different, but the actual
+journey has no interest for education. The memory was all that
+mattered; and what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his
+lifetime, was the sudden change that came over the world on entering a
+slave State. He took education politically. The mere raggedness of
+outline could not have seemed wholly new, for even Boston had its
+ragged edges, and the town of Quincy was far from being a vision of
+neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seen a finished
+landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind. The railway,
+about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled through unfenced
+fields and woods, or through village streets, among a haphazard variety
+of pigs, cows, and negro babies, who might all have used the cabins for
+pens and styes, had the Southern pig required styes, but who never
+showed a sign of care. This was the boy's impression of what slavery
+caused, and, for him, was all it taught. Coming down in the early
+morning from his bedroom in his grandmother's house--still called the
+Adams Building in--F Street and venturing outside into the air reeking
+with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found himself on an
+earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering from the
+colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble columns and
+fronts of the Post Office and Patent Office which faced each other in
+the distance, like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of
+a deserted Syrian city. Here and there low wooden houses were scattered
+along the streets, as in other Southern villages, but he was chiefly
+attracted by an unfinished square marble shaft, half-a-mile below, and
+he walked down to inspect it before breakfast. His aunt drily remarked
+that, at this rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she
+could not guess--having lived always in Washington--how little the
+sights of Washington had to do with its interest.
+
+  The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an
+understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he
+understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a
+horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more
+repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave
+States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had
+not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another
+side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; the
+thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more; the sense of
+atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again; and the brooding
+indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the
+atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple,
+but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as an
+attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers, of
+pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern
+drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with
+bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed
+his Johnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the same way, but
+with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance. The softness of his
+gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted with him, did not
+come from Boston. His aunt was anything rather than Bostonian. He did
+not wholly come from Boston himself. Though Washington belonged to a
+different world, and the two worlds could not live together, he was not
+sure that he enjoyed the Boston world most. Even at twelve years old he
+could see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve
+hundred, if by accident he should happen to live so long.
+
+  His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the
+Senate, which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists, was
+freely open to visitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled a pleasant
+political club. Standing behind the Vice-President's chair, which is
+now the Chief Justice's, the boy was presented to some of the men whose
+names were great in their day, and as familiar to him as his own. Clay
+and Webster and Calhoun were there still, but with them a Free Soil
+candidate for the Vice-Presidency had little to do; what struck boys
+most was their type. Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as
+they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman. The type
+of Senator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate,
+when in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only some sixty
+members, and affecting the airs of courtesy. Its vice was not so much a
+vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The statesman of all periods
+was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity was less offensive than
+familiarity--on the platform as in the pulpit--and Southern pomposity,
+when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and
+childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the
+Websterian or Conklinian pomposity of the North. The boy felt at ease
+there, more at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though
+his acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives went
+back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly to him, and
+seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in
+spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years, after he ceased
+to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal enemies. Decidedly the
+Senate, pro-slavery though it were, seemed a friendly world.
+
+  This first step in national politics was a little like the walk
+before breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a
+fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where even the
+weeds grew rank. The second step was like the first, except that it led
+to the White House. He was taken to see President Taylor. Outside, in a
+paddock in front, "Old Whitey," the President's charger, was grazing,
+as they entered; and inside, the President was receiving callers as
+simply as if he were in the paddock too. The President was friendly,
+and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that he could ever recall. In
+fact, what strangeness should he feel? The families were intimate; so
+intimate that their friendliness outlived generations, civil war, and
+all sorts of rupture. President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van
+Buren and the Free Soil Party. To him, the Adamses might still be of
+use. As for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and,
+barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or
+less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he
+owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He
+felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter
+of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if
+he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in
+distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor,
+might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some
+very shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators,
+Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.
+
+  Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not. No
+sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole country, one
+could hardly have met with an admission of respect for any office or
+name, unless it were George Washington. That was--to all appearance
+sincerely--respected. People made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and made
+even an effort to build Washington a monument. The effort had failed,
+but one still went to Mount Vernon, although it was no easy trip. Mr.
+Adams took the boy there in a carriage and pair, over a road that gave
+him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards. To the
+New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were
+connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant
+bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy
+fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this
+road's badness which amounted to social crime--and yet, at the end of
+the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George
+Washington.
+
+  Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders
+do, or this boy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to
+repeat what he was told--that George Washington stood alone. Otherwise
+this third step in his Washington education would have been his last.
+On that line, the problem of progress was not soluble, whatever the
+optimists and orators might say--or, for that matter, whatever they
+might think. George Washington could not be reached on Boston lines.
+George Washington was a primary, or, if Virginians liked it better, an
+ultimate relation, like the Pole Star, and amid the endless restless
+motion of every other visible point in space, he alone remained steady,
+in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end. All the other points shifted
+their bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John
+Marshall, took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but Mount
+Vernon always remained where it was, with no practicable road to reach
+it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was only Quincy in a
+Southern setting. No doubt it was much more charming, but it was the
+same eighteenth-century, the same old furniture, the same old patriot,
+and the same old President.
+
+  The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the
+coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms
+upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself in
+memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine; he had only
+enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to ask himself or
+his father how to deal with the moral problem that deduced George
+Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In practice, such trifles as
+contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of
+ignoring them makes the practical man; but any attempt to deal with
+them seriously as education is fatal. Luckily Charles Francis Adams
+never preached and was singularly free from cant. He may have had views
+of his own, but he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple
+elementary fact that George Washington stood alone.
+
+  Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution,
+even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than ever,
+and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century,
+but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole
+Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy thought as
+dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. The Slave
+power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could
+go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the boy
+gradually found his surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an
+isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a
+shoal of moving fish, he began to learn the first and easier lessons of
+practical politics. Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century
+statesmanship. America and he began, at the same time, to become aware
+of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery. Even at
+that early moment, a rather slow boy felt dimly conscious that he might
+meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile
+sixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship with
+late nineteenth-century party organization. The first vague sense of
+feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in 185l.
+
+  The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as
+already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster, had
+nothing to do with machinery. Websters or Sewards depended on others
+for machine work and money--on Peter Harveys and Thurlow Weeds, who
+spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse, and asked no reward.
+Almost without knowing it, the subordinates ousted their employers and
+created a machine which no one but themselves could run. In 1850 things
+had not quite reached that point. The men who ran the small Free Soil
+machine were still modest, though they became famous enough in their
+own right. Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame, and the other
+managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts Democrats giving
+the State to the Democrats and a seat in the Senate to the Free
+Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman friends would
+have nothing to do, for such a coalition was in their eyes much like
+jockeys selling a race. They did not care to take office as pay for
+votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats. Theirs was a correct, not to say
+noble, position; but, as a matter of fact, they took the benefit of the
+sale, for the coalition chose Charles Sumner as its candidate for the
+Senate, while George S. Boutwell was made Governor for the Democrats.
+This was the boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one;
+not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the
+nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too
+good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles Sumner
+happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods, but between
+his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him,
+there was none. He entered into no casuistry on the matter. His friend
+was right because his friend, and the boy shared the glory. The
+question of education did not rise while the conflict lasted. Yet every
+one saw as clearly then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must
+be learned and understood, once for all. The boy might ignore, as a
+mere historical puzzle, the question how to deduce George Washington
+from the sum of all wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce
+Charles Sumner from the sum of political corruption. On that line, too,
+education could go no further. Tammany Hall stood at the end of the
+vista.
+
+  Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his
+object in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to
+anti-slavery principles, and that he did it. Henry Adams could rise to
+no such moral elevation. He was only a boy, and his object in
+supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Senator. It
+was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend a
+millionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral conclusions,
+except by admitting that he and his father and Sumner were wrong, and
+this he was never willing to do, for the consequences of this admission
+were worse than those of the other. Thus, before he was fifteen years
+old, he had managed to get himself into a state of moral confusion from
+which he never escaped. As a politician, he was already corrupt, and he
+never could see how any practical politician could be less corrupt than
+himself.
+
+  Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice. At
+the time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize, though the
+press shouted it at him from every corner, and though the Mount Vernon
+Street conclave agreed with the press; yet he could not plead
+ignorance, and even in the heat of the conflict, he never cared to
+defend the coalition. Boy as he was, he knew enough to know that
+something was wrong, but his only interest was the election. Day after
+day, the General Court balloted; and the boy haunted the gallery,
+following the roll-call, and wondered what Caleb Cushing meant by
+calling Mr. Sumner a "one-eyed abolitionist." Truly the difference in
+meaning with the phrase "one-ideaed abolitionist," which was Mr.
+Cushing's actual expression, is not very great, but neither the one nor
+the other seemed to describe Mr. Sumner to the boy, who never could
+have made the error of classing Garrison and Sumner together, or
+mistaking Caleb Cushing's relation to either. Temper ran high at that
+moment, while Sumner every day missed his election by only one or two
+votes. At last, April 24, 1851, standing among the silent crowd in the
+gallery, Henry heard the vote announced which gave Sumner the needed
+number. Slipping under the arms of the bystanders, he ran home as hard
+as he could, and burst into the dining-room where Mr. Sumner was seated
+at table with the family. He enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that
+he was elected; it was probably the proudest moment in the life of
+either.
+
+  The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers
+of boys and men in the streets wearing black crepe on their arm. He
+knew few Free Soil boys in Boston; his acquaintances were what he
+called pro-slavery; so he thought proper to tie a bit of white silk
+ribbon round his own arm by way of showing that his friend Mr. Sumner
+was not wholly alone. This little piece of bravado passed unnoticed; no
+one even cuffed his ears; but in later life he was a little puzzled to
+decide which symbol was the more correct. No one then dreamed of four
+years' war, but every one dreamed of secession. The symbol for either
+might well be matter of doubt.
+
+  This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the
+political climax. The boy, like a million other American boys, was a
+politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing else. He
+should have been, like his grandfather, a protege of George Washington,
+a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing to do but look directly
+ahead, follow orders, and march. On the contrary, he was not even a
+Bostonian; he felt himself shut out of Boston as though he were an
+exile; he never thought of himself as a Bostonian; he never looked
+about him in Boston, as boys commonly do wherever they are, to select
+the street they like best, the house they want to live in, the
+profession they mean to practise. Always he felt himself somewhere
+else; perhaps in Washington with its social ease; perhaps in Europe;
+and he watched with vague unrest from the Quincy hills the smoke of the
+Cunard steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon, and
+disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day might be, as
+though the steamers were offering to take him away, which was precisely
+what they were doing.
+
+  Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at
+hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when Henry
+Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas were more
+than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary, mathematical result
+of conditions old as history and fixed as fate--invariable sequence in
+man's experience. The only idea which would have been quite
+unreasonable scarcely entered his mind. This was the thought of going
+westward and growing up with the country. That he was not in the least
+fitted for going West made no objection whatever, since he was much
+better fitted than most of the persons that went. The convincing reason
+for staying in the East was that he had there every advantage over the
+West. He could not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enormous
+tribute to Boston and New York. One's position in the East was the best
+in the world for every purpose that could offer an object for going
+westward. If ever in history men had been able to calculate on a
+certainty for a lifetime in advance, the citizens of the great Eastern
+seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway systems were already
+laid out. Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of
+the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantage,
+while it offered uncertainties in plenty.
+
+  At any other moment in human history, this education, including
+its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but
+quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so
+endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and
+not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted. He saw no reason
+for thinking that any one else had more. He finished with school, not
+very brilliantly, but without finding fault with the sum of his
+knowledge. Probably he knew more than his father, or his grandfather,
+or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old. Only on
+looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and
+pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether,
+on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to
+that of the year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The
+calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century
+thought, but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in
+essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature,
+art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the
+American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The
+education he had received bore little relation to the education he
+needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at
+all. He knew not even where or how to begin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
+
+  ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time
+down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and felt no
+sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience was ended.
+Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a period so long as
+four years without some sensation of loss--some sentiment of habit--but
+school was what in after life he commonly heard his friends denounce as
+an intolerable bore. He was born too old for it. The same thing could
+be said of most New England boys. Mentally they never were boys. Their
+education as men should have begun at ten years old. They were fully
+five years more mature than the English or European boy for whom
+schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as
+afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible education were
+wasted in doing imperfectly what might have been done perfectly in one,
+and in any case would have had small value. The next regular step was
+Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after
+generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to
+Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever
+done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom,
+social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation
+in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort,
+but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their
+friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social
+self-respect.
+
+  Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
+liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
+needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted
+to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals
+were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the
+College a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what
+the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the College attained
+with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be
+recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent
+itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not a
+will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an
+autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been
+stamped.
+
+  The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief
+wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it,
+teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams debated whether in
+fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions, but,
+disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than
+any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that
+little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of
+facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew
+little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge.
+
+  What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got
+from his mates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing, a result
+common enough in education. Yet the College Catalogue for the years
+1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distinguished in their time.
+Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led it; H. H. Richardson and O.
+W. Holmes helped to close it. As a rule the most promising of all die
+early, and never get their names into a Dictionary of Contemporaries,
+which seems to be the only popular standard of success. Many died in
+the war. Adams knew them all, more or less; he felt as much regard, and
+quite as much respect for them then, as he did after they won great
+names and were objects of a vastly wider respect; but, as help towards
+education, he got nothing whatever from them or they from him until
+long after they had left college. Possibly the fault was his, but one
+would like to know how many others shared it. Accident counts for much
+in companionship as in marriage. Life offers perhaps only a score of
+possible companions, and it is mere chance whether they meet as early
+as school or college, but it is more than a chance that boys brought up
+together under like conditions have nothing to give each other. The
+Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection
+of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively
+commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms,
+and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical;
+singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not
+hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but
+little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of their
+own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others; negative to a
+degree that in the long run became positive and triumphant. Not harsh
+in manners or judgment, rather liberal and open-minded, they were still
+as a body the most formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long
+life exposed to criticism. They never flattered, seldom praised; free
+from vanity, they were not intolerant of it; but they were
+objectiveness itself; their attitude was a law of nature; their
+judgment beyond appeal, not an act either of intellect or emotion or of
+will, but a sort of gravitation.
+
+  This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard
+College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this band of
+nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but they had equally
+little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to live with, and above
+the average of students--German, French, English, or what not--but
+chiefly because each individual appeared satisfied to stand alone. It
+seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when one
+has no passions; still easier when one has no pains.
+
+  Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on
+enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as
+little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further
+affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians
+among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams
+himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge of friendship
+separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity. One of the Virginians was
+the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the Second United States Cavalry;
+the two others who seemed instinctively to form a staff for Lee, were
+town-Virginians from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came from Cincinnati
+and was half Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, Longworth on the mother's
+side. For the first time Adams's education brought him in contact with
+new types and taught him their values. He saw the New England type
+measure itself with another, and he was part of the process.
+
+  Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the
+eighteenth century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of the same
+age. Roony Lee had changed little from the type of his grandfather,
+Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal
+Virginian openness towards all he liked, he had also the Virginian
+habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. No one cared
+to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted command. For a year,
+at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young man in his
+class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of
+command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was
+simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England
+student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant
+he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a
+school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage,
+but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.
+
+  The lesson in education was vital to these young men, who,
+within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing
+their college conclusions. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had
+temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he
+could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting
+two; but in life one could get along very well without ideas, if one
+had only the social instinct. Dozens of eminent statesmen were men of
+Lee's type, and maintained themselves well enough in the legislature,
+but college was a sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself,
+though the Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of
+neither were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives;
+but the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the
+Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst stages,
+while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous. When a Virginian
+had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief and substantial whiskey,
+none of his Northern friends could be sure that he might not be
+waiting, round the corner, with a knife or pistol, to revenge insult by
+the dry light of delirium tremens; and when things reached this
+condition, Lee had to exhaust his authority over his own staff. Lee was
+a gentleman of the old school, and, as every one knows, gentlemen of
+the old school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but
+this was not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence
+of political feeling in those years; he kept his temper and his friends
+under control.
+
+  Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to them,
+by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken and even warm.
+At a moment when the immediate future posed no problem in education so
+vital as the relative energy and endurance of North and South, this
+momentary contact with Southern character was a sort of education for
+its own sake; but this was not all. No doubt the self-esteem of the
+Yankee, which tended naturally to self-distrust, was flattered by
+gaining the slow conviction that the Southerner, with his slave-owning
+limitations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern
+life as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves,
+and hunting the bos primigenius, and that every quality in which he was
+strong, made him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that even in this
+respect one eighteenth-century type might not differ deeply from
+another. Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century
+before; but Adams was himself a good deal nearer the type of his
+great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendent. He was
+little more fit than the Virginians to deal with a future America which
+showed no fancy for the past. Already Northern society betrayed a
+preference for economists over diplomats or soldiers--one might even
+call it a jealousy--against which two eighteenth-century types had
+little chance to live, and which they had in common to fear.
+
+  Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into
+close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry Adams,
+but the chief difference between them as collegians consisted only in
+their difference of scholarship: Lee was a total failure; Adams a
+partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt his failure more sensibly, so
+that he gladly seized the chance of escape by accepting a commission
+offered him by General Winfield Scott in the force then being organized
+against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance,
+which flattered Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could
+do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a
+certain amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.
+
+  If the student got little from his mates, he got little more
+from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his
+purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what
+the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one
+in a hundred--one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the
+only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole
+of it. He got barely half of an average. Long afterwards, when the
+devious path of life led him back to teach in his turn what no student
+naturally cared or needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of
+faculty-meetings by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found
+himself graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most
+needed--mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so
+nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and
+whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or
+the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed
+lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst
+he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics,
+like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet.
+
+  Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from
+the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free-trade
+and protection, he got little from Political Economy. He could not
+afterwards remember to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned, or
+the title of "Capital." He was equally ignorant of Auguste Comte. These
+were the two writers of his time who most influenced its thought. The
+bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity
+was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that
+befogged his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to
+his imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the
+Glacial Period and Paleontology, which had more influence on his
+curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether. The
+entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work
+of any four months in after life.
+
+  Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have
+value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not
+by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no
+bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias, if Adams
+had been capable of finding other amusement, but the climate kept him
+steady to desultory and useless reading, till he had run through
+libraries of volumes which he forgot even to their title-pages. Rather
+by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors
+or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating
+approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a
+long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his
+abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among
+the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly
+accurate gauge of their scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the
+opinion that his instructors were very nearly right, and when he became
+a professor in his turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking his
+scholars, he still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was not
+far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative standard
+because it was the standard of the school.
+
+  He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
+thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much affected
+his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and stood watching
+vaguely for a path and a direction. The world outside seemed large, but
+the paths that led into it were not many and lay mostly through Boston,
+where he did not want to go. As it happened, by pure chance, the first
+door of escape that seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James
+Russell Lowell opened it.
+
+  Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of
+Belles-Lettres, had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back whatever
+he found to bring. The literary world then agreed that truth survived
+in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Renan, Emerson, with
+scores of popular followers, taught the German faith. The literary
+world had revolted against the yoke of coming capitalism--its
+money-lenders, its bank directors, and its railway magnates. Thackeray
+and Dickens followed Balzac in scratching and biting the unfortunate
+middle class with savage ill-temper, much as the middle class had
+scratched and bitten the Church and Court for a hundred years before.
+The middle class had the power, and held its coal and iron well in
+hand, but the satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they
+were agreed that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a
+danger to England, they turned to Germany because at that moment
+Germany was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind
+western Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought,
+method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of scholarship.
+Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare--Kant ranked as a
+law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were obliged to become
+German, for German thought was revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had
+followed the rest, not very enthusiastically, but with sufficient
+conviction, and invited his scholars to join him. Adams was glad to
+accept the invitation, rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than
+Germany, but still in perfect good faith. It was the first serious
+attempt he had made to direct his own education, and he was sure of
+getting some education out of it; not perhaps anything that he
+expected, but at least a path.
+
+  Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
+path proved to be, but the student could never see what other was open
+to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen every stage of his
+coming life, and he would probably have done worse. The preliminary
+step was pure gain. James Russell Lowell had brought back from Germany
+the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of
+allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked
+the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal,
+for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older
+men ought to flatter and please the young even when they altogether
+exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As
+practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith
+rather than towards Boston where he properly belonged; for Concord, in
+the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure light. Adams approached it in
+much the same spirit as he would have entered a Gothic Cathedral, for
+he well knew that the priests regarded him as only a worm. To the
+Concord Church all Adamses were minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of
+feeling, poetry or imagination; little higher than the common scourings
+of State Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow
+scope; and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel
+uncertainty about so many matters more important than Adamses that his
+mind rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready
+to admit his unworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The
+influence of Harvard College was beginning to have its effect. He was
+slipping away from fixed principles; from Mount Vernon Street; from
+Quincy; from the eighteenth century; and his first steps led toward
+Concord.
+
+  He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the
+rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an
+insect, or something much lower--a man. It was surely no fault of his
+that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps--as Mr. Emerson justly
+said--it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime,
+he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was
+unreal, it was himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not
+the banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did
+not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to him, at one
+time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowell was as little
+transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy got no revolutionary
+thought whatever--objective or subjective as they used to call it--but
+he got good-humored encouragement to do what amused him, which
+consisted in passing two years in Europe after finishing the four years
+of Cambridge.
+
+  The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
+the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
+Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College
+influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could trace, but he
+tended towards negation on his own account, as one side of the New
+England mind had always done, and even there he could never feel sure
+that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In his opinion
+the education was not serious, but in truth hardly any Boston student
+took it seriously, and none of them seemed sure that President Walker
+himself, or President Felton after him, took it more seriously than the
+students. For them all, the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly
+called social, rather than mental.
+
+  Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
+only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more, but
+he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his social
+position would never be questioned. What he needed was a career in
+which social position had value. Never in his life would he have to
+explain who he was; never would he have need of acquaintance to
+strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly some one to show
+him how to use the acquaintance he cared to make. He made no
+acquaintance in college which proved to have the smallest use in after
+life. All his Boston friends he knew before, or would have known in any
+case, and contact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the last education
+these young men needed. Cordial and intimate as their college relations
+were, they all flew off in different directions the moment they took
+their degrees. Harvard College remained a tie, indeed, but a tie little
+stronger than Beacon Street and not so strong as State Street.
+Strangers might perhaps gain something from the college if they were
+hard pressed for social connections. A student like H. H. Richardson,
+who came from far away New Orleans, and had his career before him to
+chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friendships at college.
+Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in after life
+so much as Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation
+had little to do with the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley,
+and the roads run close together. Adams would have attached himself to
+Richardson in any case, as he attached himself to John LaFarge or
+Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were at
+Harvard College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with
+years, and certain men with common tastes were bound to come together.
+Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more equal footing
+with them had he been less ignorant, and had he not thrown away ten
+years of early life in acquiring what he might have acquired in one.
+
+  Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative
+and in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could
+not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the vices were
+less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking--though the mere
+recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity, so fantastic it
+seemed in later life--may have done no great or permanent harm; but the
+habit of looking at life as a social relation--an affair of
+society--did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no
+cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the
+manners and instincts of any profession--such as temper, patience,
+courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of
+opponents--it would have been education better worth having than
+mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it
+helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. The
+Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he stuck
+only to what the college gave him. If parents went on generation after
+generation, sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of
+its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite
+as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.
+
+  Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
+Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if
+it had little practical value or personal influence on the mass of
+students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who liked it.
+The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European, nor even wholly
+Yankee; his admirers were few, and critics his many; perhaps his worst
+weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness; but his ambitions,
+social or intellectual, were necessarily cheap even though they might
+be negative. Afraid of such serious risks, and still more afraid of
+personal ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly
+always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware
+that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position
+beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single
+ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of
+the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian
+supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.
+
+  The College Magazine printed his work, and the College
+Societies listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were
+not; the audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was all the
+encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to receive;
+grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible future
+acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one cared enough to
+criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his
+own limits. He found that he could not be this--or that--or the other;
+always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or
+force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he
+believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him thin,
+commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that
+he could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it,
+and he found that he had very little to say at best. Much that he then
+wrote must be still in existence in print or manuscript, though he
+never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it was in
+reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling for
+form; an instinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked--not even its weakness.
+
+  Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition--creates it--and
+at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost took
+place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being chosen as
+the representative of his class--Class Orator--at the close of their
+course. This was political as well as literary success, and precisely
+the sort of eighteenth-century combination that fascinated an
+eighteenth century boy. The idea lurked in his mind, at first as a
+dream, in no way serious or even possible, for he stood outside the
+number of what were known as popular men. Year by year, his position
+seemed to improve, or perhaps his rivals disappeared, until at last, to
+his own great astonishment, he found himself a candidate. The habits of
+the college permitted no active candidacy; he and his rivals had not a
+word to say for or against themselves, and he was never even consulted
+on the subject; he was not present at any of the proceedings, and how
+it happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen, that one
+evening on returning from Boston he received notice of his election,
+after a very close contest, as Class Orator over the head of the first
+scholar, who was undoubtedly a better orator and a more popular man. In
+politics the success of the poorer candidate is common enough, and
+Henry Adams was a fairly trained politician, but he never understood
+how he managed to defeat not only a more capable but a more popular
+rival.
+
+  To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-modesty;
+his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvass, and he
+knew his rivals and their following as well as he knew himself. What he
+did not know, even after four years of education, was Harvard College.
+What he could never measure was the bewildering impersonality of the
+men, who, at twenty years old, seemed to set no value either on
+official or personal standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men
+who had lived together intimately during four of the most
+impressionable years of life, and who, not only once but again and
+again, in different ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately,
+chose as their representatives precisely those of their companions who
+seemed least to represent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals
+had any position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of
+indifference to the college. Henry Adams never professed the smallest
+faith in universities of any kind, either as boy or man, nor had he the
+faintest admiration for the university graduate, either in Europe or in
+America; as a collegian he was only known apart from his fellows by his
+habit of standing outside the college; and yet the singular fact
+remained that this commonplace body of young men chose him repeatedly
+to express his and their commonplaces. Secretly, of course, the
+successful candidate flattered himself--and them--with the hope that
+they might perhaps not be so commonplace as they thought themselves;
+but this was only another proof that all were identical. They saw in
+him a representative--the kind of representative they wanted--and he
+saw in them the most formidable array of judges he could ever meet,
+like so many mirrors of himself, an infinite reflection of his own
+shortcomings.
+
+  All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it
+actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if
+possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the sort
+he was ever to receive. The function of Class Day was, in the eyes of
+nine-tenths of the students, altogether the most important of the
+college, and the figure of the Orator was the most conspicuous in the
+function. Unlike the Orators at regular Commencements, the Class Day
+Orator stood alone, or had only the Poet for rival. Crowded into the
+large church, the students, their families, friends, aunts, uncles and
+chaperones, attended all the girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to
+show their summer dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for an hour
+or two, in a heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an
+Orator and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes as
+their own experience and their mild censors permitted them to utter.
+What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon forgot to
+the last word, nor had it the least value for education; but he
+naturally remembered what was said of it. He remembered especially one
+of his eminent uncles or relations remarking that, as the work of so
+young a man, the oration was singularly wanting in enthusiasm. The
+young man--always in search of education--asked himself whether,
+setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a
+merit, since, in either case, it was all that Harvard College taught,
+and all that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent,
+expressed. Another comment threw more light on the effect of the
+college education. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's
+"perfect self-possession." Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College
+gave nothing else, it gave calm. For four years each student had been
+obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew each other
+to the last fibre. One had done little but read papers to Societies, or
+act comedy in the Hasty Pudding, not to speak of regular exercises, and
+no audience in future life would ever be so intimately and terribly
+intelligent as these. Three-fourths of the graduates would rather have
+addressed the Council of Trent or the British Parliament than have
+acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala audience of the
+Hasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard
+College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing
+seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms of terror before
+the public which often overcame the graduates of European universities.
+Whether this was, or was not, education, Henry Adams never knew. He was
+ready to stand up before any audience in America or Europe, with nerves
+rather steadier for the excitement, but whether he should ever have
+anything to say, remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing.
+Education had not begun.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BERLIN (1858-1859)
+
+  A FOURTH child has the strength of his weakness. Being of no
+great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be
+missed. Charles Francis Adams, the father, felt no love for Europe,
+which, as he and all the world agreed, unfitted Americans for America.
+A captious critic might have replied that all the success he or his
+father or his grandfather achieved was chiefly due to the field that
+Europe gave them, and it was more than likely that without the help of
+Europe they would have all remained local politicians or lawyers, like
+their neighbors, to the end. Strictly followed, the rule would have
+obliged them never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, so much more timid are
+parents for their children than for themselves, that Mr. and Mrs. Adams
+would have been content to see their children remain forever in Mount
+Vernon Street, unexposed to the temptations of Europe, could they have
+relied on the moral influences of Boston itself. Although the parents
+little knew what took place under their eyes, even the mothers saw
+enough to make them uneasy. Perhaps their dread of vice, haunting past
+and present, worried them less than their dread of daughters-in-law or
+sons-in-law who might not fit into the somewhat narrow quarters of
+home. On all sides were risks. Every year some young person alarmed the
+parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations of Europe
+were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston might be
+imperative. The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe; he seemed well
+behaved, when any one was looking at him; he observed conventions, when
+he could not escape them; he was never quarrelsome, towards a superior;
+his morals were apparently good, and his moral principles, if he had
+any, were not known to be bad. Above all, he was timid and showed a
+certain sense of self-respect, when in public view. What he was at
+heart, no one could say; least of all himself; but he was probably
+human, and no worse than some others. Therefore, when he presented to
+an exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a
+German university the study of the Civil Law--although neither he nor
+they knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying
+it--the parents dutifully consented, and walked with him down to the
+railway-station at Quincy to bid him good-bye, with a smile which he
+almost thought a tear.
+
+  Whether the boy deserved such indulgence, or was worth it, he
+knew no more than they, or than a professor at Harvard College; but
+whether worthy or not, he began his third or fourth attempt at
+education in November, 1858, by sailing on the steamer Persia, the
+pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; the newest, largest and
+fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several of his college
+companions sailed with him, and the world looked cheerful enough until,
+on the third day, the world--as far as concerned the young man--ran
+into a heavy storm. He learned then a lesson that stood by him better
+than any university teaching ever did--the meaning of a November gale
+on the mid-Atlantic--which, for mere physical misery, passed endurance.
+The subject offered him material for none but serious treatment; he
+could never see the humor of sea-sickness; but it united itself with a
+great variety of other impressions which made the first month of travel
+altogether the rapidest school of education he had yet found. The
+stride in knowledge seemed gigantic. One began at last to see that a great
+many impressions were needed to make very little education, but how
+many could be crowded into one day without making any education at all,
+became the pons asinorum of tourist mathematics. How many would turn
+out to be wrong whether any could turn out right, was ultimate wisdom.
+
+  The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James,
+the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in a
+furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier picture of a
+Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee-room in November murk,
+followed instantly by the passionate delights of Chester and the
+romance of red-sandstone architecture. Millions of Americans have felt
+this succession of emotions. Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists
+feel them still, but in days before tourists, when the romance was a
+reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boys went out
+to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens would have felt
+in the presence of a Duke. The very name of Grosvenor struck a note of
+grandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with their gilded
+furniture; the portraits; the terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the
+sense of superiority in the England of the fifties, actually set the
+rich nobleman apart, above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was
+real. So was the England of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell
+lurked in every churchyard shadow, not as shadow but alive. Even
+Charles the First was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see
+his army defeated. Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he
+lost his battle and his head. An eighteenth-century American boy fresh
+from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused at this
+sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.
+
+  Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the
+Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly
+felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown
+horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never
+had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast
+between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green
+charm that one glided into, as one emerged--the revelation of an
+unknown society of the pit--made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no
+idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner
+or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx
+much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic
+free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. The Black District was a practical
+education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away
+from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.
+
+  Had he known enough to know where to begin he would have seen
+something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the long, muddy,
+dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as his dingy
+four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross. He did notice one
+peculiarity about it worth remembering. London was still London. A
+certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy, arrogant,
+purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely tolerant of an
+outside world, and absolutely self-confident. The boys in the streets
+made such free comments on the American clothes and figures, that the
+travellers hurried to put on tall hats and long overcoats to escape
+criticism. No stranger had rights even in the Strand. The eighteenth
+century held its own. History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr.
+Johnson, in Adams's ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in yellow
+chariots with coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths; footmen with canes,
+on the footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the great
+houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments; every
+one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in the world were
+the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In November, 1858, London
+was still vast, but it was the London of the eighteenth century that an
+American felt and hated.
+
+  Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess
+how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as a man,
+but he could still less conceive himself returning to it fifty years
+afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city grew smaller as it
+doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its wealth; less imperial as
+its empire widened; less dignified as it tried to be civil. He liked it
+best when he hated it. Education began at the end, or perhaps would end
+at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in the eighteenth century,
+and the next step took it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp.
+As the Baron Osy steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a
+travelling band on deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working
+along the fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade and
+Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke of Alva
+was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral towered above a
+sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending abruptly in walls and a
+landscape that had not changed. The taste of the town was thick, rich,
+ripe, like a sweet wine; it was mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed
+modern; it was one of the strongest and fullest flavors that ever
+touched the young man's palate; but he might as well have drunk out his
+excitement in old Malmsey, for all the education he got from it. Even
+in art, one can hardly begin with Antwerp Cathedral and the Descent
+from the Cross. He merely got drunk on his emotions, and had then to
+get sober as he best could. He was terribly sober when he saw Antwerp
+half a century afterwards. One lesson he did learn without suspecting
+that he must immediately lose it. He felt his middle ages and the
+sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and the towns were dirty
+enough--unimproved, unrestored, untouristed--to retain the sense of
+reality. As a taste or a smell, it was education, especially because it
+lasted barely ten years longer; but it was education only sensual. He
+never dreamed of trying to educate himself to the Descent from the
+Cross. He was only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of
+the Cross; he learned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up
+again, and going about his stupid business.
+
+  This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished
+rapidly enough to reassure the most anxious of parents. Dropped into
+Berlin one morning without guide or direction, the young man in search
+of education floundered in a mere mess of misunderstandings. He could
+never recall what he expected to find, but whatever he expected, it had
+no relation with what it turned out to be. A student at twenty takes
+easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he would have accepted the
+thirteenth century pure and simple since his guides assured him that
+this was his right path; but a week's experience left him dazed and
+dull. Faith held out, but the paths grew dim. Berlin astonished him,
+but he had no lack of friends to show him all the amusement it had to
+offer. Within a day or two he was running about with the rest to
+beer-cellars and music-halls and dance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco,
+drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he
+knew no better. This was easy. One can always descend the social
+ladder. The trouble came when he asked for the education he was
+promised. His friends took him to be registered as a student of the
+university; they selected his professors and courses; they showed him
+where to buy the Institutes of Gaius and several German works on the
+Civil Law in numerous volumes; and they led him to his first lecture.
+
+  His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very
+quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and advisers;
+but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he had made
+another failure in education, and this time a fatal one. That the
+language would require at least three months' hard work before he could
+touch the Law was an annoying discovery; but the shock that upset him
+was the discovery of the university itself. He had thought Harvard
+College a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared with
+all that he could see of the University of Berlin. The German students
+were strange animals, but their professors were beyond pay. The mental
+attitude of the university was not of an American world. What sort of
+instruction prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no
+occasion to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system
+in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The
+professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make,
+notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more
+than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees,
+follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a degree. To an
+American the result was worthless. He could make no use of the Civil
+Law without some previous notion of the Common Law; but the student who
+knew enough of the Common Law to understand what he wanted, had only to
+read the Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America, and be
+his own professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner
+could profit an American education.
+
+  This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went
+to the lectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never pretended to
+take their professor seriously. They were much more serious in reading
+Heine. They knew no more than Heine what good they were getting, beyond
+the Berlin accent--which was bad; and the beer--which was not to
+compare with Munich; and the dancing--which was better at Vienna. They
+enjoyed the beer and music, but they refused to be responsible for the
+education. Anyway, as they defended themselves, they were learning the
+language.
+
+  So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at
+languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which
+depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin winter
+and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom
+never attained elsewhere. One day on the Linden he caught sight of
+Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him. Sumner was then recovering
+from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club, and he was pleased
+to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian wilderness. They
+dined together and went to hear "William Tell" at the Opera. Sumner
+tried to encourage his friend about his difficulties of language: "I
+came to Berlin," or Rome, or whatever place it was, as he said with his
+grand air of mastery, "I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the
+language; and three months later when I went away, I talked it to my
+cabman." Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in so short a time
+such social advantages, and one day complained of his trials to Mr.
+Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in Berlin for the
+sake of its music. Mr. Apthorp told of his own similar struggle, and
+how he had entered a public school and sat for months with
+ten-year-old-boys, reciting their lessons and catching their phrases.
+The idea suited Adams's desperate frame of mind. At least it ridded him
+of the university and the Civil Law and American associations in
+beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took the trouble to negotiate with the
+head-master of the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium for
+permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a member of the
+Ober-tertia, a class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there
+Adams went for three months as though he had not always avoided high
+schools with singular antipathy. He never did anything else so foolish
+but he was given a bit of education which served him some purpose in
+life.
+
+  It was not merely the language, though three months passed in
+such fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and
+this was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never
+by any chance would come in contact with German society, if German
+society existed, about which they knew nothing. Adams never learned to
+talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he
+could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself on this
+account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He
+thought himself quite Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with
+the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved that
+he knew little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
+experiment interested him less than his contact with German education.
+
+  He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
+instantly rejected the German university; and as his last experience of
+education he tried the German high school. The experiment was
+hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted, provincial town,
+simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects disgusting. Life was
+primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden
+by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only
+beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from discipline,
+activity scarcely existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his
+insane brother King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time
+looking at the passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the
+Linden. German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and
+German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bismarck himself
+was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German
+system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every
+earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top
+to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school to get educated,
+at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the
+education they were forced to follow. As an episode in the search for
+education, this adventure smacked of Heine.
+
+  The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the
+schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer a
+practical value, and had very little even at the time; one could at
+least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very
+brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his Prussian
+way, and the other instructors were not worse than in other schools; it
+was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The
+arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that
+the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys
+performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the
+memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of
+reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government
+did not encourage reasoning.
+
+  All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing
+the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the
+direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German
+machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was
+pathetic. The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium was an old
+building in the heart of Berlin which served the educational needs of
+the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood; the children
+were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such, and of a class suspected
+of sympathy and concern in the troubles of 1848. None was noble or
+connected with good society. Personally they were rather sympathetic
+than not, but as the objects of education they were proofs of nearly
+all the evils that a bad system could give. Apparently Adams, in his
+rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a viciously
+logical education. The boys' physique showed it first, but their
+physique could not be wholly charged to the school. German food was bad
+at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be
+good; but it was not the food alone that made their faces white and
+their flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard
+of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted
+in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was
+tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all
+decency; but when the American opened a window in the five minutes
+between hours, he violated the rules and was invariably rebuked. As
+long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a
+holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or
+elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausages, and
+beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would
+have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they
+could learn only because their minds were morbid. The German university
+had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very
+near an indictable nuisance.
+
+  Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
+education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except the
+ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets, never to
+gibber again before any one who could repeat the story. The derisive
+Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and everything else in
+Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years old, life is bound to be
+full, if only of Berlin beer, although German student life was on the
+whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, but though
+nothing except small fragments remained of the education that had been
+so promising--or promised--this is only what most often happens in
+life, when by-products turn out to be more valuable than staples. The
+German university and German law were failures; German society, in an
+American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed itself to
+an American; the German theatre, on the other hand, was excellent, and
+German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a journey to Berlin;
+but the curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German
+education was that the student's only clear gain--his single step to a
+higher life--came from time wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged;
+education reversed;--it came from the despised beer-garden and
+music-hall; and it was accidental, unintended, unforeseen.
+
+  When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons
+in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and
+looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played dull
+music, Adams went with them for the sake of the company, but with no
+pretence of enjoyment; and when Mr. Apthorp gently protested that he
+exaggerated his indifference, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams
+replied simply that he loathed Beethoven; and felt a slight surprise
+when Mr. Apthorp and the others laughed as though they thought it
+humor. He saw no humor in it. He supposed that, except musicians, every
+one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians
+thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-table, mentally
+impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followed
+the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been more astonished had
+he suddenly read a new language. Among the marvels of education, this
+was the most marvellous. A prison-wall that barred his senses on one
+great side of life, suddenly fell, of its own accord, without so much
+as his knowing when it happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and
+poor beer, surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new
+sense burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old
+senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that he
+could not credit it, and watched it as something apart, accidental, and
+not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly
+become intelligible to him, but he was the more inclined to think that
+Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily
+followed. This could not be called education, for he had never so much
+as listened to the music. He had been thinking of other things. Mere
+mechanical repetition of certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious
+mind. Beethoven might have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events
+not the Wagner later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before
+he reached the "Gotterdammerung."
+
+  One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense--the
+mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness--but no other sense
+awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever, and as far
+as ever below the level of an artist. His metaphysical sense did not
+spring into life, so that his mind could leap the bars of German
+expression into sympathy with the idealities of Kant and Hegel.
+Although he insisted that his faith in German thought and literature
+was exalted, he failed to approach German thought, and he shed never a
+tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his father
+rashly ventured from time to time to write him a word of common sense,
+the young man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin
+was the best of educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at
+last, April came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen, his
+heart sang like a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had suffered,
+and he made up his mind that, wherever else he might, in the infinities
+of space and time, seek for education, it should not be again in Berlin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ROME (1859-1860)
+
+  THE tramp in Thuringen lasted four-and-twenty hours. By the end
+of the first walk, his three companions--John Bancroft, James J.
+Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard College like
+himself--were satisfied with what they had seen, and when they sat down
+to rest on the spot where Goethe had written--
+
+                "Warte nur! balde
+          Rubest du auch!"--
+
+the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of the advice affected
+them so strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to Weimar the same
+night. They were all quite happy and lighthearted in the first fresh
+breath of leafless spring, and the beer was better than at Berlin, but
+they were all equally in doubt why they had come to Germany, and not
+one of them could say why they stayed. Adams stayed because he did not
+want to go home, and he had fears that his father's patience might be
+exhausted if he asked to waste time elsewhere.
+
+  They could not think that their education required a return to
+Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied them that
+Dresden was a better spot for general education than Berlin, and
+equally good for reading Civil Law. They were possibly right. There was
+nothing to study in Dresden, and no education to be gained, but the
+Sistine Madonna and the Correggios were famous; the theatre and opera
+were sometimes excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the Spree.
+They could always fall back on the language. So he took a room in the
+household of the usual small government clerk with the usual plain
+daughters, and continued the study of the language. Possibly one might
+learn something more by accident, as one had learned something of
+Beethoven. For the next eighteen months the young man pursued
+accidental education, since he could pursue no other; and by great good
+fortune, Europe and America were too busy with their own affairs to
+give much attention to his. Accidental education had every chance in
+its favor, especially because nothing came amiss.
+
+  Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that
+he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in his
+intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he still
+persuaded himself that his German education was a success. He loved, or
+thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved was the
+eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of, and were
+destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come, he knew
+nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence. What he liked was the
+simple character; the good-natured sentiment; the musical and
+metaphysical abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for
+practical affairs. At that time everyone looked on Germany as incapable
+of competing with France, England or America in any sort of organized
+energy. Germany had no confidence in herself, and no reason to feel it.
+She had no unity, and no reason to want it. She never had unity. Her
+religious and social history, her economical interests, her military
+geography, her political convenience, had always tended to eccentric
+rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and railways were
+created, she was mediaeval by nature and geography, and this was what
+Adams, under the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell, liked.
+
+  He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering
+between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing
+men who stayed too long at the points of contact. Suddenly the Emperor
+Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised a confused point of morals
+in the mind of Europe. France was the nightmare of Germany, and even at
+Dresden one looked on the return of Napoleon to Leipsic as the most
+likely thing in the world. One morning the government clerk, in whose
+family Adams was staying, rushed into his room to consult a map in
+order that he might measure the distance from Milan to Dresden. The
+third Napoleon had reached Lombardy, and only fifty or sixty years had
+passed since the first Napoleon had begun his military successes from
+an Italian base.
+
+  An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century tastes
+capped by fragments of a German education and the most excellent
+intentions, had to make up his mind about the moral value of these
+conflicting forces. France was the wicked spirit of moral politics, and
+whatever helped France must be so far evil. At that time Austria was
+another evil spirit. Italy was the prize they disputed, and for at
+least fifteen hundred years had been the chief object of their greed.
+The question of sympathy had disturbed a number of persons during that
+period. The question of morals had been put in a number of
+cross-lights. Should one be Guelph or Ghibelline? No doubt, one was
+wiser than one's neighbors who had found no way of settling this
+question since the days of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did better
+to discard the attempt to be wise, for wisdom had been singularly
+baffled by the problem. Better take sides first, and reason about it
+for the rest of life.
+
+  Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or
+wishes. He had not been German long enough for befogging his mind to
+that point, but the moment was decisive for much to come, especially
+for political morals. His morals were the highest, and he clung to them
+to preserve his self-respect; but steam and electricity had brought
+about new political and social concentrations, or were making them
+necessary in the line of his moral principles--freedom, education,
+economic development and so forth--which required association with
+allies as doubtful as Napoleon III, and robberies with violence on a
+very extensive scale. As long as he could argue that his opponents were
+wicked, he could join in robbing and killing them without a qualm; but
+it might happen that the good were robbed. Education insisted on
+finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin life in
+the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless he could
+satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were a virtue and duty.
+Education founded on mere self-interest was merely Guelph and
+Ghibelline over again--Machiavelli translated into American.
+
+Luckily for him he had a sister much brighter than he ever was--though
+he thought himself a rather superior person--who after marrying Charles
+Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy, and, like all good Americans
+and English, was hotly Italian. In July, 1859, she was at Thun in
+Switzerland, and there Henry Adams joined them. Women have, commonly, a
+very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which
+they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling
+the moral. Mrs. Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored
+Italy, but she cordially disliked Germany in all its varieties. She saw
+no gain in helping her brother to be Germanized, and she wanted him
+much to be civilized. She was the first young woman he was ever
+intimate with--quick, sensitive, wilful, or full of will, energetic,
+sympathetic and intelligent enough to supply a score of men with
+ideas--and he was delighted to give her the reins--to let her drive him
+where she would. It was his first experiment in giving the reins to a
+woman, and he was so much pleased with the results that he never wanted
+to take them back. In after life he made a general law of
+experience--no woman had ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven
+him right.
+
+  Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war as
+soon as the armistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed, nothing
+was easier. The party crossed the St. Gothard and reached Milan,
+picturesque with every sort of uniform and every sign of war. To young
+Adams this first plunge into Italy passed Beethoven as a piece of
+accidental education. Like music, it differed from other education in
+being, not a means of pursuing life, but one of the ends attained.
+Further, on these lines, one could not go. It had but one defect--that
+of attainment. Life had no richer impression to give; it offers barely
+half-a-dozen such, and the intervals seem long. Exactly what they teach
+would puzzle a Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an economic value,
+since most people would decline to part with even their faded memories
+except at a valuation ridiculously extravagant. They were also what men
+pay most for; but one's ideas become hopelessly mixed in trying to
+reduce such forms of education to a standard of exchangeable value,
+and, as in political economy, one had best disregard altogether what
+cannot be stated in equivalents. The proper equivalent of pleasure is
+pain, which is also a form of education.
+
+  Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the
+enemy's country, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by way of
+the Stelvio Pass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove up it, showed
+war. Garibaldi's Cacciatori were the only visible inhabitants. No one
+could say whether the pass was open, but in any case no carriage had
+yet crossed. At the inns the handsome young officers in command of the
+detachments were delighted to accept invitations to dinner and to talk
+all the evening of their battles to the charming patriot who sparkled
+with interest and flattery, but not one of them knew whether their
+enemies, the abhorred Austrian Jagers, would let the travellers through
+their lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the character failing in any
+party that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after climbing what
+was said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe, the carriage turned
+the last shoulder, where the glacier of the Ortler Spitze tumbled its
+huge mass down upon the road, even Mrs. Kuhn gasped when she was driven
+directly up to the barricade and stopped by the double line of sentries
+stretching on either side up the mountains, till the flash of the gun
+barrels was lost in the flash of the snow. For accidental education the
+picture had its value. The earliest of these pictures count for most,
+as first impressions must, and Adams never afterwards cared much for
+landscape education, except perhaps in the tropics for the sake of the
+contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, and set aside.
+
+  The handsome blond officers of the Jagers were not to be beaten
+in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the
+Cacciatori. The eternal woman as usual, when she is young, pretty, and
+engaging, had her way, and the barricade offered no resistance. In
+fifteen minutes the carriage was rolling down to Mals, swarming with
+German soldiers and German fleas, worse than the Italian; and German
+language, thought, and atmosphere, of which young Adams, thanks to his
+glimpse of Italy, never again felt quite the old confident charm.
+
+  Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his
+cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his companions suggested. Faithful
+to his self-contracted scheme of passing two winters in study of the
+Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter to the Frau Hofrathin
+von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and other Americans had pursued
+studies more or less serious. In those days, "The Initials" was a new
+book. The charm which its clever author had laboriously woven over
+Munich gave also a certain reflected light to Dresden. Young Adams had
+nothing to do but take fencing-lessons, visit the galleries and go to
+the theatre; but his social failure in the line of "The Initials," was
+humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofrathin herself was
+sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total discomfiture and
+helplessness of the young American in the face of her society. Possibly
+an education may be the wider and the richer for a large experience of
+the world; Raphael Pumpelly and Clarence King, at about the same time,
+were enriching their education by a picturesque intimacy with the
+manners of the Apaches and Digger Indians. All experience is an arch,
+to build upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his
+second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even
+the doctrine of accidental education broke down. There were no
+accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, he closed and
+locked the German door with a long breath of relief, and took the road
+to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as it pleased him, for
+eighteen months, and in spite of the infinite variety of new
+impressions which had packed themselves into his mind, he knew no more,
+for his practical purposes, than the day he graduated. He had made no
+step towards a profession. He was as ignorant as a schoolboy of
+society. He was unfit for any career in Europe, and unfitted for any
+career in America, and he had not natural intelligence enough to see
+what a mess he had thus far made of his education.
+
+  By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one
+might perhaps find some use for accidental and devious knowledge, but
+this had been no part of Henry Adams's plan when he chose the path most
+admired by the best judges, and followed it till he found it led
+nowhere. Nothing had been further from his mind when he started in
+November, 1858, than to become a tourist, but a mere tourist, and
+nothing else, he had become in April, 1860, when he joined his sister
+in Florence. His father had been in the right. The young man felt a
+little sore about it. Supposing his father asked him, on his return,
+what equivalent he had brought back for the time and money put into his
+experiment! The only possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a tourist!"
+
+  The answer was not what he had meant it to be, and he was not
+likely to better it by asking his father, in turn, what equivalent his
+brothers or cousins or friends at home had got out of the same time and
+money spent in Boston. All they had put into the law was certainly
+thrown away, but were they happier in science? In theory one might say,
+with some show of proof, that a pure, scientific education was alone
+correct; yet many of his friends who took it, found reason to complain
+that it was anything but a pure, scientific world in which they lived.
+
+  Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own,
+without seeking more in his son's errors. His Quincy district had sent
+him to Congress, and in the spring of 1860 he was in the full confusion
+of nominating candidates for the Presidential election in November. He
+supported Mr. Seward. The Republican Party was an unknown force, and
+the Democratic Party was torn to pieces. No one could see far into the
+future. Fathers could blunder as well as sons, and, in 1860, every one
+was conscious of being dragged along paths much less secure than those
+of the European tourist. For the time, the young man was safe from
+interference, and went on his way with a light heart to take whatever
+chance fragments of education God or the devil was pleased to give him,
+for he knew no longer the good from the bad.
+
+  He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps the
+most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his pen, for he
+wrote long letters, during the next three months, to his brother
+Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the Boston Courier;
+and the exercise was good for him. He had little to say, and said it
+not very well, but that mattered less. The habit of expression leads to
+the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of
+the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the
+expression. Young men as a rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else,
+and in after life when Adams began to learn what some men could see, he
+shrank into corners of shame at the thought that he should have
+betrayed his own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he
+invited his neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the
+nearest approach he had yet made to an intelligent act.
+
+  For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion
+naturally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough, while
+bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept Rome as
+legitimate education, though abused; but to young men seeking education
+in a serious spirit, taking for granted that everything had a cause,
+and that nature tended to an end, Rome was altogether the most violent
+vice in the world, and Rome before 1870 was seductive beyond
+resistance. The month of May, 1860, was divine. No doubt other young
+men, and occasionally young women, have passed the month of May in Rome
+since then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it
+does--in them--but in 1860 the lights and shadows were still mediaeval,
+and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and glowed, full of
+soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of science had yet
+skinned off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling. The
+pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins
+unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sorcery. Rome was the worst spot on
+earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to do with a
+twentieth-century world. One's emotions in Rome were one's private
+affair, like one's glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal;
+they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense; and
+they were surely immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could
+honestly read in the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that
+they were evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all
+the doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
+useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the last
+place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by common
+consent, the only spot that the young--of either sex and every
+race--passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.
+
+  Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
+man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is apt to
+lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion after
+conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked idly enough at
+the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot the look, and it
+never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian, fresh from Germany, Rome
+seemed a pure emotion, quite free from economic or actual values, and
+he could not in reason or common sense foresee that it was mechanically
+piling up conundrum after conundrum in his educational path, which
+seemed unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed
+insoluble but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle to be
+dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway
+train and thrown out of the window after other bad French novels, the
+morals of which could never approach the immorality of Roman history.
+Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America. Rome could
+not be fitted into an orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systematic
+scheme of evolution. No law of progress applied to it. Not even
+time-sequences--the last refuge of helpless historians--had value for
+it. The Forum no more led to the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum.
+Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed up in any
+relation of time, along with a thousand more, and never lead to a
+sequence. The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new
+religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same
+doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of
+Rome anything but flat contradiction.
+
+  Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
+heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
+importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The
+problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was more vital in
+May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the idea of writing
+the Decline and Fall of the city first started to the mind of Gibbon,
+"in the close of the evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the
+Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singing Vespers in the
+Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the Capitol." Murray's Handbook had
+the grace to quote this passage from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which
+led Adams more than once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of
+Santa Maria di Ara Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
+gained by Gibbon--or all the historians since--towards explaining the
+Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm remained intact. Two
+great experiments of Western civilization had left there the chief
+monuments of their failure, and nothing proved that the city might not
+still survive to express the failure of a third.
+
+  The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of
+posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist, even to
+the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for him that he
+should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men cannot sit with
+dignity, "in the close of evening, among the ruins of the Capitol,"
+unless they have something quite original to say about it. Tacitus
+could do it; so could Michael Angelo; and so, at a pinch, could Gibbon,
+though in figure hardly heroic; but, in sum, none of them could say
+very much more than the tourist, who went on repeating to himself the
+eternal question:--Why! Why!! Why!!!--as his neighbor, the blind
+beggar, might do, sitting next him, on the church steps. No one ever
+had answered the question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet
+every one who had either head or heart, felt that sooner or later he
+must make up his mind what answer to accept. Substitute the word
+America for the word Rome, and the question became personal.
+
+  Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never knew
+it, and never sought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest men of the
+age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a background.
+Perhaps Garibaldi--possibly even Cavour--could have sat "in the close
+of the evening, among the ruins of the Capitol," but one hardly saw
+Napoleon III there, or Palmerston or Tennyson or Longfellow. One
+morning, Adams happened to be chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde,
+when a middle-aged Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of
+the shock he had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at
+coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put
+to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite overcome
+him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time had
+blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new form of grim
+horror had for the moment wiped out the memory of two thousand years of
+Roman bloodshed, or the consolation, derived from history and
+statistics, that most citizens of Rome seemed to be the better for
+guillotining. Only by slow degrees, he grappled the conviction that the
+victim of the shock was Robert Browning; and, on the background of the
+Circus Maximus, the Christian martyrs flaming as torches, and the
+morning's murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place, as a
+middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards, in the
+light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made part of his background
+except by effacement. Browning might have sat with Gibbon, among the
+ruins, and few Romans would have smiled.
+
+  Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
+William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and Mommsen
+hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of Cicero and
+Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no teaching, the lessons of
+a rather cheap imagination and cheaper politics. Rome was a bewildering
+complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions, energies; without her, the
+Western world was pointless and fragmentary; she gave heart and unity
+to it all; yet Gibbon might have gone on for the whole century, sitting
+among the ruins of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable
+of telling him what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.
+
+  So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet
+offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
+somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the Berlin
+scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that he was
+absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he said that
+knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite of swarming
+impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he did when he
+entered it. As a marketable object, his value was less. His next step
+went far to convince him that accidental education, whatever its
+economical return might be, was prodigiously successful as an object in
+itself. Everything conspired to ruin his sound scheme of life, and to
+make him a vagrant as well as pauper. He went on to Naples, and there,
+in the hot June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand were
+about to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister, Chandler of
+Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit, but for his
+name, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to send him to the seat of war
+as bearer of despatches to Captain Palmer of the American sloop of war
+Iroquois. Young Adams seized the chance, and went to Palermo in a
+government transport filled with fleas, commanded by a charming Prince
+Caracciolo.
+
+  He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrative
+probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
+wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did not
+speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether it had any
+bearing whatever, and what was its value as a post-graduate course.
+Quite apart from its value as life attained, realized, capitalized, it
+had also a certain value as a lesson in something, though Adams could
+never classify the branch of study. Loosely, the tourist called it
+knowledge of men, but it was just the reverse; it was knowledge of
+one's ignorance of men. Captain Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a
+friend of the young man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took him with the
+officers of the ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom they
+found in the Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his
+picturesque and piratic staff, in the full noise and color of the
+Palermo revolution. As a spectacle, it belonged to Rossini and the
+Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumas at the least, but the spectacle
+was not its educational side. Garibaldi left the table, and, sitting
+down at the window, had a few words of talk with Captain Palmer and
+young Adams. At that moment, in the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was
+certainly the most serious of the doubtful energies in the world; the
+most essential to gauge rightly. Even then society was dividing between
+banker and anarchist. One or the other, Garibaldi must serve. Himself a
+typical anarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarm empires bigger
+than Naples, his success depended on his mind; his energy was beyond
+doubt.
+
+  Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for
+five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of his
+greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a
+quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt; absolutely
+impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing. Sympathetic it was, and
+one felt that it was simple; one suspected even that it might be
+childlike, but could form no guess of its intelligence. In his own eyes
+Garibaldi might be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of Cavour he
+might become a Condottiere; in the eyes of history he might, like the
+rest of the world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not
+understand. The student was none the wiser.
+
+  This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
+Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible to
+itself than to a young American who had no experience in double
+natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth, Garibaldi saw
+and said that he had not understood his own acts; that he had been an
+instrument; that he had served the purposes of the class he least
+wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the revolution anarchic,
+Napoleonic, and his ambition was unbounded. What should a young
+Bostonian have made of a character like this, internally alive with
+childlike fancies, and externally quiet, simple, almost innocent;
+uttering with apparent conviction the usual commonplaces of popular
+politics that all politicians use as the small change of their
+intercourse with the public; but never betraying a thought?
+
+  Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
+Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it. The
+lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme
+complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this from
+a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced,
+simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian
+brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary
+clamor, among the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in
+order to remember that simplicity is complex.
+
+  Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to
+stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two or
+three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris, and had
+wanted no French influence in his education. He disapproved of France
+in the lump. A certain knowledge of the language one must have; enough
+to order dinner and buy a theatre ticket; but more he did not seek. He
+disliked the Empire and the Emperor particularly, but this was a
+trifle; he disliked most the French mind. To save himself the trouble
+of drawing up a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of
+the whole, once for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life.
+France was not serious, and he was not serious in going there.
+
+  He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
+taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
+responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he felt
+quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he disapproved. Stated
+thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of fact,
+several thousand Americans passed much of their time there on this
+understanding. They sought to take share in every function that was
+open to approach, as they sought tickets to the opera, because they
+were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest. All thought of serious
+education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms,
+without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better
+in acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
+sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and
+the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Varietes and
+the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Cheri and Gil Perez,
+and other lights of the stage. His friends were good to him. Life was
+amusing. Paris rapidly became familiar. In a month or six weeks he
+forgot even to disapprove of it; but he studied nothing, entered no
+society, and made no acquaintance. Accidental education went far in
+Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowledge that might become useful;
+perhaps, after all, the three months passed there might serve better
+purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did not
+intend it--did not think it--and looked at it as a momentary and
+frivolous vacation before going home to fit himself for life.
+Therewith, after staying as long as he could and spending all the money
+he dared, he started with mixed emotions but no education, for home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+TREASON (1860-1861)
+
+  WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
+adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether fortune or
+fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known
+antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of law and to vote
+for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.
+
+  He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
+like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which played
+with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The simile is none
+too strong. Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or
+intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority
+wanted to go on with their occupations in peace. Not one, however
+clever or learned, guessed what happened. Possibly a few Southern
+loyalists in despair might dream it as an impossible chance; but none
+planned it.
+
+  As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
+sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite
+heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted away. The
+prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father asked a malicious
+question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he hinted at some shade of
+prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as private secretary
+during the winter in Washington, as though any young man who could
+afford to throw away two winters on the Civil Law could afford to read
+Blackstone for another winter without a master. The young man was
+beyond satire, and asked only a pretext for throwing all education to
+the east wind. November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been
+from earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does the
+uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail wreck of
+the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November seemed temperate
+before the chill of a Boston January.
+
+  This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood
+apart from other memories as lurid beyond description. Although no one
+believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the Republicans
+organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in a form military in
+all things except weapons. Henry reached home in time to see the last
+of these processions, stretching in ranks of torches along the
+hillside, file down through the November night; to the Old House, where
+Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress, received them, and, let them
+pretend what they liked, their air was not that of innocence.
+
+  Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed
+his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked, and
+started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed since his
+last visit, but very little had changed. As in 1800 and 1850, so in
+1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same
+unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, and sloughs for roads. The
+Government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that
+went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but
+right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so
+little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more,
+and in December, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly
+hostile, so far as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in
+Philadelphia in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in
+Washington.
+
+  Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
+Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in 1860-61,
+no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all the crowd
+swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was surely among the
+most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly that the knowledge
+possessed by everybody about him was hardly greater than his own. Never
+in a long life did he seek to master a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner
+was given to saying after Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus
+regitur!" Oxenstiern talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams
+found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both
+unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly
+unbalanced in mind--fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
+hallucination--haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent morbid
+excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of
+the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided,
+ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a
+close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of
+wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young
+student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power
+worked when held by inadequate hands.
+
+  This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was
+paradox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
+statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles Sumner's
+chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance, and he stood a
+living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams had come for a new
+education, and the school was seriously, honestly, taken by most of the
+world, including Europe, as proper for the purpose, although the Sioux
+Indians would have taught less mischief. From such contradictions among
+intelligent people, what was a young man to learn?
+
+  He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
+Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to teach or
+to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided, he was too
+glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the education of a
+reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson from the Confederate
+school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one sweep, the whole field
+of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was overshadowed
+by the cotton planters, from whom one could learn nothing but bad
+temper, bad manners, poker, and treason.
+
+  Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
+example; first of all, on his New England surroundings. Republican
+houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams aimed to create a
+social centre for New Englanders. They took a house on I Street,
+looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out towards Georgetown--the
+Markoe house--and there the private secretary began to learn his social
+duties, for the political were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies
+of the Capitol. He had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly,
+but he knew of no one who knew more.
+
+  The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
+was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
+Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the boy's
+oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady men,
+well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue--men whom
+one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or not, bore the
+stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one exception, and
+perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the New Englander's
+strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered no
+more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he
+repelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. The
+character, with its force or feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to
+the core; one was it--had been run in the same mould.
+
+  There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
+choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to
+Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few other men
+born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to Henry J. Raymond,
+who came to view the field for the New York Times, and who was a man of
+the world. The average Congressman was civil enough, but had nothing to
+ask except offices, and nothing to offer but the views of his district.
+The average Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say,
+being always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his
+own importance.
+
+  Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
+of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence of
+only two men--Sumner and Seward.
+
+  Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
+in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and, after
+his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite recovered its tone;
+but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary existence as Senator had
+most to do with his development. No man, however strong, can serve ten
+years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything
+else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a
+certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerized the
+subject. Yet even among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from
+the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay,
+or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became
+Shakespearian and bouffe--as Godkin used to call it--like Malvolio.
+Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at least the merit
+of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly thought, as Webster
+had thought before him, that his great services and sacrifices, his
+superiority in education, his oratorical power, his political
+experience, his representative character at the head of the whole New
+England contingent, and, above all, his knowledge of the world, made
+him the most important member of the Senate; and no Senator had ever
+saturated himself more thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the
+body.
+
+  Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
+superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator
+seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom
+likes to be told of it. Even the greatest Senators seemed to inspire
+little personal affection in each other, and betrayed none at all.
+Sumner had a number of rivals who held his judgment in no high esteem,
+and one of these was Senator Seward. The two men would have disliked
+each other by instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was
+created only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the
+faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of either.
+That the public service must suffer was certain, but what were the
+sufferings of the public service compared with the risks run by a young
+mosquito--a private secretary--trying to buzz admiration in the ears of
+each, and unaware that each would impatiently slap at him for belonging
+to the other? Innocent and unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even
+in a nursery, the private secretary courted both.
+
+  Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose
+business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a professional
+kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching Washington, was
+that the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for
+his Secretary of State, and that Seward was to be the medium for
+communicating his wishes to his followers. Every young man naturally
+accepted the wishes of Mr. Lincoln as orders, the more because he could
+see that the new President was likely to need all the help that several
+million young men would be able to give, if they counted on having any
+President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for the
+first meeting with the new Secretary of State.
+
+  Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed
+to be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been Senator
+since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had separated him from
+the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry light of the first Free Soil
+faith, the ways of New York politics Thurlow Weed had not won favor;
+but the fierce heat which welded the Republican Party in 1856 melted
+many such barriers, and when Mr. Adams came to Congress in December,
+1859, Governor Seward instantly renewed his attitude of family friend,
+became a daily intimate in the household, and lost no chance of forcing
+his fresh ally to the front.
+
+  A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
+as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the family,
+and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to watch him as
+carefully as one generally watches men who dispose of one's future. A
+slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose;
+shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand
+manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a new type--of western
+New York--to fathom; a type in one way simple because it was only
+double--political and personal; but complex because the political had
+become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the
+features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint, or
+seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world he threw it off,
+like a politician, for effect. In both cases he chose to appear as a
+free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but how much was
+nature and how much was mask, he was himself too simple a nature to
+know. Underneath the surface he was conventional after the conventions
+of western New York and Albany. Politicians thought it
+unconventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams
+thought it charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who,
+though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed
+that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was large; he
+generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship; he did not
+require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual--almost singular
+and quite eccentric--he had some means, unknown to other Senators, of
+producing the effect of unselfishness.
+
+  Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
+essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be rigid, but
+the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple enough when it
+chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had been attacked in
+succession as no better than political mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in
+his standard history, went so far as to echo with approval the charge
+that treachery was hereditary in the family. Any Adams had at least to
+be thick-skinned, hardened to every contradictory epithet that virtue
+could supply, and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; but
+all must have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to
+national interests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced to
+choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his father had done, as his
+father had followed the steps of John Adams, and no doubt thereby
+earned his epithets.
+
+  The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
+should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the edge
+of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his masters on
+their various paths he made no pretence of guessing; even at that age
+he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing motives; he knew only
+his own infantile ignorance, before which he stood amazed, and his
+innocent good-faith, always matter of simple-minded surprise. Critics
+who know ultimate truth will pronounce judgment on history; all that
+Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and
+he never saw quite so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one
+knows the story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and
+the conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits of
+Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion made the
+sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and concentrated education.
+
+  Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
+Washington decided that, before they could administer the Government,
+they must make sure of a government to administer, and that this chance
+depended on the action of Virginia. The whole ascendancy of the winter
+wavered between the effort of the cotton States to drag Virginia out,
+and the effort of the new President to keep Virginia in. Governor
+Seward representing the Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr.
+Adams took the lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary
+knew, the party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
+border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty, of
+dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open eyes. As
+Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after Mr. Adams and
+he had made their speeches: "If there's no secession now, you and I are
+ruined."
+
+  They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
+the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries had
+nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that side a
+secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The sudden arrival
+of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and the language of his
+inaugural address, were the final term of the winter's tactics, and
+closed the private secretary's interest in the matter forever. Perhaps
+he felt, even then, a good deal more interest in the appearance of
+another private secretary, of his own age, a young man named John Hay,
+who lighted on LaFayette Square at the same moment. Friends are born,
+not made, and Henry never mistook a friend except when in power. From
+the first slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay
+as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
+their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4 when
+Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon new shoulders,
+and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He had tried to make
+himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed to him portentous,
+acting in secret as newspaper correspondent, cultivating a large
+acquaintance and even haunting ballrooms where the simple,
+old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant even in the atmosphere of
+conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to nothing for education,
+because no one could teach; all were as ignorant as himself; none knew
+what should be done, or how to do it; all were trying to learn and were
+more bent on asking than on answering questions. The mass of ignorance
+in Washington was lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top
+to bottom, broke down.
+
+  From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
+old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military figure
+that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked it, or was
+it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young Adams been told
+that his life was to hang on the correctness of his estimate of the new
+President, he would have lost. He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the
+melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked
+anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkward figure; a
+plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently
+worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither
+self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the
+same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that
+tormented a private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
+private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought,
+as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new
+President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.
+
+  As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
+in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in March
+were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who thought they
+knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.
+Education was matter of life and death, but all the education in the
+world would have helped nothing. Only one man in Adams's reach seemed
+to him supremely fitted by knowledge and experience to be an adviser
+and friend. This was Senator Sumner; and there, in fact, the young
+man's education began; there it ended.
+
+  Going over the experience again, long after all the great
+actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In the
+effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have liked
+much to know whether he could have helped it. He had necessarily
+followed Seward and his father; he took for granted that his business
+was obedience, discipline, and silence; he supposed the party to
+require it, and that the crisis overruled all personal doubts. He was
+thunderstruck to learn that Senator Sumner privately denounced the
+course, regarded Mr. Adams as betraying the principles of his life, and
+broke off relations with his family.
+
+  Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
+life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the profoundest
+lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that
+permanently warp the mind. He cared little or nothing about the point
+in discussion; he was even willing to admit that Sumner might be right,
+though in all great emergencies he commonly found that every one was
+more or less wrong; he liked lofty moral principle and cared little for
+political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but
+the shock opened a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life
+lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political
+instinct, with out waiting further experiment--as he took for granted
+that arsenic poisoned--the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.
+
+  On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
+exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or afterwards,
+but his education--for good or bad--made an enormous stride. One has to
+deal with all sorts of unexpected morals in life, and, at this moment,
+he was looking at hundreds of Southern gentlemen who believed
+themselves singularly honest, but who seemed to him engaged in the
+plainest breach of faith and the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they
+did not disturb his education. History told of little else; and not one
+rebel defection--not even Robert E. Lee's--cost young Adams a personal
+pang; but Sumner's struck home.
+
+  This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
+down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to him
+hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March, 1861,
+offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The
+process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two worlds,
+one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing. Washington was
+a dismal school. Even before the traitors had flown, the vultures
+descended on it in swarms that darkened the ground, and tore the
+carrion of political patronage into fragments and gobbets of fat and
+lean, on the very steps of the White House. Not a man there knew what
+his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception,
+Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the
+public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to
+the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
+weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such
+as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand
+million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country
+could recover its balance and movement. Henry was a helpless victim,
+and, like all the rest, he could only wait for he knew not what, to
+send him he knew not where.
+
+  With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing
+to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return with his
+father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and, with childlike
+docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of Horace Gray in Court
+Street, to begin again: "My Lords and Gentlemen"; dozing after a two
+o'clock dinner, or waking to discuss politics with the future Justice.
+There, in ordinary times, he would have remained for life, his attempt
+at education in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+DIPLOMACY (1861)
+
+  HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
+President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his Minister to
+England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf.
+As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before:
+Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law
+prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as
+path of education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving a million young men
+planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life without
+education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had asked
+millions they would have got no answers. No one could help. Looking
+back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could
+only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
+intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one of
+his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared
+from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again without a word.
+He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in
+his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters. He was at least
+no public official, like the thousands of improvised secretaries and
+generals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on the President.
+He was not a vulture of carrion--patronage. He knew that his father's
+appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship; he
+did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the reasons
+which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could have supplied
+proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest and most
+decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams had chosen a private
+secretary far more unfit than his chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might
+well be, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of
+possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well
+as this experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs
+of fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
+exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than Senator
+Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to
+give him. In the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous
+risk, but never before had they taken one so desperate.
+
+  The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
+unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except
+perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary of State
+knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive appointed the
+editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago
+Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as Charley Wilson, who
+had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping the Minister.
+The Assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard
+worker, but socially useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find
+efficient help; perhaps he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too
+much of Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
+strength in his son.
+
+  The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
+knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by
+giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote letters, it was
+not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was
+engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was
+no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into
+service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred
+thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all
+helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves
+of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before
+Boston State House in the April evenings and march southward, quietly
+enough, with the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with
+few signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
+harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before
+being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of the
+Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few things were
+for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private
+secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at
+East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher of
+education had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly
+broken; and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without
+defence--or arms.
+
+  The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
+world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1,
+1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if
+the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin-boy in
+a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was alone. Had Secretary
+Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams the rank of Ambassador and
+four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained
+secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal family
+and the whole peerage, the private secretary would have been cabin-boy
+still, with the extra burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate
+person in the party, having for master only his father who never
+fretted, never dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American
+diplomacy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered
+how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter, 1778,
+on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son John
+Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of adventure that had
+hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how John Quincy, in 1809,
+had sailed for Russia, with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope
+with Napoleon and the Czar Alexander single-handed, almost as much of
+an adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He
+thought it natural that the Government should send him out as an
+adventurer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even
+notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend
+on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
+Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams had no
+friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he asked none.
+He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and
+grandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty
+view, and for him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys,
+and when, in time, the young man realized what had happened, he felt it
+as a betrayal. He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of
+adventurer, and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the
+first time America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order.
+Her representatives should know how to play their role; they should
+wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861,
+the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose
+stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Court and Parliament of
+Great Britain.
+
+  One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
+the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they
+overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they stood with
+their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him quickly, they
+sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same ship. Secretary
+Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M. Clay in the
+diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education profited less than the
+private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though
+possibly some rivals. No young man, not in Government pay, could be
+asked to draw, from such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was
+notorious that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
+felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government;
+fewest of all among those who were in it. At home, for the most part,
+young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England they might
+grumble or not; no one listened.
+
+  Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
+chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never
+labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and
+it affected him for life. The habit of reticence--of talking without
+meaning--is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already
+an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went
+instantly up to London: a family of early Christian martyrs about to be
+flung into an arena of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius
+Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar
+Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only
+evident resemblance in the Christian martyrs, for he had already
+arranged the ceremony.
+
+  Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
+son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair
+of history and their errors concern historians. The errors of a private
+secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a large part of his
+education. He thought on May 12 that he was going to a friendly
+Government and people, true to the anti-slavery principles which had
+been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years the chief effort
+of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England into
+intelligent cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His
+father was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
+success was promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent
+obstacle to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself,
+he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not
+conceive the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself, as one of
+the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere
+in the British Islands.
+
+  On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
+recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new
+education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard
+College and Germany. He had to learn--the sooner the better--that his
+ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in
+England--literally no one--doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or
+would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often
+saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr.
+Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power,
+but prudently held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had
+disappeared. Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the
+rebel emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency
+before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the
+British Government in advance. The recognition of independence would
+then become an understood policy; a matter of time and occasion.
+
+  Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
+shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension--a sort of
+hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow. Yet he
+realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The chances were
+great that the whole family would turn round and go home within a few
+weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves of confusion. When he
+thought over the subject in the long leisure of later life, he grew
+cold at the idea of his situation had his father then shown himself
+what Sumner thought him to be--unfit for his post. That the private
+secretary was unfit for his--trifling though it were--was proved by his
+unreflecting confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that
+his father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent
+knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over several
+generations, he could not certainly point out another who could have
+stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this long day, and
+tedious journey to London, without once thinking of the possibility
+that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the Minister thought,
+and certainly his thought was not less active than his son's, he showed
+no trace of excitement. His manner was the same as ever; his mind and
+temper were as perfectly balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve
+twitched.
+
+  The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden
+could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private
+secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his father as
+closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into Maurigy's
+Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst of a London season,
+without a friend or even an acquaintance, he preferred to laugh at his
+father's bewilderment before the waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for
+breakfast, rather than ask a question or express a doubt. His
+situation, if taken seriously, was too appalling to face. Had he known
+it better, he would only have thought it worse.
+
+  Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond
+retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of circumstances, a
+newcomer in London society needs years to establish a position, and
+Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his son had
+not even a remote chance of beginning. Politically the prospect looked
+even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but
+for the Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he
+stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one of the
+luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he escaped. The
+blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John
+Russell had acted--had probably intended to act--kindly by him in
+forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three
+months, and would then have broken him down. The British Ministers were
+a little in doubt still--a little ashamed of themselves--and certain to
+wait the longer for their next step in proportion to the haste of their
+first.
+
+  This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
+Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
+education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor. The
+father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's was
+absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles Francis Adams
+naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies; the only public
+occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in
+their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to
+quarrel with Downing Street; and the British Government, well used to a
+liberal unpopularity abroad, even when officially rude liked to be
+personally civil. All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to
+speak, in a corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had
+nothing in especial to complain of; his position was good while it
+lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such
+compensations. Brought over in order to help his father, he could
+conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was clear that his
+father had got to help him. To him, the Legation was social ostracism,
+terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire solitude in the great
+society of London was doubly desperate because his duties as private
+secretary required him to know everybody and go with his father and
+mother everywhere they needed escort. He had no friend, or even enemy,
+to tell him to be patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have
+broken out with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools
+as well as of sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do it
+at once, for his father would never so much need help again. In fact he
+never gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman,
+clerk, or a companion for the younger children.
+
+  He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
+useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
+whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common in
+diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most secretaries
+detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but useful. At the St.
+James's Club, to which the Minister's son could go only as an invited
+guest, the most instructive conversation he ever heard among the young
+men of his own age who hung about the tables, more helpless than
+himself, was: "Quel chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui,
+mon cher!" No one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
+information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also slow to
+assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If the American
+Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian Ambassador was in trouble
+yesterday, and the Frenchman would be in trouble to-morrow. It would
+all come in the day's work. There was nothing professional in worry.
+Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were always
+picking them up.
+
+  This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
+rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff. His
+social education was more barren still, and more trying to his vanity.
+His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe with
+torture. He never forgot the first two or three social functions he
+attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett Coutts's in Stratton Place,
+where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and hoped that no one
+noticed him; another was a garden-party given by the old anti-slavery
+Duchess Dowager of Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister
+and Mrs. Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till every
+one else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to
+playing leap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty
+years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly
+enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another nightmare he
+suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a
+terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform
+a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the
+daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This might seem
+humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.
+
+  When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
+yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude
+when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the Times. He felt
+only the wish to be more private than ever, for Bull Run was a worse
+diplomatic than military disaster. All this is history and can be read
+by public schools if they choose; but the curious and unexpected
+happened to the Legation, for the effect of Bull Run on them was almost
+strengthening. They no longer felt doubt. For the next year they went
+on only from week to week, ready to leave England at once, and never
+assuming more than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to
+see them go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.
+
+  So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
+his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or finished in
+the character of private secretary; and as about to begin, without
+further experiment, a final education in the ranks of the Army of the
+Potomac where he would find most of his friends enjoying a much
+pleasanter life than his own. With this idea uppermost in his mind, he
+passed the summer and the autumn, and began the winter. Any winter in
+London is a severe trial; one's first winter is the most trying; but
+the month of December, 1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would
+have gorged a glutton of gloom.
+
+  One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
+depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence of
+the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's telegram
+announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British mail-steamer
+was brought to the office. All three secretaries, public and private
+were there--nervous as wild beasts under the long strain on their
+endurance--and all three, though they knew it to be not merely their
+order of departure--not merely diplomatic rupture--but a declaration of
+war--broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They
+saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for its own
+moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.
+
+  They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
+Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it, is told
+in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster who was one of
+the Fryston party. The moment was for him the crisis of his diplomatic
+career; for the secretaries it was merely the beginning of another
+intolerable delay, as though they were a military outpost waiting
+orders to quit an abandoned position. At the moment of sharpest
+suspense, the Prince Consort sickened and died. Portland Place at
+Christmas in a black fog was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the
+most hardened Londoner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had
+one source of comfort denied to them--he should not be private
+secretary long.
+
+  He was mistaken--of course! He had been mistaken at every
+point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same mistake
+for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the notion that the
+end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing but one of many
+affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round hand into his books,
+yet it had one or two results personal to him which left no trace on
+the Legation records. One of these, and to him the most important, was
+to put an end forever to the idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an
+independent and free citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he
+had kept up his relations with the American press. He had written
+pretty frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
+in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with the two
+or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News, the Star, the
+weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them news and views that
+should have a certain common character, and prevent clash. He had even
+gone down to Manchester to study the cotton famine, and wrote a long
+account of his visit which his brother Charles had published in the
+Boston Courier. Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and
+instantly came back upon him in the most crushing shape possible--that
+of a long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did
+not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the
+Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he
+instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one
+of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who had haunted London
+since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them
+all they did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to tell
+Adams all he did not want to know about the Times. For a moment Adams
+thought his "usefulness" at an end in other respects than in the press,
+but a day or two more taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally
+unknown; he had not even a club; London was empty; no one thought twice
+about the Times article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and
+the world had other persons--such as President Lincoln, Secretary
+Seward, and Commodore Wilkes--for constant and favorite objects of
+ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful again.
+The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education at least had
+reached the point of seeing its own proportions. "Surtout point de
+zele!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession for a Minister's son to
+pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among Trent Affairs and rebel
+cruisers. He wrote no more letters and meddled with no more newspapers,
+but he was still young, and felt unkindly towards the editor of the
+London Times.
+
+  Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
+felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the Trent
+Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its surprise,
+still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this delay--which
+he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense--no reason for changing his
+opinion about the views of the British Government, he had no choice but
+to sit down again at his table, and go on copying papers, filing
+letters, and reading newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr.
+Lincoln and the brutality of Mr. Seward--or vice versa. The heavy
+months dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without improving
+his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to the
+end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During
+this tedious winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of
+sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the guest of
+Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix.
+
+  His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers,
+although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were strong
+allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be kinder than
+Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper Grosvenor Street were
+certainly the best in London; but none offered a refuge to compare with
+Mount Felix, and, for the first time, the refuge was a liberal
+education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women to whom an
+intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams was
+not a very intelligent boy, and he had no knowledge of the world, but
+he knew enough to understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of
+education he most required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs.
+Russell Sturgis, a dozen years older than himself, could have
+good-naturedly trained a school of such, without an effort, and with
+infinite advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
+Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this
+social polar winter, the single source of warmth and light.
+
+  Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such
+pressure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates made
+common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was merely
+flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the younger
+members of the household, it was not quite so with the Minister and
+Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they gained foothold. For
+some reason partly connected with American sources, British society had
+begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all
+the Republican leaders except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of
+Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity
+of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own
+interests, the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself
+that this new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary
+suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to do
+with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally the
+Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had Lincoln and
+Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average Englishman would have
+liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the
+unassailable social position of Minister Adams in no way conciliated
+them. They chose to ignore him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord
+John Russell set the example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly
+treated; politically he was negligible; he was there to be put aside.
+London and Paris imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln
+and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
+Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams would
+vanish with the rest.
+
+  This situation made Minister Adams an exception among
+diplomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated as
+members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of total
+extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe, for a year at
+least, regarded the Washington Government as dead, and its Ministers as
+nullities. Minister Adams was better received than most nullities
+because he made no noise. Little by little, in private, society took
+the habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomat, but rather as a
+member of opposition, or an eminent counsel retained for a foreign
+Government. He was to be received and considered; to be cordially
+treated as, by birth and manners, one of themselves. This curiously
+English way of getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every
+possible advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race,
+language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart
+in order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams
+apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society few
+Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double personality and
+corresponding double weight.
+
+  The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of
+the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes and
+William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes and
+Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be supported. They
+saw what the private secretary in May had overlooked, the hopeless
+position they were in if the American Minister made a mistake, and,
+since his strength was theirs, they lost no time in expressing to all
+the world their estimate of the Minister's character. Between them the
+Minister was almost safe.
+
+  One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
+Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences of
+different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, possibly
+greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for in London
+society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a large majority,
+and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes. Every bore was used to
+talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the "cool of the evening"; and of
+course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule
+with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in
+London, and a maker of men--of a great many men. A word from him went
+far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his
+almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad,
+and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had
+written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were
+certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches,
+chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the
+audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere,
+knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of Ministers; but
+unlike most wits, he held a social position of his own that ended in a
+peerage, and he had a house in Upper Brook Street to which most clever
+people were exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous,
+and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous
+to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a
+strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of
+books, but above all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved
+the contacts--perhaps the collisions--of society. Not even Henry
+Brougham dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes
+was the good-nature of London; the Gargantuan type of its refinement
+and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.
+
+  Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or
+Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E. Forster
+stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May
+Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of
+Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never
+had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a tall, rough,
+ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the
+Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear--the exterior
+roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental
+nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker
+ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and
+emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a
+daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace of base
+metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union cause and
+made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sure to do,
+partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partly
+because it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a new member,
+he needed a field.
+
+  Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
+sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership, and
+made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for work.
+With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England began to take
+heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his true champions, the
+heavy-weights, came into action, and even the private secretary caught
+now and then a stray gleam of encouragement as he saw the ring begin to
+clear for these burly Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely
+to be as brutal as ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not
+exactly light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters
+in England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle even
+Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
+
+  In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
+even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed as
+enemies of order,--anarchists,--and anarchists they were if hatred of
+the so-called established orders made them so. About them was no sort
+of political timidity. They took bluntly the side of the Union against
+Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers to London society, they were at
+home in the American Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking
+always with reckless freedom. Cobden was the milder and more
+persuasive; Bright was the more dangerous to approach; but the private
+secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them
+talk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the
+House.
+
+  With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
+quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a little
+ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
+disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends
+gathered about the Legation who were no fair-weather companions. The
+old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an
+annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the
+most valuable friends the Minister found, both politically and
+socially, and the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private
+secretary shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and
+never forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
+dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
+merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
+probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's claret
+which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he insisted that it
+was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his
+point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in
+that respect the Duke would perhaps have done better; but the secretary
+had to admit that though at other periods of life he was sufficiently
+and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could never recall a single
+occasion during this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.
+
+  Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
+elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either men
+or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for Frederick
+Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made Devonshire House
+almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent Americanism created a
+certain cordiality with the Stanleys of Alderley whose house was one of
+the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was
+always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to more literary
+intimacies. Sir Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which
+young Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
+ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them.
+Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close
+alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors after the death
+of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary occasionally saw a
+face he knew, although he made no more effort of any kind, but silently
+waited the end. Whatever might be the advantages of social relations to
+his father and mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and
+society was futile. He meant to go home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
+
+  OF the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a
+shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in his
+short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could
+plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had found his
+chief amusement in bloodshed; but the ferocious joy of destruction at
+its best requires that one should kill what one hates, and young Adams
+neither hated nor wanted to kill his friends the rebels, while he
+wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth. Never could
+any good come from that besotted race! He was feebly trying to save his
+own life. Every day the British Government deliberately crowded him one
+step further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knew it; no
+one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent Affair
+showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of the rebel
+cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes, the sign of
+hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to intervene. Lord
+Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were discourteous in their
+indifference, and, to an irritable young private secretary of
+twenty-four, were insolent in their disregard of truth. Whatever forms
+of phrase were usual in public to modify the harshness of invective, in
+private no political opponent in England, and few political friends,
+hesitated to say brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This was
+no great reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the
+intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief that
+Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an instant
+did the Legation draw a free breath. The suspense was hideous and
+unendurable.
+
+  The Minister, no doubt, endured it, but he had support and
+consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his friends
+who were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps about Richmond, or
+his enemies who were exulting in Pall Mall. He bore it as well as he
+could till midsummer, but, when the story of the second Bull Run
+appeared, he could bear it no longer, and after a sleepless night,
+walking up and down his room without reflecting that his father was
+beneath him, he announced at breakfast his intention to go home into
+the army. His mother seemed to be less impressed by the announcement
+than by the walking over her head, which was so unlike her as to
+surprise her son. His father, too, received the announcement quietly.
+No doubt they expected it, and had taken their measures in advance. In
+those days, parents got used to all sorts of announcements from their
+children. Mr. Adams took his son's defection as quietly as he took Bull
+Run; but his son never got the chance to go. He found obstacles
+constantly rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brother
+Charles, who was himself in the Army of the Potomac, and whose opinion
+had always the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with delaying
+action; but he felt, of his own accord, that if he deserted his post in
+London, and found the Capuan comforts he expected in Virginia where he
+would have only bullets to wound him, he would never forgive himself
+for leaving his father and mother alone to be devoured by the wild
+beasts of the British amphitheatre. This reflection might not have
+stopped him, but his father's suggestion was decisive. The Minister
+pointed out that it was too late for him to take part in the actual
+campaign, and that long before next spring they would all go home
+together.
+
+
+  The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel
+cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again to
+copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a continuous
+supply. Properly, the affidavits were no business of the private
+secretary, but practically the private secretary did a second
+secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would save Mr. Seward
+the trouble of sending more secretaries of his own selection to help
+the Minister. The work was nothing, and no one ever complained of it;
+not even Moran, the Secretary of Legation after the departure of
+Charley Wilson, though he might sit up all night to copy. Not the work,
+but the play exhausted. The effort of facing a hostile society was bad
+enough, but that of facing friends was worse. After terrific disasters
+like the seven days before Richmond and the second Bull Run, friends
+needed support; a tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the average
+mind sees quickest through a bluff; nothing answers but candor; yet
+private secretaries never feel candid, however much they feel the
+reverse, and therefore they must affect candor; not always a simple act
+when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and choking with tears over
+the blunders and incapacity of one's Government. If one shed tears,
+they must be shed on one's pillow. Least of all, must one throw extra
+strain on the Minister, who had all he could carry without being
+fretted in his family. One must read one's Times every morning over
+one's muffin without reading aloud--"Another disastrous Federal
+Defeat"; and one might not even indulge in harmless profanity.
+Self-restraint among friends required much more effort than keeping a
+quiet face before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day
+the private secretary smiled, when standing with the crowd in the
+throne-room while the endless procession made bows to the royal family,
+at hearing, behind his shoulder, one Cabinet Minister remark gaily to
+another: "So the Federals have got another licking!" The point of the
+remark was its truth. Even a private secretary had learned to control
+his tones and guard his features and betray no joy over the "lickings"
+of an enemy--in the enemy's presence.
+
+  London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial;
+it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham
+Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more
+devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two men, English
+society seemed demented. Defence was useless; explanation was vain; one
+could only let the passion exhaust itself. One's best friends were as
+unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality
+and Seward's ferocity became a dogma of popular faith. The last time
+Henry Adams saw Thackeray, before his sudden death at Christmas in
+1863, was in entering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening
+reception. Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing
+because, in his usual blind way, he had stumbled into the wrong house
+and not found it out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he
+knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his tone
+changed as he spoke of his--and Adams's--friend, Mrs. Frank Hampton, of
+South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally Baxter and painted as Ethel
+Newcome. Though he had never quite forgiven her marriage, his warmth of
+feeling revived when he heard that she had died of consumption at
+Columbia while her parents and sister were refused permission to pass
+through the lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice
+trembled and his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln
+and his hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals
+made a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of
+women--particularly of women--in order to punish their opponents. On
+quite insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had Adams
+carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was unjust, he would
+have gained nothing by showing them. At that moment Thackeray, and all
+London society with him, needed the nervous relief of expressing
+emotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not what they said he--was what were
+they?
+
+  For like reason, the members of the Legation kept silence, even
+in private, under the boorish Scotch jibes of Carlyle. If Carlyle was
+wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this measure
+would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more sincere or
+more sound in one thought than in another. The proof that a philosopher
+does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers
+before it reacts on himself. Demolition of one's idols is painful, and
+Carlyle had been an idol. Doubts cast on his stature spread far into
+general darkness like shadows of a setting sun. Not merely the idols
+fell, but also the habit of faith. If Carlyle, too, was a fraud, what
+were his scholars and school?
+
+  Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to
+complain than every other diplomatist has had, in like conditions, but
+one's few friends in society were mere ornament. The Legation could not
+dream of contesting social control. The best they could do was to
+escape mortification, and by this time their relations were good enough
+to save the Minister's family from that annoyance. Now and then, the
+fact could not be wholly disguised that some one had refused to
+meet--or to receive--the Minister; but never an open insult, or any
+expression of which the Minister had to take notice. Diplomacy served
+as a buffer in times of irritation, and no diplomat who knew his
+business fretted at what every diplomat--and none more commonly than
+the English--had to expect; therefore Henry Adams, though not a
+diplomat and wholly unprotected, went his way peacefully enough, seeing
+clearly that society cared little to make his acquaintance, but seeing
+also no reason why society should discover charms in him of which he
+was himself unconscious. He went where he was asked; he was always
+courteously received; he was, on the whole, better treated than at
+Washington; and he held his tongue.
+
+  For a thousand reasons, the best diplomatic house in London was
+Lord Palmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the worst. Of
+neither host could a private secretary expect to know anything. He
+might as well have expected to know the Grand Lama. Personally Lord
+Palmerston was the last man in London that a cautious private secretary
+wanted to know. Other Prime Ministers may perhaps have lived who
+inspired among diplomatists as much distrust as Palmerston, and yet
+between Palmerston's word and Russell's word, one hesitated to decide,
+and gave years of education to deciding, whether either could be
+trusted, or how far. The Queen herself in her famous memorandum of
+August 12, 1850, gave her opinion of Palmerston in words that differed
+little from words used by Lord John Russell, and both the Queen and
+Russell said in substance only what Cobden and Bright said in private.
+Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the diplomatic standard of
+trust seemed to be other than the parliamentarian. No professional
+diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Words were with them forms of
+expression which varied with individuals, but falsehood was more or
+less necessary to all. The worst liars were the candid. What
+diplomatists wanted to know was the motive that lay beyond the
+expression. In the case of Palmerston they were unanimous in warning
+new colleagues that they might expect to be sacrificed by him to any
+momentary personal object. Every new Minister or Ambassador at the
+Court of St. James received this preliminary lesson that he must, if
+possible, keep out of Palmerston's reach. The rule was not secret or
+merely diplomatic. The Queen herself had emphatically expressed the
+same opinion officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain, he would
+go down to the House of Commons and betray or misrepresent a foreign
+Minister, without concern for his victim. No one got back on him with a
+blow equally mischievous--not even the Queen--for, as old Baron Brunnow
+described him: "C'est une peau de rhinocere!" Having gained his point,
+he laughed, and his public laughed with him, for the usual British--or
+American--public likes to be amused, and thought it very amusing to see
+these beribboned and bestarred foreigners caught and tossed and gored
+on the horns of this jovial, slashing, devil-may-care British bull.
+
+  Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is
+their own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them; but
+they complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to lay traps.
+He was the enfant terrible of the British Government. On the other
+hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and loyal. All the
+diplomats and their wives seemed to think so, and took their troubles
+to her, believing that she would try to help them. For this reason
+among others, her evenings at home--Saturday Reviews, they were
+called--had great vogue. An ignorant young American could not be
+expected to explain it. Cambridge House was no better for entertaining
+than a score of others. Lady Palmerston was no longer young or
+handsome, and could hardly at any age have been vivacious. The people
+one met there were never smart and seldom young; they were largely
+diplomatic, and diplomats are commonly dull; they were largely
+political, and politicians rarely decorate or beautify an evening
+party; they were sprinkled with literary people, who are notoriously
+unfashionable; the women were of course ill-dressed and middle-aged;
+the men looked mostly bored or out of place; yet, beyond a doubt,
+Cambridge House was the best, and perhaps the only political house in
+London, and its success was due to Lady Palmerston, who never seemed to
+make an effort beyond a friendly recognition. As a lesson in social
+education, Cambridge House gave much subject for thought. First or
+last, one was to know dozens of statesmen more powerful and more
+agreeable than Lord Palmerston; dozens of ladies more beautiful and
+more painstaking than Lady Palmerston; but no political house so
+successful as Cambridge House. The world never explains such riddles.
+The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was "sympathique."
+
+  The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or
+tolerated, without a further effort to recognize their existence, but
+they were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and there
+they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop or even a
+duke. This was the social diversion of young Adams. No one knew
+him--not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening he ever attended,
+he gave his name as usual at the foot of the staircase, and was rather
+disturbed to hear it shouted up as "Mr. Handrew Hadams!" He tried to
+correct it, and the footman shouted more loudly: "Mr. Hanthony Hadams!"
+With some temper he repeated the correction, and was finally announced
+as "Mr. Halexander Hadams," and under this name made his bow for the
+last time to Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.
+
+  Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as he
+stood at the door receiving his guests, talking probably to one of his
+henchmen, Delane, Borthwick, or Hayward, who were sure to be near. The
+laugh was singular, mechanical, wooden, and did not seem to disturb his
+features. "Ha! ... Ha! ... Ha!" Each was a slow, deliberate
+ejaculation, and all were in the same tone, as though he meant to say:
+"Yes! ... Yes! ... Yes!" by way of assurance. It was a laugh of 1810
+and the Congress of Vienna. Adams would have much liked to stop a
+moment and ask whether William Pitt and the Duke of Wellington had
+laughed so; but young men attached to foreign Ministers asked no
+questions at all of Palmerston and their chiefs asked as few as
+possible. One made the usual bow and received the usual glance of
+civility; then passed on to Lady Palmerston, who was always kind in
+manner, but who wasted no remarks; and so to Lady Jocelyn with her
+daughter, who commonly had something friendly to say; then went through
+the diplomatic corps, Brunnow, Musurus, Azeglio, Apponyi, Van de Weyer,
+Bille, Tricoupi, and the rest, finally dropping into the hands of some
+literary accident as strange there as one's self. The routine varied
+little. There was no attempt at entertainment. Except for the desperate
+isolation of these two first seasons, even secretaries would have found
+the effort almost as mechanical as a levee at St. James's Palace.
+
+  Lord Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary; he was Prime
+Minister, but he loved foreign affairs and could no more resist scoring
+a point in diplomacy than in whist. Ministers of foreign powers,
+knowing his habits, tried to hold him at arms'-length, and, to do this,
+were obliged to court the actual Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell,
+who, on July 30, 1861, was called up to the House of Lords as an earl.
+By some process of personal affiliation, Minister Adams succeeded in
+persuading himself that he could trust Lord Russell more safely than
+Lord Palmerston. His son, being young and ill-balanced in temper,
+thought there was nothing to choose. Englishmen saw little difference
+between them, and Americans were bound to follow English experience in
+English character. Minister Adams had much to learn, although with him
+as well as with his son, the months of education began to count as
+aeons.
+
+  Just as Brunnow predicted, Lord Palmerston made his rush at
+last, as unexpected as always, and more furiously than though still a
+private secretary of twenty-four. Only a man who had been young with
+the battle of Trafalgar could be fresh and jaunty to that point, but
+Minister Adams was not in a position to sympathize with octogenarian
+youth and found himself in a danger as critical as that of his numerous
+predecessors. It was late one after noon in June, 1862, as the private
+secretary returned, with the Minister, from some social function, that
+he saw his father pick up a note from his desk and read it in silence.
+Then he said curtly: "Palmerston wants a quarrel!" This was the point
+of the incident as he felt it. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; he must not
+be gratified; he must be stopped. The matter of quarrel was General
+Butler's famous woman-order at New Orleans, but the motive was the
+belief in President Lincoln's brutality that had taken such deep root
+in the British mind. Knowing Palmerston's habits, the Minister took for
+granted that he meant to score a diplomatic point by producing this
+note in the House of Commons. If he did this at once, the Minister was
+lost; the quarrel was made; and one new victim to Palmerston's passion
+for popularity was sacrificed.
+
+  The moment was nervous--as far as the private secretary knew,
+quite the most critical moment in the records of American
+diplomacy--but the story belongs to history, not to education, and can
+be read there by any one who cares to read it. As a part of Henry
+Adams's education it had a value distinct from history. That his father
+succeeded in muzzling Palmerston without a public scandal, was well
+enough for the Minister, but was not enough for a private secretary who
+liked going to Cambridge House, and was puzzled to reconcile
+contradictions. That Palmerston had wanted a quarrel was obvious; why,
+then, did he submit so tamely to being made the victim of the quarrel?
+The correspondence that followed his note was conducted feebly on his
+side, and he allowed the United States Minister to close it by a
+refusal to receive further communications from him except through Lord
+Russell. The step was excessively strong, for it broke off private
+relations as well as public, and cost even the private secretary his
+invitations to Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried her best, but the
+two ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do with American
+Minister perplexed in the extreme. Not that Mr. Adams lost his temper,
+for he never felt such a weight of responsibility, and was never more
+cool; but he could conceive no other way of protecting his Government,
+not to speak of himself, than to force Lord Russell to interpose. He
+believed that Palmerston's submission and silence were due to Russell.
+Perhaps he was right; at the time, his son had no doubt of it, though
+afterwards he felt less sure. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; the motive
+seemed evident; yet when the quarrel was made, he backed out of it; for
+some reason it seemed that he did not want it--at least, not then. He
+never showed resentment against Mr. Adams at the time or afterwards. He
+never began another quarrel. Incredible as it seemed, he behaved like a
+well-bred gentleman who felt himself in the wrong. Possibly this change
+may have been due to Lord Russell's remonstrances, but the private
+secretary would have felt his education in politics more complete had
+he ever finally made up his mind whether Palmerston was more angry with
+General Butler, or more annoyed at himself, for committing what was in
+both cases an unpardonable betise.
+
+  At the time, the question was hardly raised, for no one doubted
+Palmerston's attitude or his plans. The season was near its end, and
+Cambridge House was soon closed. The Legation had troubles enough
+without caring to publish more. The tide of English feeling ran so
+violently against it that one could only wait to see whether General
+McClellan would bring it relief. The year 1862 was a dark spot in Henry
+Adams's life, and the education it gave was mostly one that he gladly
+forgot. As far as he was aware, he made no friends; he could hardly
+make enemies; yet towards the close of the year he was flattered by an
+invitation from Monckton Milnes to Fryston, and it was one of many acts
+of charity towards the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes made
+it his business to be kind. Other people criticised him for his manner
+of doing it, but never imitated him. Naturally, a dispirited,
+disheartened private secretary was exceedingly grateful, and never
+forgot the kindness, but it was chiefly as education that this first
+country visit had value. Commonly, country visits are much alike, but
+Monckton Milnes was never like anybody, and his country parties served
+his purpose of mixing strange elements. Fryston was one of a class of
+houses that no one sought for its natural beauties, and the winter
+mists of Yorkshire were rather more evident for the absence of the
+hostess on account of them, so that the singular guests whom Milnes
+collected to enliven his December had nothing to do but astonish each
+other, if anything could astonish such men. Of the five, Adams alone
+was tame; he alone added nothing to the wit or humor, except as a
+listener; but they needed a listener and he was useful. Of the
+remaining four, Milnes was the oldest, and perhaps the sanest in spite
+of his superficial eccentricities, for Yorkshire sanity was true to a
+standard of its own, if not to other conventions; yet even Milnes
+startled a young American whose Boston and Washington mind was still
+fresh. He would not have been startled by the hard-drinking,
+horse-racing Yorkshireman of whom he had read in books; but Milnes
+required a knowledge of society and literature that only himself
+possessed, if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had sought
+contact with everybody and everything that Europe could offer. He knew
+it all from several points of view, and chiefly as humorous.
+
+  The second of the party was also of a certain age; a quiet,
+well-mannered, singularly agreeable gentleman of the literary class.
+When Milnes showed Adams to his room to dress for dinner, he stayed a
+moment to say a word about this guest, whom he called Stirling of Keir.
+His sketch closed with the hint that Stirling was violent only on one
+point--hatred of Napoleon III. On that point, Adams was himself
+sensitive, which led him to wonder how bad the Scotch gentleman might
+be. The third was a man of thirty or thereabouts, whom Adams had
+already met at Lady Palmerston's carrying his arm in a sling. His
+figure and bearing were sympathetic--almost pathetic--with a certain
+grave and gentle charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He
+was Lawrence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in
+the fanatics' attack on the British Legation. He seemed exceptionally
+sane and peculiarly suited for country houses, where every man would
+enjoy his company, and every woman would adore him. He had not then
+published "Piccadilly"; perhaps he was writing it; while, like all the
+young men about the Foreign Office, he contributed to The Owl.
+
+  The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a
+year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action--and in this
+trait, was remotely followed, a generation later, by another famous
+young man, Robert Louis Stevenson--a tropical bird, high-crested,
+long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humor,
+quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him
+a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed.
+Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested
+nothing. Milnes was always unearthing new coins and trying to give them
+currency. He had unearthed Henry Adams who knew himself to be worthless
+and not current. When Milnes lingered a moment in Adams's room to add
+that Swinburne had written some poetry, not yet published, of really
+extraordinary merit, Adams only wondered what more Milnes would
+discover, and whether by chance he could discover merit in a private
+secretary. He was capable of it.
+
+  In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with
+the usual club manners of ladyless dinner-tables, easy and formal at
+the same time. Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his dramatic
+story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into other channels,
+until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne out. Then, at last, if
+never before, Adams acquired education. What he had sought so long, he
+found; but he was none the wiser; only the more astonished. For once,
+too, he felt at ease, for the others were no less astonished than
+himself, and their astonishment grew apace. For the rest of the evening
+Swinburne figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only
+freer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was
+forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; but
+Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in
+Adams's bedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant
+of manners; and there after dinner all sat--or lay--till far into the
+night, listening to the rush of Swinburne's talk. In a long experience,
+before or after, no one ever approached it; yet one had heard accounts
+of the best talking of the time, and read accounts of talkers in all
+time, among the rest, of Voltaire, who seemed to approach nearest the
+pattern.
+
+  That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of
+men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original,
+wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams
+could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They
+could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature,
+classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of
+Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to
+beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to
+make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished
+ballads--"Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad
+of Burdens"--which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad.
+It was singular that his most appreciative listener should have been
+the author only of pretty verses like "We wandered by the brook-side,"
+and "She seemed to those that saw them meet"; and who never cared to
+write in any other tone; but Milnes took everything into his
+sympathies, including Americans like young Adams whose standards were
+stiffest of all, while Swinburne, though millions of ages far from
+them, united them by his humor even more than by his poetry. The story
+of his first day as a member of Professor Stubbs's household was
+professionally clever farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who
+could write a Greek ode or a Provençal chanson as easily as an English
+quatrain.
+
+  Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir
+wanted to take with him to his chamber a copy of "Queen Rosamund," the
+only volume Swinburne had then published, which was on the library
+table, and Adams offered to light him down with his solitary bedroom
+candle. All the way, Stirling was ejaculating explosions of wonder,
+until at length, at the foot of the stairs and at the climax of his
+imagination, he paused, and burst out: "He's a cross between the devil
+and the Duke of Argyll!"
+
+  To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious
+critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one--at least
+in person--but he understood that to a Scotchman the likeness meant
+something quite portentous, beyond English experience, supernatural,
+and what the French call moyenageux, or mediaeval with a grotesque
+turn. That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a
+prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first
+in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as
+muffins and pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of
+dyspepsia. The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns
+slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.
+
+  Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius
+never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its uttermost
+flights, was never moyenageux. One felt the horror of Longfellow and
+Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of Holmes, at the wild
+Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What could a shy young private
+secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that
+Swinburne might find a friend in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could
+hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams
+could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest
+Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The
+quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched
+there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only
+receive; one had nothing to give--nothing even to offer.
+
+  Swinburne tested him then and there by one of his favorite
+tests--Victor Hugo for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the surest
+and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise
+for foreigners; it requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and
+rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French
+verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams
+had neither. To the end of his life he never listened to a French
+recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse;
+but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade
+Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de
+Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was unequal; he did
+not sustain himself on the wing.
+
+  Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to
+sustain himself on the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo; but his
+education as well as his ear was at fault, and he succumbed. Swinburne
+tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In truth the test was the
+same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's English the qualities that he
+felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's failure was equally gross, for, when
+forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him.
+Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was
+lost.
+
+  The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew
+his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified
+by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was no
+companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an annoyance; no
+number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even
+in technical appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was
+nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly
+such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy
+to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one.
+Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became
+absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendors of Hugo and
+Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in
+personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the
+Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he
+had made on Hugo: "I was shown into a large room," he said, "with women
+and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end
+throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and
+uttered the words: 'Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!' Silence followed.
+Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: 'Chose sublime! un
+Dieu qui croit en Dieu!"'
+
+  With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the
+actors had not the instinct of the drama; and yet even a private
+secretary was not wholly wanting in instinct. As soon as he reached
+town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of "Queen Rosamund," and at
+that time, if Swinburne was not joking, Pickering had sold seven
+copies. When the "Poems and Ballads" came out, and met their great
+success and scandal, he sought one of the first copies from Moxon. If
+he had sinned and doubted at all, he wholly repented and did penance
+before "Atalanta in Calydon," and would have offered Swinburne a solemn
+worship as Milnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the
+poet. Unfortunately it was worthless.
+
+  The three young men returned to London, and each went his own
+way. Adams's interest in making friends was something desperate, but
+"the London season," Milnes used to say, "is a season for making
+acquaintances and losing friends"; there was no intimate life. Of
+Swinburne he saw no more till Monckton Milnes summoned his whole array
+of Frystonians to support him in presiding at the dinner of the
+Authors' Fund, when Adams found himself seated next to Swinburne,
+famous then, but no nearer. They never met again. Oliphant he met
+oftener; all the world knew and loved him; but he too disappeared in
+the way that all the world knows. Stirling of Keir, after one or two
+efforts, passed also from Adams's vision into Sir William
+Stirling-Maxwell. The only record of his wonderful visit to Fryston may
+perhaps exist still in the registers of the St. James's Club, for
+immediately afterwards Milnes proposed Henry Adams for membership, and
+unless his memory erred, the nomination was seconded by Tricoupi and
+endorsed by Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was a little
+singular for variety, but on the whole it suggested that the private
+secretary was getting on.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)
+
+  ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquired
+whether Minister Adams would like the place of Assistant Secretary for
+his son. It was the first--and last--office ever offered him, if indeed
+he could claim what was offered in fact to his father. To them both,
+the change seemed useless. Any young man could make some sort of
+Assistant Secretary; only one, just at that moment, could make an
+Assistant Son. More than half his duties were domestic; they sometimes
+required long absences; they always required independence of the
+Government service. His position was abnormal. The British Government
+by courtesy allowed the son to go to Court as Attache, though he was
+never attached, and after five or six years' toleration, the decision
+was declared irregular. In the Legation, as private secretary, he was
+liable to do Secretary's work. In society, when official, he was
+attached to the Minister; when unofficial, he was a young man without
+any position at all. As the years went on, he began to find advantages
+in having no position at all except that of young man. Gradually he
+aspired to become a gentleman; just a member of society like the rest.
+The position was irregular; at that time many positions were irregular;
+yet it lent itself to a sort of irregular education that seemed to be
+the only sort of education the young man was ever to get.
+
+  Such as it was, few young men had more. The spring and summer
+of 1863 saw a great change in Secretary Seward's management of foreign
+affairs. Under the stimulus of danger, he too got education. He felt,
+at last, that his official representatives abroad needed support.
+Officially he could give them nothing but despatches, which were of no
+great value to any one; and at best the mere weight of an office had
+little to do with the public. Governments were made to deal with
+Governments, not with private individuals or with the opinions of
+foreign society. In order to affect European opinion, the weight of
+American opinion had to be brought to bear personally, and had to be
+backed by the weight of American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously
+to work and sent over every important American on whom he could lay his
+hands. All came to the Legation more or less intimately, and Henry
+Adams had a chance to see them all, bankers or bishops, who did their
+work quietly and well, though, to the outsider, the work seemed wasted
+and the "influential classes" more indurated with prejudice than ever.
+The waste was only apparent; the work all told in the end, and
+meanwhile it helped education.
+
+  Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the
+Minister and to cooperate with him. The most interesting of these was
+Thurlow Weed, who came to do what the private secretary himself had
+attempted two years before, with boyish ignorance of his own powers.
+Mr. Weed took charge of the press, and began, to the amused
+astonishment of the secretaries, by making what the Legation had
+learned to accept as the invariable mistake of every amateur diplomat;
+he wrote letters to the London Times. Mistake or not, Mr. Weed soon got
+into his hands the threads of management, and did quietly and smoothly
+all that was to be done. With his work the private secretary had no
+connection; it was he that interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete
+American education in himself. His mind was naturally strong and
+beautifully balanced; his temper never seemed ruffled; his manners were
+carefully perfect in the style of benevolent simplicity, the tradition
+of Benjamin Franklin. He was the model of political management and
+patient address; but the trait that excited enthusiasm in a private
+secretary was his faculty of irresistibly conquering confidence. Of all
+flowers in the garden of education, confidence was becoming the rarest;
+but before Mr. Weed went away, young Adams followed him about not only
+obediently--for obedience had long since become a blind instinct--but
+rather with sympathy and affection, much like a little dog.
+
+  The sympathy was not due only to Mr. Weed's skill of
+management, although Adams never met another such master, or any one
+who approached him; nor was the confidence due to any display of
+professions, either moral or social, by Mr. Weed. The trait that
+astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparent unselfishness.
+Never, in any man who wielded such power, did Adams meet anything like
+it. The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of
+self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies; a
+diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one
+can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of
+egotism it stimulates; and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a
+rare immune. He thought apparently not of himself, but of the person he
+was talking with. He held himself naturally in the background. He was
+not jealous. He grasped power, but not office. He distributed offices
+by handfuls without caring to take them. He had the instinct of empire:
+he gave, but he did not receive. This rare superiority to the
+politicians he controlled, a trait that private secretaries never met
+in the politicians themselves, excited Adams's wonder and curiosity,
+but when he tried to get behind it, and to educate himself from the
+stores of Mr. Weed's experience, he found the study still more
+fascinating. Management was an instinct with Mr. Weed; an object to be
+pursued for its own sake, as one plays cards; but he appeared to play
+with men as though they were only cards; he seemed incapable of feeling
+himself one of them. He took them and played them for their face-value;
+but once, when he had told, with his usual humor, some stories of his
+political experience which were strong even for the Albany lobby, the
+private secretary made bold to ask him outright: "Then, Mr. Weed, do
+you think that no politician can be trusted?" Mr. Weed hesitated for a
+moment; then said in his mild manner: "I never advise a young man to
+begin by thinking so."
+
+  This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral
+sense, as though Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions!" As he grew
+older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it as a question of how
+the game should be played. Young men most needed experience. They could
+not play well if they trusted to a general rule. Every card had a
+relative value. Principles had better be left aside; values were
+enough. Adams knew that he could never learn to play politics in so
+masterly a fashion as this: his education and his nervous system
+equally forbade it, although he admired all the more the impersonal
+faculty of the political master who could thus efface himself and his
+temper in the game. He noticed that most of the greatest politicians in
+history had seemed to regard men as counters. The lesson was the more
+interesting because another famous New Yorker came over at the same
+time who liked to discuss the same problem. Secretary Seward sent
+William M. Evarts to London as law counsel, and Henry began an
+acquaintance with Mr. Evarts that soon became intimate. Evarts was as
+individual as Weed was impersonal; like most men, he cared little for
+the game, or how it was played, and much for the stakes, but he played
+it in a large and liberal way, like Daniel Webster, "a great advocate
+employed in politics." Evarts was also an economist of morals, but with
+him the question was rather how much morality one could afford. "The
+world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill
+it." One sought education in order to adjust the dose.
+
+  The teachings of Weed and Evarts were practical, and the
+private secretary's life turned on their value. England's power of
+absorbing truth was small. Englishmen, such as Palmerston, Russell,
+Bethell, and the society represented by the Times and Morning Post, as
+well as the Tories represented by Disraeli, Lord Robert Cecil, and the
+Standard, offered a study in education that sickened a young student
+with anxiety. He had begun--contrary to Mr. Weed's advice--by taking
+their bad faith for granted. Was he wrong? To settle this point became
+the main object of the diplomatic education so laboriously pursued, at
+a cost already stupendous, and promising to become ruinous. Life
+changed front, according as one thought one's self dealing with honest
+men or with rogues.
+
+  Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of
+dishonesty. The reasons that satisfied him had not altogether satisfied
+his father, and of course his father's doubts gravely shook his own
+convictions, but, in practice, if only for safety, the Legation put
+little or no confidence in Ministers, and there the private secretary's
+diplomatic education began. The recognition of belligerency, the
+management of the Declaration of Paris, the Trent Affair, all
+strengthened the belief that Lord Russell had started in May, 1861,
+with the assumption that the Confederacy was established; every step he
+had taken proved his persistence in the same idea; he never would
+consent to put obstacles in the way of recognition; and he was waiting
+only for the proper moment to interpose. All these points seemed so
+fixed--so self-evident--that no one in the Legation would have doubted
+or even discussed them except that Lord Russell obstinately denied the
+whole charge, and persisted in assuring Minister Adams of his honest
+and impartial neutrality.
+
+  With the insolence of youth and zeal, Henry Adams jumped at once to the
+conclusion that Earl Russell--like other statesmen--lied; and, although
+the Minister thought differently, he had to act as though Russell were
+false. Month by month the demonstration followed its mathematical
+stages; one of the most perfect educational courses in politics and
+diplomacy that a young man ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly
+tutors in the world were provided for him at public expense--Lord
+Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr. Gladstone,
+Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by the British Government;
+William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, William Maxwell Evarts,
+Thurlow Weed, and other considerable professors employed by the
+American Government; but there was only one student to profit by this
+immense staff of teachers. The private secretary alone sought education.
+
+  To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught.
+Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel's metaphysical doctrine of
+the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to understand. Yet the
+stages of demonstration were clear. They began in June, 1862, after the
+escape of one rebel cruiser, by the remonstrances of the Minister
+against the escape of "No. 290," which was imminent. Lord Russell
+declined to act on the evidence. New evidence was sent in every few
+days, and with it, on July 24, was included Collier's legal opinion:
+"It appears difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement of
+the Foreign Enlistment Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion, is
+little better than a dead letter." Such language implied almost a
+charge of collusion with the rebel agents--an intent to aid the
+Confederacy. In spite of the warning, Earl Russell let the ship, four
+days afterwards, escape.
+
+  Young Adams had nothing to do with law; that was business of
+his betters. His opinion of law hung on his opinion of lawyers. In
+spite of Thurlow Weed's advice, could one afford to trust human nature
+in politics? History said not. Sir Robert Collier seemed to hold that
+Law agreed with History. For education the point was vital. If one
+could not trust a dozen of the most respected private characters in the
+world, composing the Queen's Ministry, one could trust no mortal man.
+
+  Lord Russell felt the force of this inference, and undertook to
+disprove it. His effort lasted till his death. At first he excused
+himself by throwing the blame on the law officers. This was a
+politician's practice, and the lawyers overruled it. Then he pleaded
+guilty to criminal negligence, and said in his "Recollections":--"I
+assent entirely to the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice of England
+that the Alabama ought to have been detained during the four days I was
+waiting for the opinion of the law officers. But I think that the fault
+was not that of the commissioners of customs, it was my fault as
+Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs." This concession brought all
+parties on common ground. Of course it was his fault! The true issue
+lay not in the question of his fault, but of his intent. To a young
+man, getting an education in politics, there could be no sense in
+history unless a constant course of faults implied a constant motive.
+
+  For his father the question was not so abstruse; it was a
+practical matter of business to be handled as Weed or Evarts handled
+their bargains and jobs. Minister Adams held the convenient belief
+that, in the main, Russell was true, and the theory answered his
+purposes so well that he died still holding it. His son was seeking
+education, and wanted to know whether he could, in politics, risk
+trusting any one. Unfortunately no one could then decide; no one knew
+the facts. Minister Adams died without knowing them. Henry Adams was an
+older man than his father in 1862, before he learned a part of them.
+The most curious fact, even then, was that Russell believed in his own
+good faith and that Argyll believed in it also.
+
+  Argyll betrayed a taste for throwing the blame on Bethell, Lord
+Westbury, then Lord Chancellor, but this escape helped Adams not at
+all. On the contrary, it complicated the case of Russell. In England,
+one half of society enjoyed throwing stones at Lord Palmerston, while
+the other half delighted in flinging mud at Earl Russell, but every one
+of every party united in pelting Westbury with every missile at hand.
+The private secretary had no doubts about him, for he never professed
+to be moral. He was the head and heart of the whole rebel contention,
+and his opinions on neutrality were as clear as they were on morality.
+The private secretary had nothing to do with him, and regretted it, for
+Lord Westbury's wit and wisdom were great; but as far as his authority
+went he affirmed the law that in politics no man should be trusted.
+
+  Russell alone insisted on his honesty of intention and
+persuaded both the Duke and the Minister to believe him. Every one in
+the Legation accepted his assurances as the only assertions they could
+venture to trust. They knew he expected the rebels to win in the end,
+but they believed he would not actively interpose to decide it. On
+that--on nothing else--they rested their frail hopes of remaining a day
+longer in England. Minister Adams remained six years longer in England;
+then returned to America to lead a busy life till he died in 1886 still
+holding the same faith in Earl Russell, who had died in 1878. In 1889,
+Spencer Walpole published the official life of Earl Russell, and told a
+part of the story which had never been known to the Minister and which
+astounded his son, who burned with curiosity to know what his father
+would have said of it.
+
+  The story was this: The Alabama escaped, by Russell's confessed
+negligence, on July 28, 1862. In America the Union armies had suffered
+great disasters before Richmond and at the second Bull Run, August
+29-30, followed by Lee's invasion of Maryland, September 7, the news of
+which, arriving in England on September 14, roused the natural idea
+that the crisis was at hand. The next news was expected by the
+Confederates to announce the fall of Washington or Baltimore.
+Palmerston instantly, September 14, wrote to Russell: "If this should
+happen, would it not be time for us to consider whether in such a state
+of things England and France might not address the contending parties
+and recommend an arrangement on the basis of separation?"
+
+  This letter, quite in the line of Palmerston's supposed
+opinions, would have surprised no one, if it had been communicated to
+the Legation; and indeed, if Lee had captured Washington, no one could
+have blamed Palmerston for offering intervention. Not Palmerston's
+letter but Russell's reply, merited the painful attention of a young
+man seeking a moral standard for judging politicians:--
+
+GOTHA, September, 17, 1862
+
+  MY DEAR PALMERSTON:--
+
+    Whether the Federal army is destroyed or not, it is clear
+  that it is driven back to Washington and has made no progress
+  in subduing the insurgent States. Such being the case, I agree
+  with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the
+  United States Government with a view to the recognition of the
+  independence of the Confederates. I agree further that in case
+  of failure, we ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States
+  as an independent State. For the purpose of taking so important
+  a step, I think we must have a meeting of the Cabinet. The 23d
+  or 30th would suit me for the meeting.
+
+    We ought then, if we agree on such a step, to propose it
+  first to France, and then on the part of England and France, to
+  Russia and other powers, as a measure decided upon by us.
+
+    We ought to make ourselves safe in Canada, not by sending
+  more troops there, but by concentrating those we have in a few
+  defensible posts before the winter sets in....
+
+  Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical
+difficulty in education which a mere student could never overcome; a
+difficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want of experience, but
+in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord Russell's course had been
+consistent from the first, and had all the look of rigid determination
+to recognize the Southern Confederacy "with a view" to breaking up the
+Union. His letter of September 17 hung directly on his encouragement of
+the Alabama and his protection of the rebel navy; while the whole of
+his plan had its root in the Proclamation of Belligerency, May 13,
+1861. The policy had every look of persistent forethought, but it took
+for granted the deliberate dishonesty of three famous men: Palmerston,
+Russell, and Gladstone. This dishonesty, as concerned Russell, was
+denied by Russell himself, and disbelieved by Argyll, Forster, and most
+of America's friends in England, as well as by Minister Adams. What the
+Minister would have thought had he seen this letter of September 17,
+his son would have greatly liked to know, but he would have liked still
+more to know what the Minister would have thought of Palmerston's
+answer, dated September 23:--
+
+   ... It is evident that a great conflict is taking place to
+  the northwest of Washington, and its issue must have a great
+  effect on the state of affairs. If the Federals sustain a great
+  defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation, and the iron
+  should be struck while it is hot. If, on the other hand, they
+  should have the best of it, we may wait a while and see what
+  may follow...
+
+  The roles were reversed. Russell wrote what was expected from
+Palmerston, or even more violently; while Palmerston wrote what was
+expected from Russell, or even more temperately. The private
+secretary's view had been altogether wrong, which would not have much
+surprised even him, but he would have been greatly astonished to learn
+that the most confidential associates of these men knew little more
+about their intentions than was known in the Legation. The most trusted
+member of the Cabinet was Lord Granville, and to him Russell next
+wrote. Granville replied at once decidedly opposing recognition of the
+Confederacy, and Russell sent the reply to Palmerston, who returned it
+October 2, with the mere suggestion of waiting for further news from
+America. At the same time Granville wrote to another member of the
+Cabinet, Lord Stanley of Alderley, a letter published forty years
+afterwards in Granville's "Life" (I, 442) to the private secretary
+altogether the most curious and instructive relic of the whole lesson
+in politics:
+
+  ... I have written to Johnny my reasons for thinking it
+  decidedly premature. I, however, suspect you will settle to do
+  so. Pam., Johnny, and Gladstone would be in favor of it, and
+  probably Newcastle. I do not know about the others. It appears
+  to me a great mistake....
+
+  Out of a Cabinet of a dozen members, Granville, the best
+informed of them all, could pick only three who would favor
+recognition. Even a private secretary thought he knew as much as this,
+or more. Ignorance was not confined to the young and insignificant, nor
+were they the only victims of blindness. Granville's letter made only
+one point clear. He knew of no fixed policy or conspiracy. If any
+existed, it was confined to Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and perhaps
+Newcastle. In truth, the Legation knew, then, all that was to be known,
+and the true fault of education was to suspect too much.
+
+  By that time, October 3, news of Antietam and of Lee's retreat
+into Virginia had reached London. The Emancipation Proclamation
+arrived. Had the private secretary known all that Granville or
+Palmerston knew, he would surely have thought the danger past, at least
+for a time, and any man of common sense would have told him to stop
+worrying over phantoms. This healthy lesson would have been worth much
+for practical education, but it was quite upset by the sudden rush of a
+new actor upon the stage with a rhapsody that made Russell seem sane,
+and all education superfluous.
+
+  This new actor, as every one knows, was William Ewart
+Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. If, in the domain of the
+world's politics, one point was fixed, one value ascertained, one
+element serious, it was the British Exchequer; and if one man lived who
+could be certainly counted as sane by overwhelming interest, it was the
+man who had in charge the finances of England. If education had the
+smallest value, it should have shown its force in Gladstone, who was
+educated beyond all record of English training. From him, if from no
+one else, the poor student could safely learn.
+
+  Here is what he learned! Palmerston notified Gladstone,
+September 24, of the proposed intervention: "If I am not mistaken, you
+would be inclined to approve such a course." Gladstone replied the next
+day: "He was glad to learn what the Prime Minister had told him; and
+for two reasons especially he desired that the proceedings should be
+prompt: the first was the rapid progress of the Southern arms and the
+extension of the area of Southern feeling; the second was the risk of
+violent impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire such as would
+prejudice the dignity and disinterestedness of the proffered mediation."
+
+  Had the puzzled student seen this letter, he must have
+concluded from it that the best educated statesman England ever
+produced did not know what he was talking about, an assumption which
+all the world would think quite inadmissible from a private
+secretary--but this was a trifle. Gladstone having thus arranged, with
+Palmerston and Russell, for intervention in the American war, reflected
+on the subject for a fortnight from September 25 to October 7, when he
+was to speak on the occasion of a great dinner at Newcastle. He decided
+to announce the Government's policy with all the force his personal and
+official authority could give it. This decision was no sudden impulse;
+it was the result of deep reflection pursued to the last moment. On the
+morning of October 7, he entered in his diary: "Reflected further on
+what I should say about Lancashire and America, for both these subjects
+are critical." That evening at dinner, as the mature fruit of his long
+study, he deliberately pronounced the famous phrase:--
+
+  ... We know quite well that the people of the Northern States
+  have not yet drunk of the cup--they are still trying to hold
+  it far from their lips--which all the rest of the world see
+  they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions
+  about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is
+  no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South
+  have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and
+  they have made, what is more than either, they have made a
+  nation....
+
+  Looking back, forty years afterwards, on this episode, one
+asked one's self painfully what sort of a lesson a young man should
+have drawn, for the purposes of his education, from this world-famous
+teaching of a very great master. In the heat of passion at the moment,
+one drew some harsh moral conclusions: Were they incorrect? Posed
+bluntly as rules of conduct, they led to the worst possible practices.
+As morals, one could detect no shade of difference between Gladstone
+and Napoleon except to the advantage of Napoleon. The private secretary
+saw none; he accepted the teacher in that sense; he took his lesson of
+political morality as learned, his notice to quit as duly served, and
+supposed his education to be finished.
+
+  Every one thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil. Any
+intelligent education ought to end when it is complete. One would then
+feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world. The
+old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the actual drama
+is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue. When the curtain fell
+on Gladstone's speech, any student had the right to suppose the drama
+ended; none could have affirmed that it was about to begin; that one's
+painful lesson was thrown away.
+
+  Even after forty years, most people would refuse to believe it;
+they would still insist that Gladstone, Russell, and Palmerston were
+true villains of melodrama. The evidence against Gladstone in special
+seemed overwhelming. The word "must" can never be used by a responsible
+Minister of one Government towards another, as Gladstone used it. No
+one knew so well as he that he and his own officials and friends at
+Liverpool were alone "making" a rebel navy, and that Jefferson Davis
+had next to nothing to do with it. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he
+was the Minister most interested in knowing that Palmerston, Russell,
+and himself were banded together by mutual pledge to make the
+Confederacy a nation the next week, and that the Southern leaders had
+as yet no hope of "making a nation" but in them. Such thoughts occurred
+to every one at the moment and time only added to their force. Never in
+the history of political turpitude had any brigand of modern
+civilization offered a worse example. The proof of it was that it
+outraged even Palmerston, who immediately put up Sir George Cornewall
+Lewis to repudiate the Chancellor of the Exchequer, against whom he
+turned his press at the same time. Palmerston had no notion of letting
+his hand be forced by Gladstone.
+
+  Russell did nothing of the kind; if he agreed with Palmerston,
+he followed Gladstone. Although he had just created a new evangel of
+non-intervention for Italy, and preached it like an apostle, he
+preached the gospel of intervention in America as though he were a
+mouthpiece of the Congress of Vienna. On October 13, he issued his call
+for the Cabinet to meet, on October 23, for discussion of the "duty of
+Europe to ask both parties, in the most friendly and conciliatory
+terms, to agree to a suspension of arms." Meanwhile Minister Adams,
+deeply perturbed and profoundly anxious, would betray no sign of alarm,
+and purposely delayed to ask explanation. The howl of anger against
+Gladstone became louder every day, for every one knew that the Cabinet
+was called for October 23, and then could not fail to decide its policy
+about the United States. Lord Lyons put off his departure for America
+till October 25 expressly to share in the conclusions to be discussed
+on October 23. When Minister Adams at last requested an interview,
+Russell named October 23 as the day. To the last moment every act of
+Russell showed that, in his mind, the intervention was still in doubt.
+
+  When Minister Adams, at the interview, suggested that an
+explanation was due him, he watched Russell with natural interest, and
+reported thus:
+
+   ... His lordship took my allusion at once, though not
+  without a slight indication of embarrassment. He said that Mr.
+  Gladstone had been evidently much misunderstood. I must have
+  seen in the newspapers the letters which contained his later
+  explanations. That he had certain opinions in regard to the
+  nature of the struggle in America, as on all public questions,
+  just as other Englishmen had, was natural enough. And it was
+  the fashion here for public men to express such as they held in
+  their public addresses. Of course it was not for him to disavow
+  anything on the part of Mr. Gladstone; but he had no idea that
+  in saying what he had, there was a serious intention to justify
+  any of the inferences that had been drawn from it of a
+  disposition in the Government now to adopt a new policy....
+
+  A student trying to learn the processes of politics in a free
+government could not but ponder long on the moral to be drawn from this
+"explanation" of Mr. Gladstone by Earl Russell. The point set for study
+as the first condition of political life, was whether any politician
+could be believed or trusted. The question which a private secretary
+asked himself, in copying this despatch of October 24, 1862, was
+whether his father believed, or should believe, one word of Lord
+Russell's "embarrassment." The "truth" was not known for thirty years,
+but when published, seemed to be the reverse of Earl Russell's
+statement. Mr. Gladstone's speech had been drawn out by Russell's own
+policy of intervention and had no sense except to declare the
+"disposition in the Government now to adopt" that new policy. Earl
+Russell never disavowed Gladstone, although Lord Palmerston and Sir
+George Cornewall Lewis instantly did so. As far as the curious student
+could penetrate the mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed Earl Russell's
+intent.
+
+  As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would
+decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively
+honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might be
+ignored as a delusion. Therefore the student felt compelled to reach
+some sort of idea that should serve to bring the case within a general
+law. Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He bluntly told Russell
+that while he was "willing to acquit" Gladstone of "any deliberate
+intention to bring on the worst effects," he was bound to say that
+Gladstone was doing it quite as certainly as if he had one; and to this
+charge, which struck more sharply at Russell's secret policy than at
+Gladstone's public defence of it, Russell replied as well as he could:--
+
+  ... His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that Lord
+  Palmerston and other members of the Government regretted the
+  speech, and Mr. Gladstone himself was not disinclined to
+  correct, as far as he could, the misinterpretation which had
+  been made of it. It was still their intention to adhere to the
+  rule of perfect neutrality in the struggle, and to let it come
+  to its natural end without the smallest interference, direct or
+  otherwise. But he could not say what circumstances might happen
+  from month to month in the future. I observed that the policy
+  he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and asked if I was to
+  understand him as saying that no change of it was now proposed.
+  To which he gave his assent....
+
+Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that Russell
+could be trusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was the
+diplomatic tradition, especially held by the Russian diplomats.
+Possibly it was sound, but it helped in no way the education of a
+private secretary. The cat's-paw theory offered no safer clue, than the
+frank, old-fashioned, honest theory of villainy. Neither the one nor
+the other was reasonable.
+
+  No one ever told the Minister that Earl Russell, only a few
+hours before, had asked the Cabinet to intervene, and that the Cabinet
+had refused. The Minister was led to believe that the Cabinet meeting
+was not held, and that its decision was informal. Russell's biographer
+said that, "with this memorandum [of Russell's, dated October 13] the
+Cabinet assembled from all parts of the country on October 23; but ...
+members of the Cabinet doubted the policy of moving, or moving at that
+time." The Duke of Newcastle and Sir George Grey joined Granville in
+opposition. As far as known, Russell and Gladstone stood alone.
+"Considerations such as these prevented the matter being pursued any
+further."
+
+  Still no one has distinctly said that this decision was formal;
+perhaps the unanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet
+unnecessary; but it is certain that, within an hour or two before or
+after this decision, "his lordship said [to the United States Minister]
+that the policy of the Government was to adhere to a strict neutrality
+and to leave this struggle to settle itself." When Mr. Adams, not
+satisfied even with this positive assurance, pressed for a categorical
+answer: "I asked him if I was to understand that policy as not now to
+be changed; he said: Yes!"
+
+  John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of
+Gladstone," forty years afterwards, would have interested the Minister,
+as well as his private secretary: "If this relation be accurate," said
+Morley of a relation officially published at the time, and never
+questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary did not construe strict
+neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call good offices." For a
+vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's construction of neutrality
+mattered little to the student, who asked only Russell's intent, and
+cared only to know whether his construction had any other object than
+to deceive the Minister.
+
+  In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and
+possibly Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his
+personal friend Mr. Adams; but to one who is still in the world even if
+not of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell totally deceived
+the private secretary, whatever he may have done to the Minister. The
+policy of abstention was not settled on October 23. Only the next day,
+October 24, Gladstone circulated a rejoinder to G. C. Lewis, insisting
+on the duty of England, France, and Russia to intervene by
+representing, "with moral authority and force, the opinion of the
+civilized world upon the conditions of the case." Nothing had been
+decided. By some means, scarcely accidental, the French Emperor was led
+to think that his influence might turn the scale, and only ten days
+after Russell's categorical "Yes!" Napoleon officially invited him to
+say "No!" He was more than ready to do so. Another Cabinet meeting was
+called for November 11, and this time Gladstone himself reports the
+debate:
+
+  Nov. 11. We have had our Cabinet to-day and meet again
+  tomorrow. I am afraid we shall do little or nothing in the
+  business of America. But I will send you definite intelligence.
+  Both Lords Palmerston and Russell are right.
+
+  Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
+  Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely
+  fighting out his battle. However, though we decline for the
+  moment, the answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave
+  the matter very open for the future.
+
+  Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about America
+  public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not
+  take it as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may
+  themselves act in the matter. It will be clear that we concur
+  with them, that the war should cease. Palmerston gave to
+  Russell's proposal a feeble and half-hearted support.
+
+  Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who
+looked on at this scene, was dead, the private secretary of 1862 read
+these lines with stupor, and hurried to discuss them with John Hay, who
+was more astounded than himself. All the world had been at
+cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and the situation, had
+followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, had known none of the
+facts. One would have done better to draw no conclusions at all. One's
+diplomatic education was a long mistake.
+
+  These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
+themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on
+September 14, under the impression that the President was about to be
+driven from Washington and the Army of the Potomac dispersed, suggested
+to Russell that in such a case, intervention might be feasible. Russell
+instantly answered that, in any case, he wanted to intervene and should
+call a Cabinet for the purpose. Palmerston hesitated; Russell insisted;
+Granville protested. Meanwhile the rebel army was defeated at Antietam,
+September 17, and driven out of Maryland. Then Gladstone, October 7,
+tried to force Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as a fait
+accompli. Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir George Cornewall
+Lewis to contradict Gladstone and treated him sharply in the press, at
+the very moment when Russell was calling a Cabinet to make Gladstone's
+words good. On October 23, Russell assured Adams that no change in
+policy was now proposed. On the same day he had proposed it, and was
+voted down. Instantly Napoleon III appeared as the ally of Russell and
+Gladstone with a proposition which had no sense except as a bribe to
+Palmerston to replace America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence
+on Europe, and to replace England in her old sovereignty of the seas,
+if Palmerston would support France in Mexico. The young student of
+diplomacy, knowing Palmerston, must have taken for granted that
+Palmerston inspired this motion and would support it; knowing Russell
+and his Whig antecedents, he would conceive that Russell must oppose
+it; knowing Gladstone and his lofty principles, he would not doubt that
+Gladstone violently denounced the scheme. If education was worth a
+straw, this was the only arrangement of persons that a trained student
+would imagine possible, and it was the arrangement actually assumed by
+nine men out of ten, as history. In truth, each valuation was false.
+Palmerston never showed favor to the scheme and gave it only "a feeble
+and half-hearted support." Russell gave way without resolutely fighting
+out "his battle." The only resolute, vehement, conscientious champion
+of Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.
+
+  Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders,
+but to him the best part of life was thrown away if he learned such a
+lesson wrong. Henry James had not yet taught the world to read a volume
+for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his burning-glass turned on
+alternate sides of the same figure. Psychological study was still
+simple, and at worst--or at best--English character was never subtile.
+Surely no one would believe that complexity was the trait that confused
+the student of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. Under a very strong
+light human nature will always appear complex and full of
+contradictions, but the British statesman would appear, on the whole,
+among the least complex of men.
+
+  Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by
+contrast, be called complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone
+deceived only by their simplicity. Russell was the most interesting to
+a young man because his conduct seemed most statesmanlike. Every act of
+Russell, from April, 1861, to November, 1862, showed the clearest
+determination to break up the Union. The only point in Russell's
+character about which the student thought no doubt to be possible was
+its want of good faith. It was thoroughly dishonest, but strong.
+Habitually Russell said one thing and did another. He seemed
+unconscious of his own contradictions even when his opponents pointed
+them out, as they were much in the habit of doing, in the strongest
+language. As the student watched him deal with the Civil War in
+America, Russell alone showed persistence, even obstinacy, in a
+definite determination, which he supported, as was necessary, by the
+usual definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of the
+falsehoods; on the contrary, he was vain of his own insight in
+detecting them; but he was wholly upset by the idea that Russell should
+think himself true.
+
+  Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old school,
+clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods--dishonest but
+strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no objects, and that
+though he might be weak he was above all else honest. Minister Adams
+leaned to Russell personally and thought him true, but officially, in
+practice, treated him as false. Punch, before 1862, commonly drew
+Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and afterwards as prematurely
+senile, at seventy. Education stopped there. No one, either in or out
+of England, ever offered a rational explanation of Earl Russell.
+
+  Palmerston was simple--so simple as to mislead the student
+altogether--but scarcely more consistent. The world thought him
+positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be cautious,
+careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for pugnacious and
+quarrelsome; the "Lives" of Russell, Gladstone, and Granville show him
+to have been good-tempered, conciliatory, avoiding quarrels. He
+surprised the Minister by refusing to pursue his attack on General
+Butler. He tried to check Russell. He scolded Gladstone. He discouraged
+Napoleon. Except Disraeli none of the English statesmen were so
+cautious as he in talking of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods;
+made no professions; concealed no opinions; was detected in no
+double-dealing. The most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long
+education was that, after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust,
+and detraction of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit
+himself in error, and to consent in spirit--for by that time he was
+nearly as dead as any of them--to beg his pardon.
+
+  Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
+difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
+including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions. The
+highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a reduction to
+the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could reach in 1862 would
+have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone admitted, avowed,
+proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which brought all reason and
+all hope of education to a still-stand:--
+
+  I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
+  palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially
+  since it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had
+  outlived half a century ... I declared in the heat of the
+  American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation....
+  Strange to say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be made
+  by a Minister of the Crown with no authority other than his
+  own, was not due to any feeling of partisanship for the South
+  or hostility to the North.... I really, though most
+  strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all
+  America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end.
+  ... That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the
+  facts was the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive
+  the gross impropriety of such an utterance from a Cabinet
+  Minister of a power allied in blood and language, and bound to
+  loyal neutrality; the case being further exaggerated by the
+  fact that we were already, so to speak, under indictment before
+  the world for not (as was alleged) having strictly enforced the
+  laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruisers. My offence
+  was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness, and
+  with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it,
+  that my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very
+  severe blame. It illustrates vividly that incapacity which my
+  mind so long retained, and perhaps still exhibits, an
+  incapacity of viewing subjects all round....
+
+  Long and patiently--more than patiently--sympathetically,
+did the private secretary, forty years afterwards in the twilight of a
+life of study, read and re-read and reflect upon this confession. Then,
+it seemed, he had seen nothing correctly at the time. His whole theory
+of conspiracy--of policy--of logic and connection in the affairs of
+man, resolved itself into "incredible grossness." He felt no rancor,
+for he had won the game; he forgave, since he must admit, the
+"incapacity of viewing subjects all round" which had so nearly cost him
+life and fortune; he was willing even to believe. He noted, without
+irritation, that Mr. Gladstone, in his confession, had not alluded to
+the understanding between Russell, Palmerston, and himself; had even
+wholly left out his most "incredible" act, his ardent support of
+Napoleon's policy, a policy which even Palmerston and Russell had
+supported feebly, with only half a heart. All this was indifferent.
+Granting, in spite of evidence, that Gladstone had no set plan of
+breaking up the Union; that he was party to no conspiracy; that he saw
+none of the results of his acts which were clear to every one else;
+granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last to
+conclude--that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging
+on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve--what sort of
+education should have been the result of it? How should it have
+affected one's future opinions and acts?
+
+  Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are
+rough; its judgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not have
+affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of the
+individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
+individual--a single will or intention--bent on breaking up the Union
+"as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister would still have
+found his interest in thinking Russell friendly and Palmerston hostile.
+The individual would still have been identical with the mass. The
+problem would have been the same; the answer equally obscure. Every
+student would, like the private secretary, answer for himself alone.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
+
+  MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
+see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
+seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom
+credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his own. Earl
+Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them;
+and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without being amused by his
+droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart from this shadowy personal
+relation, no doubt the Minister was diplomatically right; he had
+nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a friend of the
+Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or false mattered
+less, because, in either case, the American Legation could act only as
+though he were false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined
+effort to betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely
+used stronger expressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been
+greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier's hint of collusion with the
+rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to hear the
+same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time
+went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American
+Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the
+nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but
+after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November
+12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister
+Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain
+language for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to
+understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it;
+this was one of the points that greatly interested a student, but young
+men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile, which was only
+in part warranted in this instance by observing that Russell's
+generation were mostly senile from youth. They had never got beyond
+1815. Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case. Their senility was
+congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions,
+which caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not
+conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams from
+the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on the
+defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere
+confusion and helplessness.
+
+  Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
+the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between Russell
+and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal negligence. If, by
+an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil enough to admit that the
+escape of the Alabama had been due to criminal negligence, he could
+make no such concession in regard to the ironclad rams which the Lairds
+were building; for no one could be so simple as to believe that two
+armored ships-of-war could be built publicly, under the eyes of the
+Government, and go to sea like the Alabama, without active and
+incessant collusion. The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of
+assumed ignorance, the more violently in the end, the Minister would
+have to tear it off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl
+Russell, he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with
+him if this crisis were allowed to arrive.
+
+  As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself
+for action. A campaign more beautiful--better suited for training the
+mind of a youth eager for training--has not often unrolled itself for
+study, from the beginning, before a young man perched in so commanding
+a position. Very slowly, indeed, after two years of solitude, one began
+to feel the first faint flush of new and imperial life. One was
+twenty-five years old, and quite ready to assert it; some of one's
+friends were wearing stars on their collars; some had won stars of a
+more enduring kind. At moments one's breath came quick. One began to
+dream the sensation of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like
+vertigo, for an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed,
+doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that of any
+Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the armies in the
+field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of what
+might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel that,
+somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking shape; that
+it was massed and guided as it had not been before. Men seemed to have
+learned their business--at a cost that ruined--and perhaps too late. A
+private secretary knew better than most people how much of the new
+power was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the
+diplomatic campaign had to wait for the military campaign to lead. The
+student could only study.
+
+  Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
+form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows began to
+fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with
+incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one after another, with
+the precision of machinery, the opposing mass, the world shivered. Such
+development of power was unknown. The magnificent resistance and the
+return shocks heightened the suspense. During the July days Londoners
+were stupid with unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to
+fight.
+
+  An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for
+one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at home;
+but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One had ample time
+to watch the process, and had even a little time to gloat over the
+repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and Gettysburg reached
+London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened that Henry Adams was asked
+for that evening to some small reception at the house of Monckton
+Milnes. He went early in order to exchange a word or two of
+congratulation before the rooms should fill, and on arriving he found
+only the ladies in the drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting
+over their wine. Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it,
+Delane of the Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young
+American friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms
+about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth who knew
+too little to realize the passions of 1863--backed by those of
+1813--and reenforced by those of 1763--might conceive that such
+publicity embarrassed a private secretary who came from Boston and
+called himself shy; but that evening, for the first time in his life,
+he happened not to be thinking of himself. He was thinking of Delane,
+whose eye caught his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane
+probably regarded it as a piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard
+of young Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed
+in the Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind
+of the American Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of
+all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of
+Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed ideas.
+Even if he had read Adams's thought, he would have felt for it only the
+usual amused British contempt for all that he had not been taught at
+school. It needed a whole generation for the Times to reach Milnes's
+standpoint.
+
+  Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
+have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured him that
+he regarded his own personal score as cleared off--sufficiently
+settled, then and there--because his father had assumed the debt, and
+was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself. "You come next!" would have
+been the friendly warning. For nearly a year the private secretary had
+watched the board arranging itself for the collision between the
+Legation and Delane who stood behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams
+had been steadily strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view
+of the final struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent
+Affair. The work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly
+complete. No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and
+had as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.
+Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chairman
+of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to press
+assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not an
+additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the Assistant
+Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that the Minister
+did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week would have done the work as
+well or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk; without express
+authority he could admit no one into the Legation; he strained a point
+already by admitting his son. Congress and its committees were the
+proper judges of what was best for the public service, and if the
+arrangement seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private
+secretary who profited by it more than they did. A great staff would
+have suppressed him. The whole Legation was a sort of improvised,
+volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. He was rather
+better off than the rest, because he was invisible and unknown. Better
+or worse, he did his work with the others, and if the secretaries made
+any remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that none
+would have received a moment's attention.
+
+  If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
+with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular service,
+he had done great things for its support. If the Minister had no
+secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he had a well-organized
+press; efficient legal support; and a swarm of social allies permeating
+all classes. All he needed was a victory in the field, and Secretary
+Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy. Vicksburg and Gettysburg
+cleared the board, and, at the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was
+ready to deal with Earl Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or
+Mr. Delane, or any one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity
+of the case, was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.
+
+  Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
+the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was
+history, and had nothing to do with education. The private secretary
+copied the notes into his private books, and that was all the share he
+had in the matter, except to talk in private.
+
+  No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in
+a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
+skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the affair
+was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance to measure
+the motive forces of men; their qualities of character; their
+foresight; their tenacity of purpose.
+
+  In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the
+rams. Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his efforts
+for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the Legation in
+September, 1863 the Minister must surely have admitted that Russell
+had, from the first, meant to force his plan of intervention on his
+colleagues. Every separate step since April, 1861, led to this final
+coercion. Although Russell's hostile activity of 1862 was still
+secret--and remained secret for some five-and-twenty years--his animus
+seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel
+armaments. Little by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of
+hope came the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell
+of every rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded
+with connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous
+sentence: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship
+that this is war!"
+
+What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the
+private secretary understood by it, was a part of his education. Had
+his father ordered him to draft an explanatory paragraph to expand the
+idea as he grasped it, he would have continued thus:--
+
+  "It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
+knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it is
+the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying action. 3d.
+Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that 'this is war,' but is
+pointing it out to the world, to complete the record."
+
+  This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the
+private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement
+with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister announced that
+a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as clerk, the words, though
+on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety, merely stated a fact,
+without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order
+to make clear the issue. The war was Russell's war--Adams only accepted
+it.
+
+  Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the
+Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries
+that "instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure of
+the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool." The members of the modest
+Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had accepted the
+capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretary conceived that, as
+Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel
+left on the Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the
+rebel right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of
+the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he were
+ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and death like
+this; and though the private secretary should covet and attain every
+office in the gift of President or people, he would never again find
+education to compare with the life-and-death alternative of this
+two-year-and-a-half struggle in London, as it had racked and
+thumb-screwed him in its shifting phases; but its practical value as
+education turned on his correctness of judgment in measuring the men
+and their forces. He felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because
+they represented traditional England and an English policy, respectable
+enough in itself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had
+fought and exploited as the chief source of his political fortunes. As
+he understood it, Russell had followed this policy steadily, ably, even
+vigorously, and had brought it to the moment of execution. Then he had
+met wills stronger than his own, and, after persevering to the last
+possible instant, had been beaten. Lord North and George Canning had a
+like experience. This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he
+ever knew, it was also the idea of his Government. For once, the
+volunteer secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the
+self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and is
+proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this case the
+English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the State Department as
+the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more decisive. It was
+well planned, well prepared, and well executed. He could never discover
+a mistake in it. Possibly he was biassed by personal interest, but his
+chief reason for trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself
+to be one of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it.
+When others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their
+opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were talking
+about, and could not be taught without living over again the London
+life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely strong and
+steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russell or
+Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power, patience and
+steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two years and a half in
+their plan for breaking up the Union, and had yielded at last only in
+the jaws of war. After a long and desperate struggle, the American
+Minister had trumped their best card and won the game.
+
+  Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
+see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none. At
+every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the more he
+was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with growing
+energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of Adams's whole
+contention, that from the first he meant to break up the Union. Russell
+affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort; that he had meant nothing
+at all; that he meant to do right; that he did not know what he meant.
+Driven from one defence after another, he pleaded at last, like
+Gladstone, that he had no defence. Concealing all he could
+conceal--burying in profound secrecy his attempt to break up the Union
+in the autumn of 1862--he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good
+faith. What was worse for the private secretary, to the total derision
+and despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result
+of combined practice, experience, and theory--he proved it.
+
+  Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
+to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
+admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's death
+was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in 1866; he died
+in 1878; the biography was published in 1889. During the Alabama
+controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872, his course as Foreign
+Secretary had been sharply criticised, and he had been compelled to see
+England pay more than L3,000,000 penalty for his errors. On the other
+hand, he brought forward--or his biographer for him--evidence tending
+to prove that he was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in
+spite of appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or
+policy, as far as concerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his
+nature. Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.
+
+  In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of
+admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led even his
+old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone's; but
+this was not enough for the student of diplomacy who had made a certain
+theory his law of life, and wanted to hold Russell up against himself;
+to show that he had foresight and persistence of which he was unaware.
+The effort became hopeless when the biography in 1889 published papers
+which upset all that Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education;
+yet he sat down once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he
+could unravel the skein.
+
+  Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
+on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from Gotha,
+17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond Gladstone's plea in
+excuse for his speech in pursuance of the same effort, that it was "the
+most singular and palpable error," "the least excusable," "a mistake of
+incredible grossness," which passed defence; but while Gladstone threw
+himself on the mercy of the public for his speech, he attempted no
+excuse for Lord Russell who led him into the "incredible grossness" of
+announcing the Foreign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence,
+"singular and palpable," was not the speech alone, but its cause--the
+policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed ... I really,
+though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness."
+Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell supposed nothing of the
+sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most strangely believed" in any
+proposition so obviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napoleon delude
+himself with philanthropy. Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up
+policy, speech, motives, and persons, as though he were trying to
+confuse chiefly himself.
+
+  There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
+reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in 1863,
+as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on September 1
+that he could not interfere in any way with those vessels, and thereby
+brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration of war on September 5. A
+student held that, in this refusal, he was merely following his policy
+of September, 1862, and of every step he had taken since 1861.
+
+  The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
+timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is convincing.
+The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the known opinion of
+the law-officers that the statute did not apply, and a jury would not
+convict. Minister Adams replied that, in this case, the statute should
+be amended, or the ships stopped by exercise of the political power.
+Bethell rejoined that this would be a violation of neutrality; one must
+preserve the status quo. Tacitly Russell connived with Laird, and, had
+he meant to interfere, he was bound to warn Laird that the defect of
+the statute would no longer protect him, but he allowed the builders to
+go on till the ships were ready for sea. Then, on September 3, two days
+before Mr. Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to Lord Palmerston
+begging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen who have contracted for
+the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious,"--he began, and
+this he actually wrote in good faith and deep confidence to Lord
+Palmerston, his chief, calling "the conduct" of the rebel agents
+"suspicious" when no one else in Europe or America felt any suspicion
+about it, because the whole question turned not on the rams, but on the
+technical scope of the Foreign Enlistment Act,--"that I have thought it
+necessary to direct that they should be detained," not, of course,
+under the statute, but on the ground urged by the American Minister, of
+international obligation above the statute. "The Solicitor General has
+been consulted and concurs in the measure as one of policy though not
+of strict law. We shall thus test the law, and, if we have to pay
+damages, we have satisfied the opinion which prevails here as well as
+in America that that kind of neutral hostility should not be allowed to
+go on without some attempt to stop it."
+
+  For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of
+Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after
+two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused Palmerston
+to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well earned by Russell's old
+attacks on himself, Palmerston met the appeal with wonderful loyalty.
+"On consulting the law officers he found that there was no lawful
+ground for meddling with the ironclads," or, in unprofessional
+language, that he could trust neither his law officers nor a Liverpool
+jury; and therefore he suggested buying the ships for the British Navy.
+As proof of "criminal negligence" in the past, this suggestion seemed
+decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in other troubles
+of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the American Minister. He
+should have done so at once, on September 3. Instead he waited till
+September 4, and then merely said that the matter was under "serious
+and anxious consideration." This note did not reach the Legation till
+three o'clock on the afternoon of September 5--after the "superfluous"
+declaration of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the
+Lairds: had cost his Ministry the price of two ironclads, besides the
+Alabama Claims--say, in round numbers, twenty million dollars--and had
+put himself in the position of appearing to yield only to a threat of
+war. Finally he wrote to the Admiralty a letter which, from the
+American point of view, would have sounded youthful from an Eton
+schoolboy:--
+
+September 14, 1863.
+  MY DEAR DUKE:--
+
+    It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads
+  building at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the
+  blockade. They belong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris. If you will
+  offer to buy them on the part of the Admiralty you will get
+  money's worth if he accepts your offer; and if he does not, it
+  will be presumptive proof that they are already bought by the
+  Confederates. I should state that we have suggested to the
+  Turkish Government to buy them; but you can easily settle that
+  matter with the Turks....
+
+  The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have
+been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of
+difficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself under
+the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless, these letters
+upset from top to bottom the results of the private secretary's
+diplomatic education forty years after he had supposed it complete.
+They made a picture different from anything he had conceived and
+rendered worthless his whole painful diplomatic experience.
+
+  To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
+practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use in
+attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether he
+understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much of it as he
+wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone" (II, 464) a remark
+several times repeated that gave him matter for curious thought. "I
+always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that politicians are the men whom,
+as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend"; and he added, by way of
+strengthening it: "For my own part, I never have thus understood, or
+thought I understood, above one or two."
+
+  Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.
+
+  Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the
+American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient result
+of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ECCENTRICITY (1863)
+
+  KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political
+education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of
+Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human
+nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris, such a
+habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the instincts of
+native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided, eccentric,
+systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical. The less one knew
+of it, the better.
+
+  This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to
+penetrate a Boston mind--it would, indeed, have been shut out by
+instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration--rested on an experience
+which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to think
+conclusive--for him. That it should be conclusive for any one else
+never occurred to him, since he had no thought of educating anybody
+else. For him--alone--the less English education he got, the better!
+
+  For several years, under the keenest incitement to
+watchfulness, he observed the English mind in contact with itself and
+other minds. Especially with the American the contact was interesting
+because the limits and defects of the American mind were one of the
+favorite topics of the European. From the old-world point of view, the
+American had no mind; he had an economic thinking-machine which could
+work only on a fixed line. The American mind exasperated the European
+as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest. The English mind disliked
+the French mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps
+hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was
+not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and
+ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp, and
+direct.
+
+  The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
+either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck an
+American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and
+used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English
+society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.
+
+  The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or
+dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence to
+So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when
+applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets
+much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary
+distinction. It made the chief charm of English society as well as its
+chief terror.
+
+  The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but
+Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at all,
+and that his pictures of English society were exact and good-natured.
+The American, who could not believe it, fell back on Dickens, who, at
+all events, had the vice of exaggeration to extravagance, but Dickens's
+English audience thought the exaggeration rather in manner or style,
+than in types. Mr. Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary,
+and laughed till his face was distorted--not because Dundreary was
+exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that
+Gladstone had seen--or might have seen--in any club in Pall Mall.
+Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained little else.
+
+  Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps
+it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston
+thought so. The Bostonian called it national character--native
+vigor--robustness--honesty--courage. He respected and feared it.
+British self-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it was, seemed to him a
+better and nobler thing than the acuteness of the Yankee or the polish
+of the Parisian. Perhaps he was right.
+
+  These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no
+settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses
+himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. Whatever
+others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the national
+eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to correct it. The
+savage satires of Dickens and the gentler ridicule of Matthew Arnold
+against the British middle class were but a part of the rebellion, for
+the middle class were no worse than their neighbors in the eyes of an
+American in 1863; they were even a very little better in the sense that
+one could appeal to their interests, while a university man, like
+Gladstone, stood outside of argument. From none of them could a young
+American afford to borrow ideas.
+
+  The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by
+regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in the
+shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him hesitate; he saw
+his own national type--his father, Weed, Evarts, for instance--deal
+with the British, and show itself certainly not the weaker; certainly
+sometimes the stronger. Biassed though he were, he could hardly be
+biassed to such a degree as to mistake the effects of force on others,
+and while--labor as he might--Earl Russell and his state papers seemed
+weak to a secretary, he could not see that they seemed strong to
+Russell's own followers. Russell might be dishonest or he might be
+merely obtuse--the English type might be brutal or might be only
+stupid--but strong, in either case, it was not, nor did it seem strong
+to Englishmen.
+
+Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply interested
+in deciding whether it was always a weakness. Evidently, on the
+hustings or in Parliament, among eccentricities, eccentricity was at
+home; but in private society the question was not easy to answer. That
+English society was infinitely more amusing because of its
+eccentricities, no one denied. Barring the atrocious insolence and
+brutality which Englishmen and especially Englishwomen showed to each
+other--very rarely, indeed, to foreigners--English society was much
+more easy and tolerant than American. One must expect to be treated
+with exquisite courtesy this week and be totally forgotten the next,
+but this was the way of the world, and education consisted in learning
+to turn one's back on others with the same unconscious indifference
+that others showed among themselves. The smart of wounded vanity lasted
+no long time with a young man about town who had little vanity to
+smart, and who, in his own country, would have found himself in no
+better position. He had nothing to complain of. No one was ever brutal
+to him. On the contrary, he was much better treated than ever he was
+likely to be in Boston--let alone New York or Washington--and if his
+reception varied inconceivably between extreme courtesy and extreme
+neglect, it merely proved that he had become, or was becoming, at home.
+Not from a sense of personal griefs or disappointments did he labor
+over this part of the social problem, but only because his education
+was becoming English, and the further it went, the less it promised.
+
+  By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized
+with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to
+rebellion--when foreign--and it felt particular confidence in the
+Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes--foreign
+rebellion of English blood--which came nearer ideal eccentricity than
+could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the
+English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of rebel sympathizers, leaving
+few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the
+Union. None of the English leaders on the Northern side were marked
+eccentrics. William E. Forster was a practical, hard-headed
+Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in politics took shape as working
+arrangements on an economical base. Cobden, considering the one-sided
+conditions of his life, was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was
+stronger in his expressions than either of them, but with all his
+self-assertion he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He
+did not, like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously
+earnest," as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every question";
+he was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative of the old
+Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend inconsistencies. Monckton
+Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chiefly by those who did
+not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only ideas a little in
+advance of the time; his manner was eccentric, but not his mind, as any
+one could see who read a page of his poetry. None of them, except
+Milnes, was a university man. As a rule, the Legation was troubled very
+little, if at all, by indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions
+among its English friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical,
+well considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all rebels,
+and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed by old Lord
+Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a July 4th reception at the
+Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his old credit as "Attorney
+General to Mr. Madison." The Church was rebel, but the dissenters were
+mostly with the Union. The universities were rebel, but the university
+men who enjoyed most public confidence--like Lord Granville, Sir George
+Cornewall Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey--took infinite pains to
+be neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers, as
+well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a vast
+majority of the English people seemed to follow the professional
+eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took that direction;
+Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and Gladstone, threw their
+sympathies on the side which they should naturally have opposed, and
+did so for no reason except their eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots
+and Yorkshiremen were cautious.
+
+  This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
+the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first cause of
+this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No one understood
+why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent for London at the same
+time that he made so good a choice as Mr. Slidell for Paris. The
+Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to send to London, but few who
+were less fitted than Mason. Possibly Mason had a certain amount of
+common sense, but he seemed to have nothing else, and in London society
+he counted merely as one eccentric more. He enjoyed a great
+opportunity; he might even have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with
+all society at his feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and
+made the social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but
+Mr. Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
+valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
+greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with Palmerston; he
+drove Russell off the field; he swept the board before Cockburn; he
+overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a finger against Mason, who
+became his bulwark of defence.
+
+  Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
+common which might have led them into this serious mistake. Neither
+could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must have been
+unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason, President Davis
+sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to Russia. Some twenty years
+later, in the shifting search for the education he never found, Adams
+became closely intimate at Washington with Lamar, then Senator from
+Mississippi, who had grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable
+and most amiable Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in
+social charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
+but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all his
+Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps this was a
+reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others, on a futile
+mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better in London, in
+place of Mason. London society would have delighted in him; his stories
+would have won success; his manners would have made him loved; his
+oratory would have swept every audience; even Monckton Milnes could
+never have resisted the temptation of having him to breakfast between
+Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop of Oxford.
+
+  Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
+never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate management or
+criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject that amused
+him was his English allies. At that moment--the early summer of
+1863--the rebel party in England were full of confidence, and felt
+strong enough to challenge the American Legation to a show of power.
+They knew better than the Legation what they could depend upon: that
+the law officers and commissioners of customs at Liverpool dared not
+prosecute the ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone
+were ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon
+would offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they owned
+Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were building their
+ships. The political member of the Laird firm was Lindsay, about whom
+the whole web of rebel interests clung--rams, cruisers, munitions, and
+Confederate loan; social introductions and parliamentary tactics. The
+firm of Laird, with a certain dignity, claimed to be champion of
+England's navy; and public opinion, in the summer of 1863, still
+inclined towards them.
+
+  Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
+should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the managers must
+have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as their champion an
+eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort of Brougham of
+Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse temper. Mr. Roebuck
+had been a tribune of the people, and, like tribunes of most other
+peoples, in growing old, had grown fatuous. He was regarded by the
+friends of the Union as rather a comical personage--a favorite subject
+for Punch to laugh at--with a bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even
+more than common by the political epidemic of egotism. In all England
+they could have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own
+case. No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet.
+the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let Roebuck
+represent them and take charge of their interests.
+
+  With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern
+except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Commons on June
+30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck's motion to recognize the
+Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no anxiety, having Vicksburg
+already in its pocket, and Bright and Forster to say so; but the
+private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the
+left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with
+astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big
+mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered
+Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with
+Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a
+friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done. The
+manner counted for more than the words. The scene was interesting, but
+the result was not in doubt.
+
+  All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
+Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which, little
+by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the House of
+Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began with Lamar's
+failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his consequent detention in
+Paris waiting instructions. The motion to recognize the Confederacy was
+about to be made, and, in prospect of the debate, Mr. Lindsay collected
+a party at his villa on the Thames to bring the rebel agents into
+relations with Roebuck. Lamar was sent for, and came. After much
+conversation of a general sort, such as is the usual object or resource
+of the English Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by
+way of showing interest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked
+Roebuck whether he expected Bright to take part in the debate: "No,
+sir!" said Roebuck sententiously; "Bright and I have met before. It was
+the old story--the story of the sword-fish and the whale! NO, sir! Mr.
+Bright will not cross swords with me again!"
+
+  Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the House
+on the appointed evening, and was placed under the gallery, on the
+right, where he listened to Roebuck and followed the debate with such
+enjoyment as an experienced debater feels in these contests, until, as
+he said, he became aware that a man, with a singularly rich voice and
+imposing manner, had taken the floor, and was giving Roebuck the most
+deliberate and tremendous pounding he ever witnessed, "until at last,"
+concluded Lamar, "it dawned on my mind that the sword-fish was getting
+the worst of it."
+
+  Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself
+rather than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been unpleasantly
+common in the experience of the rebel agents. They were surrounded by
+cranks of the worst English species, who distorted their natural
+eccentricities and perverted their judgment. Roebuck may have been an
+extreme case, since he was actually in his dotage, yet this did not
+prevent the Lairds from accepting his lead, or the House from taking
+him seriously. Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England, to extreme
+confidence; sometimes it seemed a recommendation; and unless it caused
+financial loss, it rather helped popularity.
+
+  The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
+weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
+mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of Bright's
+courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern people
+themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing want of
+courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such ignorance of
+the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational as that of the
+rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the courage of a
+prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty nearly every man in
+England that could be reached by a blow, and when he could not reach
+the individual he struck the class, or when the class was too small for
+him, the whole people of England. At times he had the whole country on
+his back. He could not act on the defensive; his mind required attack.
+Even among friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were
+denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his
+phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded his
+opponents, real or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at dull
+heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.
+
+  One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
+his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St. James's
+Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient efforts to
+unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American platform. The
+secretary went to the meeting and made a report which reposes somewhere
+on file in the State Department to this day, as harmless as such
+reports should be; but it contained no mention of what interested young
+Adams most--Bright's psychology. With singular skill and oratorical
+power, Bright managed at the outset, in his opening paragraph, to
+insult or outrage every class of Englishman commonly considered
+respectable, and, for fear of any escaping, he insulted them repeatedly
+under consecutive heads. The rhetorical effect was tremendous:--
+
+  "Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American
+contest," he began in his massive, deliberate tones; "and every morning
+with blatant voice, it comes into our streets and curses the American
+Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years
+past. It has beheld thirty million of men happy and prosperous, without
+emperors--without king (cheers)--without the surroundings of a court
+(renewed cheers)--without nobles, except such as are made by eminence
+in intellect and virtue--without State bishops and State priests, those
+vendors of the love that works salvation (cheers)--without great armies
+and great navies--without a great debt and great taxes--and Privilege
+has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this great
+experiment should succeed."
+
+  An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed,
+in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than Bright
+struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed artifice and hurt
+his oratory. The audience cheered furiously, and the private secretary
+felt peace in his much troubled mind, for he knew how careful the
+Ministry would be, once they saw Bright talk republican principles
+before Trades-Unions; but, while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason
+to doubt the courage of a man who, after quarrelling with the
+Trades-Unions, quarreled with all the world outside the Trades-Unions,
+he did feel a doubt whether to class Bright as eccentric or
+conventional. Every one called Bright "un-English," from Lord
+Palmerston to William E. Forster; but to an American he seemed more
+English than any of his critics. He was a liberal hater, and what he
+hated he reviled after the manner of Milton, but he was afraid of no
+one. He was almost the only man in England, or, for that matter, in
+Europe, who hated Palmerston and was not afraid of him, or of the press
+or the pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He
+loathed the whole fabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham
+aristocracy, and sham socialism. He had the British weakness of
+believing only in himself and his own conventions. In all this, an
+American saw, if one may make the distinction, much racial
+eccentricity, but little that was personal. Bright was singularly well
+poised; but he used singularly strong language.
+
+  Long afterwards, in 1880, Adams happened to be living again in
+London for a season, when James Russell Lowell was transferred there as
+Minister; and as Adams's relations with Lowell had become closer and
+more intimate with years, he wanted the new Minister to know some of
+his old friends. Bright was then in the Cabinet, and no longer the most
+radical member even there, but he was still a rare figure in society.
+He came to dinner, along with Sir Francis Doyle and Sir Robert
+Cunliffe, and as usual did most of the talking. As usual also, he
+talked of the things most on his mind. Apparently it must have been
+some reform of the criminal law which the Judges opposed, that excited
+him, for at the end of dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the
+table in his old way, and ended with a superb denunciation of the
+Bench, spoken in his massive manner, as though every word were a
+hammer, smashing what it struck:--
+
+  "For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the Bench,
+condemning to the penalty of death every man, woman, and child who
+stole property to the value of five shillings; and, during all that
+time, not one Judge ever remonstrated against the law. We English are a
+nation of brutes, and ought to be exterminated to the last man."
+
+  As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room,
+Adams said to Lowell that Bright was very fine. "Yes!" replied Lowell,
+"but too violent!"
+
+  Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew
+his Englishmen better than Lowell did--better than England did. He knew
+what amount of violence in language was necessary to drive an idea into
+a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that no violence was enough to
+affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire peasant. Bright kept his own head
+cool and clear. He was not excited; he never betrayed excitement. As
+for his denunciation of the English Bench, it was a very old story, not
+original with him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a
+commonplace generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted
+by foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be treated
+only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were probably not
+very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright said that the French,
+Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a nation of brutes and ought to be
+exterminated, no one would have found fault; the whole human race,
+according to the highest authority, has been exterminated once already
+for the same reason, and only the rainbow protects them from a
+repetition of it. What shocked Lowell was that he denounced his own
+people.
+
+  Adams felt no moral obligation to defend Judges, who, as far as
+he knew, were the only class of society specially adapted to defend
+themselves; but he was curious--even anxious--as a point of education,
+to decide for himself whether Bright's language was violent for its
+purpose. He thought not. Perhaps Cobden did better by persuasion, but
+that was another matter. Of course, even Englishmen sometimes
+complained of being so constantly told that they were brutes and
+hypocrites, although they were told little else by their censors, and
+bore it, on the whole, meekly; but the fact that it was true in the
+main troubled the ten-pound voter much less than it troubled Newman,
+Gladstone, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally
+disliked by his victims, but not distrusted. They never doubted what he
+would do next, as they did with John Russell, Gladstone, and Disraeli.
+He betrayed no one, and he never advanced an opinion in practical
+matters which did not prove to be practical.
+
+  The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual
+opposites of Bright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest and
+most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political
+economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers of de
+Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were timid--with
+good reason--and timidity, which is high wisdom in philosophy, sicklies
+the whole cast of thought in action. Numbers of these men haunted
+London society, all tending to free-thinking, but never venturing much
+freedom of thought. Like the anti-slavery doctrinaires of the forties
+and fifties, they became mute and useless when slavery struck them in
+the face. For type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosen
+Henry Reeve, at least to the extent of biography. He was a bulky figure
+in society, always friendly, good-natured, obliging, and useful; almost
+as universal as Milnes and more busy. As editor of the Edinburgh Review
+he had authority and even power, although the Review and the whole Whig
+doctrinaire school had begun--as the French say--to date; and of course
+the literary and artistic sharpshooters of 1867--like Frank
+Palgrave--frothed and foamed at the mere mention of Reeve's name.
+Three-fourths of their fury was due only to his ponderous manner.
+London society abused its rights of personal criticism by fixing on
+every too conspicuous figure some word or phrase that stuck to it.
+Every one had heard of Mrs. Grote as "the origin of the word
+grotesque." Every one had laughed at the story of Reeve approaching
+Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat florid manner, asking in his
+literary dialect how her husband the historian was: "And how is the
+learned Grotius?" "Pretty well, thank you, Puffendorf!" One winced at
+the word, as though it were a drawing of Forain.
+
+  No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been
+charged with want of moral courage. He proved his courage afterwards by
+publishing the "Greville Memoirs," braving the displeasure of the
+Queen. Yet the Edinburgh Review and its editor avoided taking sides
+except where sides were already fixed. Americanism would have been bad
+form in the liberal Edinburgh Review; it would have seemed eccentric
+even for a Scotchman, and Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American
+this attitude of oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the
+reckless hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he
+never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it might encourage.
+
+  The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that
+eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should adopt English
+thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion was correct, yet, as
+usual, the conclusion was wrong. The years of Palmerston's last
+Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of truce--of arrested
+development. The British system like the French, was in its last stage
+of decomposition. Never had the British mind shown itself so
+decousu--so unravelled, at sea, floundering in every sort of historical
+shipwreck. Eccentricities had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in
+State and Church. England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to
+clearing away only a part of the debris. A young American in 1863 could
+see little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not
+foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England in its
+wake, was to vanish in 1870. He was in dead-water, and the
+parti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though he were
+the ancient mariner, and they saurians of the prime.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)
+
+  MINISTER ADAMS'S success in stopping the rebel rams fixed his
+position once for all in English society. From that moment he could
+afford to drop the character of diplomatist, and assume what, for an
+American Minister in London, was an exclusive diplomatic advantage, the
+character of a kind of American Peer of the Realm. The British never
+did things by halves. Once they recognized a man's right to social
+privileges, they accepted him as one of themselves. Much as Lord Derby
+and Mr. Disraeli were accepted as leaders of Her Majesty's domestic
+Opposition, Minister Adams had a rank of his own as a kind of leader of
+Her Majesty's American Opposition. Even the Times conceded it. The
+years of struggle were over, and Minister Adams rapidly gained a
+position which would have caused his father or grandfather to stare
+with incredulous envy.
+
+  This Anglo-American form of diplomacy was chiefly undiplomatic,
+and had the peculiar effect of teaching a habit of diplomacy useless or
+mischievous everywhere but in London. Nowhere else in the world could
+one expect to figure in a role so unprofessional. The young man knew no
+longer what character he bore. Private secretary in the morning, son in
+the afternoon, young man about town in the evening, the only character
+he never bore was that of diplomatist, except when he wanted a card to
+some great function. His diplomatic education was at an end; he seldom
+met a diplomat, and never had business with one; he could be of no use
+to them, or they to him; but he drifted inevitably into society, and,
+do what he might, his next education must be one of English social
+life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilemmas, he reached his
+twenty-sixth birthday without the power of earning five dollars in any
+occupation. His friends in the army were almost as badly off, but even
+army life ruined a young man less fatally than London society. Had he
+been rich, this form of ruin would have mattered nothing; but the young
+men of 1865 were none of them rich; all had to earn a living; yet they
+had reached high positions of responsibility and power in camps and
+Courts, without a dollar of their own and with no tenure of office.
+
+  Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
+should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously enough, he
+failed here also. From the European or English point of view, he had no
+social experience, and never got it. Minister Adams happened on a
+political interregnum owing to Lord Palmerston's personal influence
+from 1860 to 1865; but this political interregnum was less marked than
+the social still-stand during the same years. The Prince Consort was
+dead; the Queen had retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In
+its best days, Victorian society had never been "smart." During the
+forties, under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be
+simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste of
+Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen
+Victoria. Style lingered in the background with the powdered footman
+behind the yellow chariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style
+save what she inherited. Balmoral was a startling revelation of royal
+taste. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes at Court unless it
+were the way they were worn. One's eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but
+they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared well dressed, she was
+either a foreigner or "fast." Fashion was not fashionable in London
+until the Americans and the Jews were let loose. The style of London
+toilette universal in 1864 was grotesque, like Monckton Milnes on
+horseback in Rotten Row.
+
+  Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
+editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the society
+of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other causes, young Adams
+never got the full training of such style as still existed. The
+embarrassments of his first few seasons socially ruined him. His own
+want of experience prevented his asking introductions to the ladies who
+ruled society; his want of friends prevented his knowing who these
+ladies were; and he had every reason to expect snubbing if he put
+himself in evidence. This sensitiveness was thrown away on English
+society, where men and women treated each others' advances much more
+brutally than those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private
+secretary too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman. He
+was not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old ones, felt
+awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not
+precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told so.
+
+  If there was in those days a country house in England which had
+a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
+Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right to
+consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady Margaret
+Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting by her side--not
+for his own merits--Henry Adams heard her say to herself in her languid
+and liberal way, with her rich voice and musing manner, looking into
+her tea-cup: "I don't think I care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken,
+not so much on his own account as on hers, the young man could only
+execute himself as gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make
+one small exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident,
+that she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
+the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew that,
+except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in fact a
+foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she should like him,
+or any other foreigner, unless it were because she was bored by
+natives. She seemed to feel that her indifference needed a reason to
+excuse itself in her own eyes, and she showed the subconscious sympathy
+of the Irish nature which never feels itself perfectly at home even in
+England. She, too, was some shadowy shade un-English.
+
+  Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the
+private secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till he
+found his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt himself in
+society, and he never knew definitely what was meant as society by
+those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a score of societies
+which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartest was the
+smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest was the
+sporting world, also unknown to him except through the talk of his
+acquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of nebulous
+societies. His lawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented legal circles
+where one still sat over the wine and told anecdotes of the bench and
+bar; but he himself never set eyes on a judge except when his father
+took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old Lord
+Campbell, both abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church and the Bishops
+formed several societies which no secretary ever saw except as an
+interloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical and
+surgical professions; City people; artists; county families; the
+Scotch, and indefinite other subdivisions of society existed, which
+were as strange to each other as they were to Adams. At the end of
+eight or ten seasons in London society he professed to know less about
+it, or how to enter it, than he did when he made his first appearance
+at Miss Burdett Coutts's in May, 1861.
+
+  Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
+and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him. An
+American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished nor
+gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to think of society at
+large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred were useless to him, a
+greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the question of getting
+into--or getting out of--society which troubled young foreigners
+greatly, settled itself after three or four years of painful
+speculation. Society had no unity; one wandered about in it like a
+maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom cab, to be got into, or out of,
+at dinner-time.
+
+  Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
+never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the accounts of
+his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or George Smalley, and of
+various ladies who reigned in the seventies, he inclined to think that
+he knew very little about it. Certain great houses and certain great
+functions of course he attended, like every one else who could get
+cards, but even of these the number was small that kept an interest or
+helped education. In seven years he could remember only two that seemed
+to have any meaning for him, and he never knew what that meaning was.
+Neither of the two was official; neither was English in interest; and
+both were scandals to the philosopher while they scarcely enlightened
+men of the world.
+
+  One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
+evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire House if
+asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the usual people.
+The private secretary was standing among the rest, when Mme. de
+Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the Second Empire. How
+beautiful she may have been, or indeed what sort of beauty she was,
+Adams never knew, because the company, consisting of the most refined
+and aristocratic society in the world, instantly formed a lane, and
+stood in ranks to stare at her, while those behind mounted on chairs to
+look over their neighbors' heads; so that the lady walked through this
+polite mob, stared completely out of countenance, and fled the house at
+once. This was all!
+
+  The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
+1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's pictures
+of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his gray capote over
+his red shirt, received all London, and three duchesses literally
+worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events, a private secretary had
+surely caught the last and highest touch of social experience; but what
+it meant--what social, moral, or mental development it pointed out to
+the searcher of truth--was not a matter to be treated fully by a leader
+in the Morning Post or even by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de
+Castiglione and Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for
+simple measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
+The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an ordered
+social system tending to orderly development--in London or
+elsewhere--was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or Victor Hugo, but
+was beyond any process yet reached by the education of Henry Adams, who
+would probably, even then, have rejected, as superficial or
+supernatural, all the views taken by any of the company who looked on
+with him at these two interesting and perplexing sights.
+
+  From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
+nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his road
+through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to think in
+these years, 1860-65, that the nicest distinction between the very best
+society and the second-best, was their attitude towards royalty. The
+one regarded royalty as a bore, and avoided it, or quietly said that
+the Queen had never been in society. The same thing might have been
+said of fully half the peerage. Adams never knew even the names of half
+the rest; he never exchanged ten words with any member of the royal
+family; he never knew any one in those years who showed interest in any
+member of the royal family, or who would have given five shillings for
+the opinion of any royal person on any subject; or cared to enter any
+royal or noble presence, unless the house was made attractive by as
+much social effort as would have been necessary in other countries
+where no rank existed. No doubt, as one of a swarm, young Adams
+slightly knew various gilded youth who frequented balls and led such
+dancing as was most in vogue, but they seemed to set no value on rank;
+their anxiety was only to know where to find the best partners before
+midnight, and the best supper after midnight. To the American, as to
+Arthur Pendennis or Barnes Newcome, the value of social position and
+knowledge was evident enough; he valued it at rather more than it was
+worth to him; but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary with
+every street corner; a thing which had shifting standards, and which no
+one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and beauties of his
+time, with great names and of the utmost fashion, made some of the
+poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.
+
+  Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
+loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every announcement of
+a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a formal dinner. The
+greatest social event gave not half the pleasure that one could buy for
+ten shillings at the opera when Patti sang Cherubino or Gretchen, and
+not a fourth of the education. Yet this was not the opinion of the best
+judges. Lothrop Motley, who stood among the very best, said to him
+early in his apprenticeship that the London dinner and the English
+country house were the perfection of human society. The young man
+meditated over it, uncertain of its meaning. Motley could not have
+thought the dinner itself perfect, since there was not then--outside of
+a few bankers or foreigners--a good cook or a good table in London, and
+nine out of ten of the dinners that Motley ate came from Gunter's, and
+all were alike. Every one, especially in young society, complained
+bitterly that Englishmen did not know a good dinner when they ate it,
+and could not order one if they were given carte blanche. Henry Adams
+was not a judge, and knew no more than they, but he heard the
+complaints, and he could not think that Motley meant to praise the
+English cuisine.
+
+  Equally little could Motley have meant that dinners were good
+to look at. Nothing could be worse than the toilettes; nothing less
+artistic than the appearance of the company. One's eyes might be
+dazzled by family diamonds, but, if an American woman were present, she
+was sure to make comments about the way the jewels were worn. If there
+was a well-dressed lady at table, she was either an American or "fast."
+She attracted as much notice as though she were on the stage. No one
+could possibly admire an English dinner-table.
+
+  Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were
+perfect. The manners of English society were notorious, and the taste
+was worse. Without exception every American woman rose in rebellion
+against English manners. In fact, the charm of London which made most
+impression on Americans was the violence of its contrasts; the extreme
+badness of the worst, making background for the distinction,
+refinement, or wit of a few, just as the extreme beauty of a few superb
+women was more effective against the plainness of the crowd. The result
+was mediaeval, and amusing; sometimes coarse to a degree that might
+have startled a roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to
+a degree that suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic
+contrast was surely not the perfection that Motley had in his mind. He
+meant something scholarly, worldly, and modern; he was thinking of his
+own tastes.
+
+  Probably he meant that, in his favorite houses, the tone was
+easy, the talk was good, and the standard of scholarship was high. Even
+there he would have been forced to qualify his adjectives. No German
+would have admitted that English scholarship was high, or that it was
+scholarship at all, or that any wish for scholarship existed in
+England. Nothing that seemed to smell of the shop or of the
+lecture-room was wanted. One might as well have talked of Renan's
+Christ at the table of the Bishop of London, as talk of German
+philology at the table of an Oxford don. Society, if a small literary
+class could be called society, wanted to be amused in its old way.
+Sydney Smith, who had amused, was dead; so was Macaulay, who instructed
+if he did not amuse; Thackeray died at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never
+felt at home, and seldom appeared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not
+sprightly; Tennyson detested strangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by
+them; Darwin never came to town; the men of whom Motley must have been
+thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton's breakfasts:
+Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew Arnold, or
+Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward; or perhaps
+Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A relatively small class,
+commonly isolated, suppressed, and lost at the usual London dinner,
+such society as this was fairly familiar even to a private secretary,
+but to the literary American it might well seem perfection since he
+could find nothing of the sort in America. Within the narrow limits of
+this class, the American Legation was fairly at home; possibly a score
+of houses, all liberal, and all literary, but perfect only in the eyes
+of a Harvard College historian. They could teach little worth learning,
+for their tastes were antiquated and their knowledge was ignorance to
+the next generation. What was altogether fatal for future purposes,
+they were only English.
+
+  A social education in such a medium was bound to be useless in
+any other, yet Adams had to learn it to the bottom. The one thing
+needful for a private secretary, was that he should not only seem, but
+should actually be, at home. He studied carefully, and practised
+painfully, what seemed to be the favorite accomplishments of society.
+Perhaps his nervousness deceived him; perhaps he took for an ideal of
+others what was only his reflected image; but he conceived that the
+perfection of human society required that a man should enter a
+drawing-room where he was a total stranger, and place himself on the
+hearth-rug, his back to the fire, with an air of expectant benevolence,
+without curiosity, much as though he had dropped in at a charity
+concert, kindly disposed to applaud the performers and to overlook
+mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded in youth, and towards thirty it
+took a form of modified insolence and offensive patronage; but about
+sixty it mellowed into courtesy, kindliness, and even deference to the
+young which had extraordinary charm both in women and in men.
+Unfortunately Adams could not wait till sixty for education; he had his
+living to earn; and the English air of patronage would earn no income
+for him anywhere else.
+
+  After five or six years of constant practice, any one can
+acquire the habit of going from one strange company to another without
+thinking much of one's self or of them, as though silently reflecting
+that "in a world where we are all insects, no insect is alien; perhaps
+they are human in parts"; but the dreamy habit of mind which comes from
+solitude in crowds is not fitness for social success except in London.
+Everywhere else it is injury. England was a social kingdom whose social
+coinage had no currency elsewhere.
+
+  Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give
+nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become very
+interesting--very charming--to the man of fifty. The young American was
+not worth the young Englishwoman's notice, and never received it.
+Neither understood the other. Only in the domestic relation, in the
+country--never in society at large--a young American might accidentally
+make friends with an Englishwoman of his own age, but it never happened
+to Henry Adams. His susceptible nature was left to the mercy of
+American girls, which was professional duty rather than education as
+long as diplomacy held its own.
+
+  Thus he found himself launched on waters where he had never
+meant to sail, and floating along a stream which carried him far from
+his port. His third season in London society saw the end of his
+diplomatic education, and began for him the social life of a young man
+who felt at home in England--more at home there than anywhere else.
+With this feeling, the mere habit of going to garden-parties, dinners,
+receptions, and balls had nothing to do. One might go to scores without
+a sensation of home. One might stay in no end of country houses without
+forgetting that one was a total stranger and could never be anything
+else. One might bow to half the dukes and duchesses in England, and
+feel only the more strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod
+and never come nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a
+personal mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and
+one separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another, and
+so make, little by little, a group.
+
+  One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir
+Henry Holland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted with
+every American Minister since Edward Everett, and was a valuable social
+ally, who had the courage to try to be of use to everybody, and who,
+while asking the private secretary to breakfast one day, was too
+discreet to betray what he might have learned about rebel doings at his
+breakfast-table the day before. He had been friendly with the Legation,
+in the teeth of society, and was still bearing up against the weight of
+opinion, so that young Adams could not decline his invitations,
+although they obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nine o'clock
+in the morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Holland
+was himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed about
+London, and eating Welsh rarebit every night before bed; he thought
+that any young man should be pleased to take his early muffin in Brook
+Street, and supply a few crumbs of war news for the daily peckings of
+eminent patients. Meekly, when summoned, the private secretary went,
+and on reaching the front door, this particular morning, he found there
+another young man in the act of rapping the knocker. They entered the
+breakfastroom together, where they were introduced to each other, and
+Adams learned that the other guest was a Cambridge undergraduate,
+Charles Milnes Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the Member for
+Wenlock; another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from Thornes near
+Wakefield. Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire. By another chance it
+happened that young Milnes Gaskell was intimate at Cambridge with
+William Everett who was also about to take his degree. A third chance
+inspired Mr. Evarts with a fancy for visiting Cambridge, and led
+William Everett to offer his services as host. Adams acted as courier
+to Mr. Evarts, and at the end of May they went down for a few days,
+when William Everett did the honors as host with a kindness and
+attention that made his cousin sorely conscious of his own social
+shortcomings. Cambridge was pretty, and the dons were kind. Mr. Evarts
+enjoyed his visit but this was merely a part of the private secretary's
+day's work. What affected his whole life was the intimacy then begun
+with Milnes Gaskell and his circle of undergraduate friends, just about
+to enter the world.
+
+  Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand
+people, great and small; jostled against every one, from royal princes
+to gin-shop loafers; attended endless official functions and private
+parties; visited every part of the United Kingdom and was not quite a
+stranger at the Legations in Paris and Rome; he knew the societies of
+certain country houses, and acquired habits of Sunday-afternoon calls;
+but all this gave him nothing to do, and was life wasted. For him
+nothing whatever could be gained by escorting American ladies to
+drawing-rooms or American gentlemen to levees at St. James's Palace, or
+bowing solemnly to people with great titles, at Court balls, or even by
+awkwardly jostling royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for the
+Government, and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would
+ever know enough of their business to thank him for doing what they did
+not know how to get properly done by their own servants; but for Henry
+Adams--not private secretary--all the time taken up by such duties was
+wasted. On the other hand, his few personal intimacies concerned him
+alone, and the chance that made him almost a Yorkshireman was one that
+must have started under the Heptarchy.
+
+  More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
+sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly more
+distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strongest of the
+British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a different race from
+the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the mass and the cultivation of the
+West Riding. London could never quite absorb Yorkshire, which, in its
+turn had no great love for London and freely showed it. To a certain
+degree, evident enough to Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English--or
+was all England, as they might choose to express it. This must have
+been the reason why young Adams was drawn there rather than elsewhere.
+Monckton Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him, and possibly Milnes
+was the only man in England with whom Henry Adams, at that moment, had
+a chance of calling out such an un-English effort. Neither Oxford nor
+Cambridge nor any region south of the Humber contained a considerable
+house where a young American would have been sought as a friend.
+Eccentricity alone did not account for it. Monckton Milnes was a
+singular type, but his distant cousin, James Milnes Gaskell, was
+another, quite as marked, in an opposite sense. Milnes never seemed
+willing to rest; Milnes Gaskell never seemed willing to move. In his
+youth one of a very famous group--Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Manning,
+Gladstone, Francis Doyle--and regarded as one of the most promising; an
+adorer of George Canning; in Parliament since coming of age; married
+into the powerful connection of the Wynns of Wynstay; rich according to
+Yorkshire standards; intimate with his political leaders; he was one of
+the numerous Englishmen who refuse office rather than make the effort
+of carrying it, and want power only to make it a source of indolence.
+He was a voracious reader and an admirable critic; he had forty years
+of parliamentary tradition on his memory; he liked to talk and to
+listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite of George Canning, his dry
+champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he belonged to the generation
+of 1830, a generation which could not survive the telegraph and
+railway, and which even Yorkshire could hardly produce again. To an
+American he was a character even more unusual and more fascinating than
+his distant cousin Lord Houghton.
+
+  Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his son
+brought to the house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for she
+thought the American perhaps a less dangerous friend than some
+Englishman might be, for her son, and she was probably right. The
+American had the sense to see that she was herself one of the most
+intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her sister, Miss
+Charlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a position in
+society that made their friendship a compliment as well as a pleasure.
+Their consent and approval settled the matter. In England, the family
+is a serious fact; once admitted to it, one is there for life. London
+might utterly vanish from one's horizon, but as long as life lasted,
+Yorkshire lived for its friends.
+
+  In the year 1857, Mr. James Milnes Gaskell, who had sat for
+thirty years in Parliament as one of the Members for the borough of
+Wenlock in Shropshire, bought Wenlock Abbey and the estate that
+included the old monastic buildings. This new, or old, plaything amused
+Mrs. Milnes Gaskell. The Prior's house, a charming specimen of
+fifteenth-century architecture, had been long left to decay as a
+farmhouse. She put it in order, and went there to spend a part of the
+autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one of her first guests, and drove
+about Wenlock Edge and the Wrekin with her, learning the loveliness of
+this exquisite country, and its stores of curious antiquity. It was a
+new and charming existence; an experience greatly to be envied--ideal
+repose and rural Shakespearian peace--but a few years of it were likely
+to complete his education, and fit him to act a fairly useful part in
+life as an Englishman, an ecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)
+
+  THE campaign of 1864 and the reelection of Mr. Lincoln in
+November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he could
+safely regard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties of Earl
+Russell and the Emperor Napoleon as begun. With a few months more his
+own term of four years would come to an end, and even though the
+questions still under discussion with England should somewhat prolong
+his stay, he might look forward with some confidence to his return home
+in 1865. His son no longer fretted. The time for going into the army
+had passed. If he were to be useful at all, it must be as a son, and as
+a son he was treated with the widest indulgence and trust. He knew that
+he was doing himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life
+he had done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh
+birthday without having advanced a step, that he could see, beyond his
+twenty-first. For the most part, his friends were worse off than he.
+The war was about to end and they were to be set adrift in a world they
+would find altogether strange.
+
+  At this point, as though to cut the last thread of relation,
+six months were suddenly dropped out of his life in England. The London
+climate had told on some of the family; the physicians prescribed a
+winter in Italy. Of course the private secretary was detached as their
+escort, since this was one of his professional functions; and he passed
+six months, gaining an education as Italian courier, while the Civil
+War came to its end. As far as other education went, he got none, but
+he was amused. Travelling in all possible luxury, at some one else's
+expense, with diplomatic privileges and position, was a form of travel
+hitherto untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful; Sorrento in
+winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naples near
+by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the
+education of every properly trained private secretary; the journey
+north by vettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream; the Splugen
+Pass, if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing; Paris had always
+something to show. The chances of accidental education were not so
+great as they had been, since one's field of experience had grown
+large; but perhaps a season at Baden Baden in these later days of its
+brilliancy offered some chances of instruction, if it were only the
+sight of fashionable Europe and America on the race-course watching the
+Duke of Hamilton, in the middle, improving his social advantages by the
+conversation of Cora Pearl.
+
+  The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while
+they were at Rome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that nursery
+of murderers and murdered, as though America were also getting
+educated. Again one went to meditate on the steps of the Santa Maria in
+Ara Coeli, but the lesson seemed as shallow as before. Nothing
+happened. The travellers changed no plan or movement. The Minister did
+not recall them to London. The season was over before they returned;
+and when the private secretary sat down again at his desk in Portland
+Place before a mass of copy in arrears, he saw before him a world so
+changed as to be beyond connection with the past. His identity, if one
+could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to
+remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was
+a spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new
+attachment.
+
+  All his American friends and contemporaries who were still
+alive looked singularly commonplace without uniforms, and hastened to
+get married and retire into back streets and suburbs until they could
+find employment. Minister Adams, too, was going home "next fall," and
+when the fall came, he was going home "next spring," and when the
+spring came, President Andrew Johnson was at loggerheads with the
+Senate, and found it best to keep things unchanged. After the usual
+manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office and lost
+the faculty of will, the members of the Legation in London continued
+the daily routine of English society, which, after becoming a habit,
+threatened to become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with
+the young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
+custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack, was not
+a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently he must set to
+work; he must get a new education; he must begin a career of his own.
+
+  Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
+careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him; for
+diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held, during the
+four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a position at the
+centre of action, with his hands actually touching the lever of power,
+could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna or Madrid in order to bore
+himself doing nothing until the next President should do him the honor
+to turn him out. For once all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was
+not possible.
+
+  In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
+in the State Department, but, between the President and the Senate,
+service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of career was more
+difficult than the education which had proved impracticable. Adams saw
+no road; in fact there was none. All his friends were trying one path
+or another, but none went a way that he could have taken. John Hay
+passed through London in order to bury himself in second-rate Legations
+for years, before he drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and
+George Smalley on the Tribune. Frank Barlow and Frank Bartlett carried
+Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Miles stayed in
+the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was forced into
+State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with brevet-brigadier rank,
+trying to find employment. Scores of others tried experiments more or
+less unsuccessful. Henry Adams could see easy ways of making a hundred
+blunders; he could see no likely way of making a legitimate success.
+Such as it was, his so-called education was wanted nowhere.
+
+  One profession alone seemed possible--the press. In 1860 he
+would have said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a
+thousand other young graduates from American colleges who entered the
+world every year enjoying the same conviction; but in 1866 the
+situation was altered; the possession of money had become doubly
+needful for success, and double energy was essential to get money.
+America had more than doubled her scale. Yet the press was still the
+last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would
+not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an
+editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation
+accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a
+helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in
+the corner of a newspaper office. The press was an inferior pulpit; an
+anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school but it was still the
+nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked
+education. For the press, then, Henry Adams decided to fit himself, and
+since he could not go home to get practical training, he set to work to
+do what he could in London.
+
+  He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that
+this was not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain number
+of other drawbacks which the reporter could not see so clearly. Do what
+he might, he drew breath only in the atmosphere of English methods and
+thoughts; he could breathe none other. His mother--who should have been
+a competent judge, since her success and popularity in England exceeded
+that of her husband--averred that every woman who lived a certain time
+in England came to look and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how
+she struggled. Henry Adams felt himself catching an English tone of
+mind and processes of thought, though at heart more hostile to them
+than ever. As though to make him more helpless and wholly distort his
+life, England grew more and more agreeable and amusing. Minister Adams
+became, in 1866, almost a historical monument in London; he held a
+position altogether his own. His old opponents disappeared. Lord
+Palmerston died in October, 1865; Lord Russell tottered on six months
+longer, but then vanished from power; and in July, 1866, the
+conservatives came into office. Traditionally the Tories were easier to
+deal with than the Whigs, and Minister Adams had no reason to regret
+the change. His personal relations were excellent and his personal
+weight increased year by year. On that score the private secretary had
+no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but it was
+enough; the life he led was agreeable; his friends were all he wanted,
+and, except that he was at the mercy of politics, he felt much at ease.
+Of his daily life he had only to reckon so many breakfasts; so many
+dinners; so many receptions, balls, theatres, and country-parties; so
+many cards to be left; so many Americans to be escorted--the usual
+routine of every young American in a Legation; all counting for nothing
+in sum, because, even if it had been his official duty--which it was
+not--it was mere routine, a single, continuous, unbroken act, which led
+to nothing and nowhere except Portland Place and the grave.
+
+  The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which
+deepened its ruts every day. The English mind was like the London
+drawing-room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and
+fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go
+together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole,
+except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas
+till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one,
+except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to doubt; least of all, the
+Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as
+unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers, and, in England,
+every one must drift with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the
+race-course or the moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one
+or two followed some form of science; and a number took to what, for
+want of a better name, they called Art. Young Adams inherited a certain
+taste for the same pursuit from his father who insisted that he had it
+not, because he could not see what his son thought he saw in Turner.
+The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort of aesthetic rag-bag of
+his own, which he regarded as amusement, and never called art. So he
+would wander off on a Sunday to attend service successively in all the
+city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren; or he would disappear from
+the Legation day after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where his
+son attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or water-colors.
+Neither knew enough to talk much about the other's tastes, but the only
+difference between them was a slight difference of direction. The
+Minister's mind like his writings showed a correctness of form and line
+that his son would have been well pleased had he inherited.
+
+  Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most
+alluring and treacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small chance of
+escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no beginning, middle, or
+end, no origin, no object, and no conceivable result as education. In
+London one met no corrective. The only American who came by, capable of
+teaching, was William Hunt, who stopped to paint the portrait of the
+Minister which now completes the family series at Harvard College. Hunt
+talked constantly, and was, or afterwards became, a famous teacher, but
+Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, he had
+inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which he
+was slow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish of
+Adams's mind. The portrait finished, he went.
+
+  As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine,
+and there always sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du Bac,
+or wherever he lived, and they went off to dine at the Palais Royal,
+and talk of whatever interested the students of the Beaux Arts.
+Richardson, too, had much to say, but had not yet seized his style.
+Adams caught very little of what lay in his mind, and the less,
+because, to Adams, everything French was bad except the restaurants,
+while the continuous life in England made French art seem worst of all.
+This did not prove that English art, in 1866, was good; far from it;
+but it helped to make bric-a-brac of all art, after the manner of
+England.
+
+  Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes,
+Adams met the man that pushed him furthest in this English garden of
+innate disorder called taste. The older daughter of the Milnes Gaskells
+had married Francis Turner Palgrave. Few Americans will ever ask
+whether any one has described the Palgraves, but the family was one of
+the most describable in all England at that day. Old Sir Francis, the
+father, had been much the greatest of all the historians of early
+England, the only one who was un-English; and the reason of his
+superiority lay in his name, which was Cohen, and his mind which was
+Cohen also, or at least not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in
+order to please his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis
+Turner, Gifford, Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford
+was perhaps the most eccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were
+famous, even among the famous travels of that generation. Francis
+Turner--or, as he was commonly called, Frank Palgrave--unable to work
+off his restlessness in travel like Gifford, and stifled in the
+atmosphere of the Board of Education, became a critic. His art
+criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terror to the British
+artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "Golden Treasury,"
+helped Adams to more literary education than he ever got from any taste
+of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one of the minor poets; his
+hymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was too ferocious to be liked;
+even Holman Hunt found his temper humorous; among many rivals, he may
+perhaps have had a right to claim the much-disputed rank of being the
+most unpopular man in London; but he liked to teach, and asked only for
+a docile pupil. Adams was docile enough, for he knew nothing and liked
+to listen. Indeed, he had to listen, whether he liked or not, for
+Palgrave's voice was strident, and nothing could stop him. Literature,
+painting, sculpture, architecture were open fields for his attacks,
+which were always intelligent if not always kind, and when these
+failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John Richard Green, who
+was Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose Irish charm of touch and
+humor defended him from most assaults, used to tell with delight of
+Palgrave's call on him just after he had moved into his new Queen Anne
+house in Kensington Square: "Palgrave called yesterday, and the first
+thing he said was, 'I've counted three anachronisms on your front
+doorstep.'"
+
+  Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type
+almost more emphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded with
+emphasis. Woolner's sculpture showed none of the rough assertion that
+Woolner himself showed, when he was not making supernatural effort to
+be courteous, but his busts were remarkable, and his work altogether
+was, in Palgrave's clamorous opinion, the best of his day. He took the
+matter of British art--or want of art--seriously, almost ferociously,
+as a personal grievance and torture; at times he was rather terrifying
+in the anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. As Henry Adams felt no
+responsibility for English art, and had no American art to offer for
+sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much like Carlyle's,
+and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as a third member
+of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose tastes
+lay in the same direction, and whose expression was modified by
+clerical propriety. Among these men, one wandered off into paths of
+education much too devious and slippery for an American foot to follow.
+He would have done better to go on the race-track, as far as concerned
+a career.
+
+  Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an
+art-critic, still less an artist. For some things ignorance is good,
+and art is one of them. He knew he knew nothing, and had not the
+trained eye or the keen instinct that trusted itself; but he was
+curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew. He took
+Palgrave's word as final about a drawing of Rembrandt or Michael
+Angelo, and he trusted Woolner implicitly about a Turner; but when he
+quoted their authority to any dealer, the dealer pooh-poohed it, and
+declared that it had no weight in the trade. If he went to a sale of
+drawings or paintings, at Sotheby's or Christie's, an hour afterwards,
+he saw these same dealers watching Palgrave or Woolner for a point, and
+bidding over them. He rarely found two dealers agree in judgment. He
+once bought a water-color from the artist himself out of his studio,
+and had it doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whose place he
+took it for framing. He was reduced to admit that he could not prove its
+authenticity; internal evidence was against it.
+
+  One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the
+Legation in Portland Place on his way downtown, and offered to take
+Adams to Sotheby's, where a small collection of old drawings was on
+show. The collection was rather a curious one, said to be that of Sir
+Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with an undisturbed record of a
+century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probably none but
+collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some dozens of these
+were always on hand, following every sale, and especially on the
+lookout for old drawings, which became rarer every year. Turning
+rapidly over the numbers, Palgrave stopped at one containing several
+small drawings, one marked as Rembrandt, one as Rafael; and putting his
+finger on the Rafael, after careful examination; "I should buy this,"
+he said; "it looks to me like one of those things that sell for five
+shillings one day, and fifty pounds the next." Adams marked it for a
+bid, and the next morning came down to the auction. The numbers sold
+slowly, and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he
+came back, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed
+at his own stupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted the
+drawing for himself if he had not in a manner given it to Adams, the
+culprit waited for the sale to close, and then asked the clerk for the
+name of the buyer. It was Holloway, the art-dealer, near Covent Garden,
+whom he slightly knew. Going at once to the shop he waited till young
+Holloway came in, with his purchases under his arm, and without attempt
+at preface, he said: "You bought to-day, Mr. Holloway, a number that I
+wanted. Do you mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out the parcel,
+looked over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number for
+the sake of the Rembrandt, which he thought possibly genuine; taking
+that out, Adams might have the rest for the price he paid for the
+lot--twelve shillings.
+
+  Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably
+seen these drawings. Two of them--only two--had thought them worth
+buying at any price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the Rafael,
+Holloway the one marked as Rembrandt. Adams, the purchaser of the
+Rafael, knew nothing whatever on the subject, but thought he might
+credit himself with education to the value of twelve shillings, and
+call the drawing nothing. Such items of education commonly came higher.
+
+  He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an
+old, rather thin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the window,
+one could see lines on the reverse. "Take it down to Reed at the
+British Museum," said Palgrave; "he is Curator of the drawings, and, if
+you ask him, he will have it taken off the mount." Adams amused himself
+for a day or two by searching Rafael's works for the figure, which he
+found at last in the Parnasso, the figure of Horace, of which, as it
+happened--though Adams did not know it--the British Museum owned a much
+finer drawing. At last he took the dirty, little, unfinished red-chalk
+sketch to Reed whom he found in the Curator's room, with some of the
+finest Rafael drawings in existence, hanging on the walls. "Yes!" said
+Mr Reed; "I noticed this at the sale; but it's not Rafael!" Adams,
+feeling himself incompetent to discuss this subject, reported the
+result to Palgrave, who said that Reed knew nothing about it. Also this
+point lay beyond Adams's competence; but he noted that Reed was in the
+employ of the British Museum as Curator of the best--or nearly the
+best--collection in the world, especially of Rafaels, and that he
+bought for the Museum. As expert he had rejected both the Rafael and
+the Rembrandt at first-sight, and after his attention was recalled to
+the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected it again.
+
+  A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr. Reed
+took out of his drawer and gave him, saying with what seemed a little
+doubt or hesitation: "I should tell you that the paper shows a
+water-mark, which I find the same as that of paper used by Marc
+Antonio." A little taken back by this method of studying art, a method
+which even a poor and ignorant American might use as well as Rafael
+himself, Adams asked stupidly: "Then you think it genuine?" "Possibly!"
+replied Reed; "but much overdrawn."
+
+  Here was expert opinion after a second revise, with help of
+water-marks! In Adams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve
+shillings as education; but this was not all. Reed continued: "The
+lines on the back seem to be writing, which I cannot read, but if you
+will take it down to the manuscript-room, they will read it for you."
+
+  Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts and
+begged him to read the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes' study,
+very obligingly said he could not: "It is scratched with an artist's
+crayon, very rapidly, with many unusual abbreviations and old forms. If
+any one in Europe can read it, it is the old man at the table yonder,
+Libri! Take it to him!"
+
+  This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even judge
+a manuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he had nothing to
+pay, not even twelve shillings, though he thought these experts worth
+more, at least for his education. Accordingly he carried his paper to
+Libri, a total stranger to him, and asked the old man, as deferentially
+as possible, to tell him whether the lines had any meaning. Had Adams
+not been an ignorant person he would have known all about Libri, but
+his ignorance was vast, and perhaps was for the best. Libri looked at
+the paper, and then looked again, and at last bade him sit down and
+wait. Half an hour passed before he called Adams back and showed him
+these lines:--
+
+  "Or questo credo ben che una elleria
+   Te offende tanto che te offese il core.
+   Perche sei grande nol sei in tua volia;
+   Tu vedi e gia non credi il tuo valore;
+   Passate gia son tutte gelosie;
+   Tu sei di sasso; non hai piu dolore."
+
+  As far as Adams could afterwards recall it, this was Libri's
+reading, but he added that the abbreviations were many and unusual;
+that the writing was very ancient; and that the word he read as
+"elleria" in the first line was not Italian at all.
+
+  By this time, one had got too far beyond one's depth to ask
+questions. If Libri could not read Italian, very clearly Adams had
+better not offer to help him. He took the drawing, thanked everybody,
+and having exhausted the experts of the British Museum, took a cab to
+Woolner's studio, where he showed the figure and repeated Reed's
+opinion. Woolner snorted: "Reed's a fool!" he said; "he knows nothing
+about it; there may be a rotten line or two, but the drawing's all
+right."
+
+  For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece,
+partly for its own interest, but largely for curiosity to see whether
+any critic or artist would ever stop to look at it. None ever did,
+unless he knew the story. Adams himself never wanted to know more about
+it. He refused to seek further light. He never cared to learn whether
+the drawing was Rafael's, or whether the verse was Rafael's, or
+whether even the water-mark was Rafael's. The experts--some scores of
+them including the British Museum,--had affirmed that the drawing was
+worth a certain moiety of twelve shillings. On that point, also, Adams
+could offer no opinion, but he was clear that his education had
+profited by it to that extent--his amusement even more.
+
+  Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met
+the same old figure, like a battered and illegible signpost that ought
+to direct him to the next station but never did. There was no next
+station. All the art of a thousand--or ten thousand--years had brought
+England to stuff which Palgrave and Woolner brayed in their mortars;
+derided, tore in tatters, growled at, and howled at, and treated in
+terms beyond literary usage. Whistler had not yet made his appearance
+in London, but the others did quite as well. What result could a
+student reach from it? Once, on returning to London, dining with
+Stopford Brooke, some one asked Adams what impression the Royal Academy
+Exhibition made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it
+was rather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke
+abruptly met it by asking whether chaos were not better than death.
+Truly the question was worth discussion. For his own part, Adams
+inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an object to him as
+a searcher of knowledge--neither would have vogue in America--neither
+would help him to a career. Both of them led him away from his objects,
+into an English dilettante museum of scraps, with nothing but a
+wall-paper to unite them in any relation of sequence. Possibly English
+taste was one degree more fatal than English scholarship, but even this
+question was open to argument. Adams went to the sales and bought what
+he was told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now a
+water-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because it was
+more likely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them not because
+they went together--on the contrary, they made rather awkward spots on
+the wall as they did on the mind--but because he could afford to buy
+those, and not others. Ten pounds did not go far to buy a Michael
+Angelo, but was a great deal of money to a private secretary. The
+effect was spotty, fragmentary, feeble; and the more so because the
+British mind was constructed in that way--boasted of it, and held it to
+be true philosophy as well as sound method.
+
+  What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as
+wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew it, but
+perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were scrappy, and ought to
+be studied so. Turning from British art to British literature, one met
+the same dangers. The historical school was a playground of traps and
+pitfalls. Fatally one fell into the sink of history--antiquarianism.
+For one who nourished a natural weakness for what was called history,
+the whole of British literature in the nineteenth century was
+antiquarianism or anecdotage, for no one except Buckle had tried to
+link it with ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as having failed.
+Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest admiration
+for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even distantly
+imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One might as well
+imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was wrong here, for the
+poet and the historian ought to have different methods, and Macaulay's
+method ought to be imitable if it were sound; yet the method was more
+doubtful than the style. He was a dramatist; a painter; a poet, like
+Carlyle. This was the English mind, method, genius, or whatever one
+might call it; but one never could quite admit that the method which
+ended in Froude and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion
+and poetry were eccentricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met
+them at dinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the
+English method was right, and art fragmentary by essence. History, like
+everything else, might be a field of scraps, like the refuse about a
+Staffordshire iron-furnace. One felt a little natural reluctance to
+decline and fall like Silas Wegg on the golden dust-heap of British
+refuse; but if one must, one could at least expect a degree from Oxford
+and the respect of the Athenaeum Club.
+
+  While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends
+came abroad for a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy with
+his "History of New England." Of all the relics of childhood, Dr.
+Palfrey was the most sympathetic, and perhaps the more so because he,
+too, had wandered into the pleasant meadows of antiquarianism, and had
+forgotten the world in his pursuit of the New England Puritan. Although
+America seemed becoming more and more indifferent to the Puritan except
+as a slightly rococo ornament, he was only the more amusing as a study
+for the Monkbarns of Boston Bay, and Dr. Palfrey took him seriously, as
+his clerical education required. His work was rather an Apologia in the
+Greek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man, or, what was
+much the same thing, of Puritans to other men; and the task of
+justification was onerous enough to require the occasional relief of a
+contrast or scapegoat. When Dr. Palfrey happened on the picturesque but
+unpuritanic figure of Captain John Smith, he felt no call to beautify
+Smith's picture or to defend his moral character; he became impartial
+and penetrating. The famous story of Pocahontas roused his latent New
+England scepticism. He suggested to Adams, who wanted to make a
+position for himself, that an article in the North American Review on
+Captain John Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract as much
+attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other stone that
+could be thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest nothing better. The
+task seemed likely to be amusing. So he planted himself in the British
+Museum and patiently worked over all the material he could find, until,
+at last, after three or four months of labor, he got it in shape and
+sent it to Charles Norton, who was then editing the North American. Mr.
+Norton very civilly and even kindly accepted it. The article appeared
+in January, 1867.
+
+  Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in
+education; something that tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite of
+personal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil wars and
+diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be actual, daily,
+and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at twenty-eight, still in
+English society, dragged on one side into English dilettantism, which
+of all dilettantism he held the most futile; and, on the other, into
+American antiquarianism, which of all antiquarianism he held the most
+foolish. This was the result of five years in London. Even then he knew
+it to be a false start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to
+amount to anything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with
+a new purpose.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+DARWINISM (1867-1868)
+
+  POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet
+for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in
+Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly
+long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The geological
+champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate
+at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave
+said of Tennyson, that the first time he came to town, Adams should be
+asked to meet him, but neither of them ever came to town, or ever cared
+to meet a young American, and one could not go to them because they
+were known to dislike intrusion. The only Americans who were not
+allowed to intrude were the half-dozen in the Legation. Adams was
+content to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his
+"Voyage of the Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a
+predestined follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow
+Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in those
+days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English way,
+building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow foundations
+as to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous. The atomic
+theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanical
+theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin's Law
+of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man had to take on
+trust. Neither he nor any one else knew enough to verify them; in his
+ignorance of mathematics, he was particularly helpless; but this never
+stood in his way. The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere--to
+some great generalization which would finish one's clamor to be
+educated. That a beginner should understand them all, or believe them
+all, no one could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist
+because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief, and
+one must know something in order to contradict even such triflers as
+Tyndall and Huxley.
+
+  By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow
+trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he
+tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best thing; he
+became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He was ready to
+become anything but quiet. As though the world had not been enough
+upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more. He had his wish,
+but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them.
+
+  He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
+might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology;
+a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were history.
+Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for vestiges of
+Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges of Natural Selection, and
+Adams followed him, although he cared nothing about Selection, unless
+perhaps for the indirect amusement of upsetting curates. He felt, like
+nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt no
+more concern in Natural than in unnatural Selection, though he seized
+with greediness the new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir
+Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking
+the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new
+edition of his "Principles," then the highest text-book of geology; but
+here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature. Natural Selection led back
+to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity. This was a
+vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every
+one--except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for
+religion; a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
+Such a working system for the universe suited a young man who had just
+helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million
+lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who
+objected to it; the idea was only too seductive in its perfection; it
+had the charm of art. Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of
+philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back
+into it--to reach God a posteriori--rather than start from it, like
+Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best
+way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived.
+Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither and
+thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the
+strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and
+another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the
+primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady,
+uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one
+day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his
+"Principles" properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothing
+simpler than to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles
+would tell him what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the
+universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir
+Charles's ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after
+half an hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of
+American geologists about the principles of their profession. This was
+getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.
+
+  The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt
+by Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their
+account. He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but
+himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell, asked him
+to explain for Americans his last edition of the "Principia," Adams
+would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately the mere reading such
+works for amusement is quite a different matter from studying them for
+criticism. Ignorance must always begin at the beginning. Adams must
+inevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason
+why the apple fell to the ground. He did not know enough to be
+satisfied with the fact. The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what
+was Gravitation? and he would have been thrown quite off his base if
+Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know.
+
+  At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial Theory
+or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial epoch
+looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world. If the
+glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe? To him the two or
+three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested or borrowed to explain
+glaciation were proof of nothing, and were quite unsolid as support for
+so immense a superstructure as geological uniformity. If one were at
+liberty to be as lax in science as in theology, and to assume unity
+from the start, one might better say so, as the Church did, and not
+invite attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man,
+altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir
+Isaac Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views, which he
+thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs. Sir Charles himself
+seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in vain. At last he
+resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of inserting a sentence
+in the text, intended to provoke correction. "The introduction [by
+Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent seemed at first sight
+inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument, obliging him to allow that
+causes had in fact existed on the earth capable of producing more
+violent geological changes than would be possible in our own day." The
+hint produced no effect. Sir Charles said not a word; he let the
+paragraph stand; and Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian
+was strict or lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.
+
+  Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
+as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the glacial
+epoch remained a misty region in the young man's Darwinism. Had it been
+the only one, he would not have fretted about it; but uniformity often
+worked queerly and sometimes did not work as Natural Selection at all.
+Finding himself at a loss for some single figure to illustrate the Law
+of Natural Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of
+uniformity on record. Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him that
+certain forms, like Terebratula,  appeared to be identical from the
+beginning to the end of geological time. Since this was altogether too
+much uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up the
+attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the
+end--himself. Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his
+purpose, he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate.
+Infinitely to his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first
+vertebrate was a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all
+fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under
+Adams's own favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.
+
+  By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire
+familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he
+loved best. Like Catherine Olney in "Northanger Abbey," he yearned for
+nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey,
+unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior's House, and both
+these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions or without, he never
+tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all the
+historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and
+Uriconium; or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins,
+all was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roman
+Campagna; but perhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge on a summer
+afternoon and look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales. The
+peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with absence of
+evolution; it was better marked in Egypt: it was felt wherever
+time-sequences became interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As
+one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer
+haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium,
+nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the railroad;
+Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildwas were far
+superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa, or the
+monks of Buildwas, had they approached where he lay in the grass, would
+have taken him only for another and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They
+would have seen little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless
+it were the steam of a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of
+time as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past,
+measuring time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of
+wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of all
+was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's earliest
+ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according
+to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose
+kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria. Life
+began and ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian,
+without vertebrates or any other organism except a few shell-fish. On
+the further verge of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which
+every trace of organic existence had been erased.
+
+  That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American,
+seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate parentage as
+modern as though just caught in the Severn below, astonished him as
+much as though he had found Darwin himself. In the scale of evolution,
+one vertebrate was as good as another. For anything he, or any one
+else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution out of a
+thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis. To an American in search of
+a father, it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through
+lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether
+another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced
+descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This
+matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La
+Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals,
+stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had
+doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:--
+
+  "Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme,
+     Que scelerat pour scelerat,
+   Il vaut mieux etre un loup qu'un homme."
+
+  It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the
+problem of Pteraspis,  for it was quite certain that no complete proof
+of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis,  and
+that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate had
+been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites
+whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the
+shores of Quincy Bay.
+
+  That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
+grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them
+should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor
+could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden
+back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature
+he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of
+tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Siluria, he understood, Sir
+Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Limulus, which helped
+nothing. Neither in the Limulus  nor in the Terebratula, nor in the
+Cestracion Philippi, any more than in the Pteraspis,  could one
+conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the choice mattered little.
+Cousinship had limits but no one knew enough to fix them. When the
+vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.
+Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of
+ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow
+shale, as complete as Adams himself--in some respects more so--at the
+top of the column of organic evolution: and geology offered no sort of
+proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might,
+Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure
+inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one found a
+watch, one inferred a maker. He could detect no more evolution in life
+since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the
+Abbey. All he could prove was change. Coal-power alone asserted
+evolution--of power--and only by violence could be forced to assert
+selection of type.
+
+  All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir
+Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles
+labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them
+till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams gladly
+studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the
+day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove
+only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform;
+and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians--except
+Darwin--Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the
+Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of
+ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in
+the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he
+felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be
+brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey
+from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no
+more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most was
+Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change.
+
+  Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
+education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass
+close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass--or
+whatever there was to nibble--in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he
+seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of
+fishes. He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he
+determined to stop it. Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had
+any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be
+many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of
+ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived
+and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which
+had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to
+discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth
+was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved
+true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for
+fun.
+
+  From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
+as criminal--worse than crime--sacrilege! Society punished it
+ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father, looked
+on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy him
+nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn from
+Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on enterprises
+great or small. He had no notion of letting the currents of his action
+be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him, the current of his
+time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology
+under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards;
+on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of
+every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was,
+as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their
+practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as
+though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the
+surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young
+men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law
+should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in
+the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy
+in order; and he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though
+he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million
+more lives.
+
+  As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
+but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he could
+not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying it. He,
+at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith. The Church
+was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded
+deeply in interest and law. This was the result of five or six years in
+England; a result so British as to be almost the equivalent of an
+Oxford degree.
+
+  Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
+his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who
+left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned resolutely to
+business, and attacked the burning question of specie payments. His
+principles assured him that the honest way to resume payments was to
+restrict currency. He thought he might win a name among financiers and
+statesmen at home by showing how this task had been done by England,
+after the classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the
+study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a
+morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his
+confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British
+financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that
+the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the
+Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were the remedies.
+
+  The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
+serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
+Pteraspis  to his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution was
+not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever the
+last hope of employment in State Street. Six months of patient labor
+would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his whole
+scheme of making himself a position as a practical man-of-business. If
+he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that
+moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had
+nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone?
+Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge
+impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or
+forgave.
+
+  With labor and caution he made one long article on British
+Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821, and,
+doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for
+choice. He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus
+thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to crush the author;
+but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic--when successful--than
+his ignorance. The editor accepted both.
+
+  When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
+he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with as
+much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The letter
+gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the freedom of
+the press. These articles, following those on Pocahontas and Lyell,
+enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review.
+Precisely what this rank was worth, no one could say; but, for fifty
+years the North American Review had been the stage coach which carried
+literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved. Few
+writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development, but for
+such as thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An article
+was a small volume which required at least three months' work, and was
+paid, at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even in England or
+France could write a good thirty-page article, and practically no one
+in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in search of
+items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact, which
+was a sort of wild game--a bluefish or a teal--worth anywhere from
+fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaper writers had their eye on
+quarterly pickings. The circulation of the Review  had never exceeded
+three or four hundred copies, and the Review  had never paid its
+reasonable expenses. Yet it stood at the head of American literary
+periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it
+reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was an
+organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in
+some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily newspaper.
+
+  With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself
+what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his
+helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No one
+could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a
+part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might perhaps
+have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers or
+William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one would have picked out
+William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Boston
+was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry
+Higginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard;
+Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start.
+Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the
+century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could
+show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor.
+The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks. Had Adams
+foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser,
+and could have chosen no better path.
+
+  Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the
+pleasantest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the
+Silurian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord
+Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background
+the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly, and
+the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing
+that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 was nearly
+complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himself
+almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before
+he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary
+could afford to be happy. His old education was finished; his new one
+was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end
+of a very long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with another
+to follow, and a summer sea between.
+
+  He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back
+in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season he wandered
+on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome of the
+middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as had become
+with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of
+Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its mediaeval
+society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itself as seriously
+as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years of accidental
+education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868
+than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more
+intelligible to him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no
+better when he got back to London and went through his last season.
+London had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his
+habits, and even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like an Englishman,
+and going into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a straw.
+He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments of his
+friends. When at last he found himself back again at Liverpool, his
+heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved mechanically, unstrung,
+but he had no more acquired education than when he first trod the steps
+of the Adelphi Hotel in November, 1858. He could see only one great
+change, and this was wholly in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed
+his imagination; even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy
+interest; he felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the
+British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people
+who frequented their country houses; he had become English to the point
+of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices
+against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of American
+youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes. As
+far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education,
+but in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years
+in London.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE PRESS (1868)
+
+  AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical
+rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family clambered
+down the side of their Cunard steamer into the government tugboat,
+which set them ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River
+pier. Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000 landing from a
+galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on
+the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years
+before. The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but
+diplomatist, started up an unknown street, in company with the private
+secretary who had become private citizen, in search of carriages to
+convey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous
+but successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in their
+native land.
+
+  How much its character had changed or was changing, they could
+not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the
+land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was always
+trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand
+itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of
+its tail. Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan,
+stretching loosely towards the prairies, its few score of leaders far
+in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in
+the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage over
+Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction, while
+Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several contradictory
+movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or
+oriented towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead.
+Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the head of
+the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where the leaders
+could be found. One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay,
+since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical
+energies--coal, iron, steam--a distinct superiority in power over the
+old industrial elements--agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the
+result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the
+action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his
+starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an
+estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a
+scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish
+Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow--not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still
+reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the
+customs--but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer
+hand than he--American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans
+and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He
+made no complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse off
+than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their
+heritage by his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he was not
+himself at fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any
+superiority of his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out of the
+track, and must get back into it as best he could.
+
+  One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be
+fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at his
+father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he. All were
+equally survivals from the forties--bric-a-brac from the time of Louis
+Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments that had been more or less
+suited to the colonial architecture, but which never had much value in
+Desbrosses Street or Fifth Avenue. They could scarcely have earned five
+dollars a day in any modern industry. The men who commanded high pay
+were as a rule not ornamental. Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould
+lacked social charm. Doubtless the country needed ornament--needed it
+very badly indeed--but it needed energy still more, and capital most of
+all, for its supply was ridiculously out of proportion to its wants. On
+the new scale of power, merely to make the continent habitable for
+civilized people would require an immediate outlay that would have
+bankrupted the world. As yet, no portion of the world except a few
+narrow stretches of western Europe had ever been tolerably provided
+with the essentials of comfort and convenience; to fit out an entire
+continent with roads and the decencies of life would exhaust the credit
+of the entire planet. Such an estimate seemed outrageous to a Texan
+member of Congress who loved the simplicity of nature's noblemen; but
+the mere suggestion that a sun existed above him would outrage the
+self-respect of a deep-sea fish that carried a lantern on the end of
+its nose. From the moment that railways were introduced, life took on
+extravagance.
+
+  Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the
+Desbrosses Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the effort to
+see his own length. The new Americans, of whom he was to be one, must,
+whether they were fit or unfit, create a world of their own, a science,
+a society, a philosophy, a universe, where they had not yet created a
+road or even learned to dig their own iron. They had no time for
+thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond their day's work;
+their attitude to the universe outside them was that of the deep-sea
+fish. Above all, they naturally and intensely disliked to be told what
+to do, and how to do it, by men who took their ideas and their methods
+from the abstract theories of history, philosophy, or theology. They
+knew enough to know that their world was one of energies quite new.
+
+  All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
+not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as little
+as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he knew, the less
+he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and seemed rather
+inclined to boast of it, at least on the stump; but the leaders of
+industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other. They used, without
+qualm, whatever instruments they found at hand. They had been obliged,
+in 1861, to turn aside and waste immense energy in settling what had
+been settled a thousand years before, and should never have been
+revived. At prodigious expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance
+down, leaving everything but the mere fact of power untouched, since
+nothing else had a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having
+cleared its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw
+itself on that which stood first--its roads. The field was vast;
+altogether beyond its power to control offhand; and society dropped
+every thought of dealing with anything more than the single fraction
+called a railway system. This relatively small part of its task was
+still so big as to need the energies of a generation, for it required
+all the new machinery to be created--capital, banks, mines, furnaces,
+shops, power-houses, technical knowledge, mechanical population,
+together with a steady remodelling of social and political habits,
+ideas, and institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new
+conditions. The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged
+to the railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself.
+
+  Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act as
+though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the new start.
+His brother Charles had determined to strike for the railroads; Henry
+was to strike for the press; and they hoped to play into each other's
+hands. They had great need, for they found no one else to play with.
+After discovering the worthlessness of a so-called education, they had
+still to discover the worthlessness of so-called social connection. No
+young man had a larger acquaintance and relationship than Henry Adams,
+yet he knew no one who could help him. He was for sale, in the open
+market. So were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and knew
+too that they were cheap; to be bought at the price of a mechanic.
+There was no concealment, no delicacy, and no illusion about it.
+Neither he nor his friends complained; but he felt sometimes a little
+surprised that, as far as he knew, no one, seeking in the labor market,
+ever so much as inquired about their fitness. The want of solidarity
+between old and young seemed American. The young man was required to
+impose himself, by the usual business methods, as a necessity on his
+elders, in order to compel them to buy him as an investment. As Adams
+felt it, he was in a manner expected to blackmail. Many a young man
+complained to him in after life of the same experience, which became a
+matter of curious reflection as he grew old. The labor market of good
+society was ill-organized.
+
+  Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor. A peculiar
+and perplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had changed
+much in ten years, it was not less perplexing. One no longer dined at
+two o'clock; one could no longer skate on Back Bay; one heard talk of
+Bostonians worth five millions or more as something not incredible. Yet
+the place seemed still simple, and less restless-minded than ever
+before. In the line that Adams had chosen to follow, he needed more
+than all else the help of the press, but any shadow of hope on that
+side vanished instantly. The less one meddled with the Boston press,
+the better. All the newspapermen were clear on that point. The same was
+true of politics. Boston meant business. The Bostonians were building
+railways. Adams would have liked to help in building railways, but had
+no education. He was not fit.
+
+  He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations,
+renewing friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years old,
+the man who has not yet got further than to study the situation, is
+lost, or near it. He could see nothing in the situation that could be
+of use to him. His friends had won no more from it than he. His brother
+Charles, after three years of civil life, was no better off than
+himself, except for being married and in greater need of income. His
+brother John had become a brilliant political leader on the wrong side.
+No one had yet regained the lost ground of the war.
+
+  He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the
+simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had learned
+so painfully in London was worse than useless in America where every
+standard was different. Newport was charming, but it asked for no
+education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer and pleasanter,
+and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in that society were a
+kind of social partnership, like the classes at college; not education
+but the subjects of education. All were doing the same thing, and
+asking the same question of the future. None could help. Society seemed
+founded on the law that all was for the best New Yorkers in the best of
+Newports, and that all young people were rich if they could waltz. It
+was a new version of the Ant and Grasshopper.
+
+  At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
+he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or had shown a
+sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward Atkinson. Boston was
+cool towards sons, whether prodigals or other, and needed much time to
+make up its mind what to do for them--time which Adams, at thirty years
+old, could hardly spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to
+hire an office in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze
+there alone, vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for
+Fortune to knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the
+elevator; or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in use.
+Whether this course would have offered his best chance he never knew;
+it was one of the points in practical education which most needed a
+clear understanding, and he could never reach it. His father and mother
+would have been glad to see him stay with them and begin reading
+Blackstone again, and he showed no very filial tenderness by abruptly
+breaking the tie that had lasted so long. After all, perhaps Beacon
+Street was as good as any other street for his objects in life;
+possibly his easiest and surest path was from Beacon Street to State
+Street and back again, all the days of his years. Who could tell? Even
+after life was over, the doubt could not be determined.
+
+  In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path
+that had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his brothers.
+He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his peculiar birthright.
+The mere thought of beginning life again in Mount Vernon Street lowered
+the pulsations of his heart. This is a story of education--not a mere
+lesson of life--and, with education, temperament has in strictness
+nothing to do, although in practice they run close together. Neither by
+temperament nor by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted
+far away and behind his companions there; no one trusted his
+temperament or education; he had to go.
+
+  Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his
+plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the shortest road
+to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside the social pale. No
+Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced one's self as an
+adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of deplorably bad judgment,
+and the charges were true. The chances of ending in the gutter were, at
+best, even. The risk was the greater in Adams's case, because he had no
+very clear idea what to do when he got there. That he must educate
+himself over again, for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile
+to his old educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do
+it--how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist of
+the Capital--he had not an idea, and no one to teach him. The question
+of money is rarely serious for a young American unless he is married,
+and money never troubled Adams more than others; not because he had it,
+but because he could do without it, like most people in Washington who
+all lived on the income of bricklayers; but with or without money he
+met the difficulty that, after getting to Washington in order to go on
+the press, it was necessary to seek a press to go on. For large work he
+could count on the North American Review, but this was scarcely a
+press. For current discussion and correspondence, he could depend on
+the New York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily, and no
+New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the death of Henry
+J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was out of the question
+both for political and personal reasons, and because Whitelaw Reid had
+already undertaken that singularly venturesome position, amid
+difficulties that would have swamped Adams in four-and-twenty hours.
+Charles A. Dana had made the Sun a very successful as well as a very
+amusing paper, but had hurt his own social position in doing it; and
+Adams knew himself well enough to know that he could never please
+himself and Dana too; with the best intentions, he must always fail as
+a blackguard, and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life
+to the Sun. As for the New York Herald,  it was a despotic empire
+admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the moment, the
+New York daily press offered no field except the free-trade Holy Land
+of the Evening Post  under William Cullen Bryant, while beside it lay
+only the elevated plateau of the New Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and
+the Nation. Much as Adams liked Godkin, and glad as he was to creep
+under the shelter of the Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware
+that he should find there only the same circle of readers that he
+reached in the North American Review.
+
+  The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington,
+except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then Attorney
+General and living there, he would stand in solitude much like that of
+London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in Boston seemed to care for
+doing; he held out a hand to the young man. Whether Boston, like Salem,
+really shunned strangers, or whether Evarts was an exception even in
+New York, he had the social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by
+nature, prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born
+man-of-the-world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without scruple, and
+accepted the world without fearing or abusing it. His wit was the least
+part of his social attraction. His talk was broad and free. He laughed
+where he could; he joked if a joke was possible; he was true to his
+friends, and never lost his temper or became ill-natured. Like all New
+Yorkers he was decidedly not a Bostonian; but he was what one might
+call a transplanted New Englander, like General Sherman; a variety,
+grown in ranker soil. In the course of life, and in widely different
+countries, Adams incurred heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom
+he had no claim and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps
+half-a-dozen such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is a
+large number as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily than
+when Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.
+
+  Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep
+gratitude, the more because his first struggle with a sleeping-car made
+him doubt the value--to him--of a Pullman civilization; but he was even
+more grateful for the shelter of Mr. Evarts's house in H Street at the
+corner of Fourteenth, where he abode in safety and content till he
+found rooms in the roomless village. To him the village seemed
+unchanged. Had he not known that a great war and eight years of
+astonishing movement had passed over it, he would have noticed nothing
+that betrayed growth. As of old, houses were few; rooms fewer; even the
+men were the same. No one seemed to miss the usual comforts of
+civilization, and Adams was glad to get rid of them, for his best
+chance lay in the eighteenth century.
+
+  The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
+the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an aspirant
+to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately took him to
+the White House and presented him to President Andrew Johnson. The
+interview was brief and consisted in the stock remark common to
+monarchs and valets, that the young man looked even younger than he
+was. The younger man felt even younger than he looked. He never saw the
+President again, and never felt a wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson
+was not the sort of man whom a young reformer of thirty, with two or
+three foreign educations, was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet,
+musing over the interview as a matter of education, long years
+afterwards, he could not help recalling the President's figure with a
+distinctness that surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and
+statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that
+had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were
+greater than others; but all were statesmen and all were supported,
+lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness. To them the
+universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their universe, a
+Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that he never
+entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern system until he
+found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery was only a part of
+the Southern system, and the life of it all--the vigor--the poetry--was
+its moral certainty of self. The Southerner could not doubt; and this
+self-assurance not only gave Andrew Johnson the look of a true
+President, but actually made him one. When Adams came to look back on
+it afterwards, he was surprised to realize how strong the Executive was
+in 1868--perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly he never
+again found himself so well satisfied, or so much at home.
+
+  Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
+though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed little
+changed in these eight years. He was the same--with a difference.
+Perhaps he--unlike Henry Adams--had at last got an education, and all
+he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself to doing without it.
+Whatever the reason, although his manner was as roughly kind as ever,
+and his talk as free, he appeared to have closed his account with the
+public; he no longer seemed to care; he asked nothing, gave nothing,
+and invited no support; he talked little of himself or of others, and
+waited only for his discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in
+these last days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in
+the evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
+drew near, wanting to feel that the great man--the only chief he ever
+served even as a volunteer--recognized some personal relation, he asked
+Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his rooms, and play his game
+of whist there, as he did every night in his own house. Mr. Seward came
+and had his whist, and Adams remembered his rough parting speech: "A
+very sensible entertainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of
+Mr. Seward, and the only one he ever accepted.
+
+  Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,
+Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what should
+have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State Department had
+ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the Treasury had taken its
+place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a man new to politics--Hugh
+McCulloch--not a person of much importance in the eyes of practical
+politicians such as young members of the press meant themselves to
+become, but they all liked Mr. McCulloch, though they thought him a
+stop-gap rather than a force. Had they known what sort of forces the
+Treasury was to offer them for support in the generation to come, they
+might have reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams
+was fated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he ever
+cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the idea that
+McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to represent
+everything that one liked least. He was no politician, he had no party,
+and no power. He was not fashionable or decorative. He was a banker,
+and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice which the serf
+feels to his overseer; for he knew he must obey, and he knew that the
+helpless showed only their helplessness when they tempered obedience by
+mockery. The world, after 1865, became a bankers' world, and no banker
+would ever trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to
+Washington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at all,
+for he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow five thousand
+dollars of any bank in America. The banker never would trust him, and
+he would never trust the banker. To him, the banking mind was
+obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the more surprise at finding
+McCulloch the broadest, most liberal, most genial, and most practical
+public man in Washington.
+
+  There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
+that time was very great. The whole financial system was in chaos;
+every part of it required reform; the utmost experience, tact, and
+skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No one knew how well
+McCulloch did it until his successor took it in charge, and tried to
+correct his methods. Adams did not know enough to appreciate
+McCulloch's technical skill, but he was struck at his open and generous
+treatment of young men. Of all rare qualities, this was, in Adams's
+experience, the rarest. As a rule, officials dread interference. The
+strongest often resent it most. Any official who admits equality in
+discussion of his official course, feels it to be an act of virtue;
+after a few months or years he tires of the effort. Every friend in
+power is a friend lost. This rule is so nearly absolute that it may be
+taken in practice as admitting no exception. Apparent exceptions exist,
+and McCulloch was one of them.
+
+  McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and
+infantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early political
+education. He had neither past nor future, and could afford to be
+careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded by all the active
+and intelligent young men in the country. Full of faith, greedy for
+work, eager for reform, energetic, confident, capable, quick of study,
+charmed with a fight, equally ready to defend or attack, they were
+unselfish, and even--as young men went--honest. They came mostly from
+the army, with the spirit of the volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank
+Barlow, Frank Bartlett were types of the generation. Most of the press,
+and much of the public, especially in the West, shared their ideas. No
+one denied the need for reform. The whole government, from top to
+bottom, was rotten with the senility of what was antiquated and the
+instability of what was improvised. The currency was only one example;
+the tariff was another; but the whole fabric required reconstruction as
+much as in 1789, for the Constitution had become as antiquated as the
+Confederation. Sooner or later a shock must come, the more dangerous
+the longer postponed. The Civil War had made a new system in fact; the
+country would have to reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.
+
+  One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
+government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough, but no
+one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant, universal
+nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests upheld it.
+McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with large
+good-nature and willing sympathy--outside of parties, jobs, bargains,
+corporations or intrigues--which Adams never was to meet again.
+
+  Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil War
+had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer type
+were not always docile under control, but they were handy in a fight.
+Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted as one of them. He found
+himself much at home with them--more at home than he ever had been
+before, or was ever to be again--in the atmosphere of the Treasury. He
+had no strong party passion, and he felt as though he and his friends
+owned this administration, which, in its dying days, had neither
+friends nor future except in them.
+
+  These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
+branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme Court was
+about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge Curtis had been
+employed to argue against the constitutional power of the Government to
+make an artificial standard of value in time of peace. Evarts was
+anxious to fix on a line of argument that should have a chance of
+standing up against that of Judge Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He
+did not know which foot to put forward. About to deal with Judge
+Curtis, the last of the strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could
+risk no chances. In doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to
+discuss, and Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day,
+driving, dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
+needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.
+
+  Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all,
+more solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to treat Mr.
+Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts himself expressed
+for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like most young men, he was
+much of a doctrinaire, and the question was, in any event, rather
+historical or political than legal. He could easily maintain, by way of
+argument, that the required power had never been given, and that no
+sound constitutional reason could possibly exist for authorizing the
+Government to overthrow the standard of value without necessity, in
+time of peace. The dispute itself had not much value for him, even as
+education, but it led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice
+himself. Following up the subject for his letters to the Nation and his
+articles in the North American Review, Adams grew to be intimate with
+the Chief Justice, who, as one of the oldest and strongest leaders of
+the Free Soil Party, had claims to his personal regard; for the old
+Free Soilers were becoming few. Like all strong-willed and
+self-asserting men, Mr. Chase had the faults of his qualities. He was
+never easy to drive in harness, or light in hand. He saw vividly what
+was wrong, and did not always allow for what was relatively right. He
+loved power as though he were still a Senator. His position towards
+Legal Tender was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury he had been its
+author; as Chief Justice he became its enemy. Legal Tender caused no
+great pleasure or pain in the sum of life to a newspaper correspondent,
+but it served as a subject for letters, and the Chief Justice was very
+willing to win an ally in the press who would tell his story as he
+wished it to be read. The intimacy in Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly,
+and the alliance was no small help to the comforts of a struggling
+newspaper adventurer in Washington. No matter what one might think of
+his politics or temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high
+senatorial rank, if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable ally.
+
+  As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
+Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him. As
+though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
+friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise, dropped
+back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams enjoyed
+accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was fifty-seven;
+he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever dreamed of, and he felt
+a sort of amused curiosity to be treated once more as a child. At best,
+the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter, and in this case
+it bristled with thorns, for Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not
+been the most delicate of his ruptured relations, and he was liable to
+be sensitive in many ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in
+constant mind; yet it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a new
+study of political humanity. The younger man knew that the meeting
+would have to come, and was ready for it, if only as a newspaper need;
+but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a disagreeable one, as Adams
+conceived. He learned something--a piece of practical education worth
+the effort--by watching Sumner's behavior. He could see that many
+thoughts--mostly unpleasant--were passing through his mind, since he
+made no inquiry about any of Adams's family, or allusion to any of his
+friends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present. To him,
+Adams in Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic,
+perhaps a spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of
+others; a politician without party; a writer without principles; an
+office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this was, for his
+purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and would be likely to do
+him all the harm in his power. Adams accepted it all; expected to be
+kept at arm's length; admitted that the reasons were just. He was the
+more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations.
+He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked
+to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La
+Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study
+and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes
+even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience.
+
+  On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
+ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a
+pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his
+solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society;
+but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the
+calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing
+them; it contained nothing but itself. The images from without, the
+objects mechanically perceived by the senses, existed by courtesy until
+the mental surface was ruffled, but never became part of the thought.
+Henry Adams roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he
+would have ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected,
+as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more
+aggressively egoistic than other Senators--Conkling, for instance--but
+that with him the disease had affected the whole mind; it was chronic
+and absolute; while, with other Senators for the most part, it was
+still acute.
+
+  Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
+acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful; perhaps
+quite the most useful of all these great authorities who were the
+stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the accumulated capital of a
+Silurian age. A few months or years more, and they were gone. In 1868,
+they were like the town itself, changing but not changed. La Fayette
+Square was society. Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's
+nursery monument to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found
+all one's acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and national
+government. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or fashionable
+stranger had yet discovered the town. No literary or scientific man, no
+artist, no gentleman without office or employment, had ever lived
+there. It was rural, and its society was primitive. Scarcely a person
+in it had ever known life in a great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper,
+of Boston, and perhaps one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed
+in that sort of world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The
+one-horse tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
+pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met to bid
+good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The State
+Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on Fourteenth Street
+while Mr. Mullett was constructing his architectural infant asylum next
+the White House. The value of real estate had not increased since 1800,
+and the pavements were more impassable than the mud. All this favored a
+young man who had come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he
+could know everybody; in two days everybody knew him.
+
+  After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
+the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered an easy
+and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from the safe shelter
+of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work with--or against--he
+had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired education was useless,
+and the other tenth harmful. He would have to begin again from the
+beginning. He must learn to talk to the Western Congressman, and to
+hide his own antecedents. The task was amusing. He could see nothing to
+prevent him from enjoying it, with immoral unconcern for all that had
+gone before and for anything that might follow. The lobby offered a
+spectacle almost picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were more
+entertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew more of life than
+all the departments of the Government together, including the Senate
+and the Smithsonian. Society had not much to give, but what it had, it
+gave with an open hand. For the moment, politics had ceased to disturb
+social relations. All parties were mixed up and jumbled together in a
+sort of tidal slack-water. The Government resembled Adams himself in
+the matter of education. All that had gone before was useless, and some
+of it was worse.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
+
+  THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low
+spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the
+overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost
+unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the
+November grays and browns of northern Europe. Life could not go on so
+beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else felt it or knew it. He bore
+it as well as he could, and when he picked himself up, winter had come,
+and he was settled in bachelor's quarters, as modest as those of a
+clerk in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown,
+where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the Russian
+Minister Stoeckel long before, had bought or built a new house.
+Congress had met. Two or three months remained to the old
+administration, but all interest centred in the new one. The town began
+to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost. He
+drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of
+the confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew
+he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but he
+picked up friends on the press--Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry
+Watterson, Sam Bowles--all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled
+together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for General Grant to
+give orders. No one seemed to know much about it. Even Senators had
+nothing to say. One could only make notes and study finance.
+
+  In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements of
+Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the amusements
+proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions, interests,
+thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington was a poor place for
+education, and of course young diplomats avoided or disliked it, but,
+as a rule, diplomats disliked every place except Paris, and the world
+contained only one Paris. They abused London more violently than
+Washington; they praised no post under the sun; and they were merely
+describing three-fourths of their stations when they complained that
+there were no theatres, no restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no
+drives, no splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza.
+This was all true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient
+and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
+diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought for
+there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men Washington was
+in one way paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand. After
+watching the abject unimportance of the young diplomat in London
+society, Adams found himself a young duke in Washington. He had ten
+years of youth to make up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the
+easiest society he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple,
+good-natured, almost genial, in the softness of a Washington spring.
+Society went on excellently well without houses, or carriages, or
+jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any sort;
+and the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could not stay there
+a month without loving the shabby town. Even the Washington girl, who
+was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor clever, had
+singular charm, and used it. According to Mr. Adams the father, this
+charm dated back as far as Monroe's administration, to his personal
+knowledge.
+
+  Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial
+or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken
+for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing.
+Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for it.
+Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.
+Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private secretary a young
+man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerous example of
+frivolity. The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from
+Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey. Another
+impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far down
+in the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have spared a world
+of superannuated history, science, or politics, to have reversed better
+in waltzing.
+
+  He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
+women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All were
+profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children to
+education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier without
+style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier than he had ever
+been before; happier than any one in the harsh world of strenuousness
+could dream of. This must be taken as background for such little
+education as he gained; but the life belonged to the eighteenth
+century, and in no way concerned education for the twentieth.
+
+  In such an atmosphere, one made no great pretence of hard work.
+If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if it
+will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus far, no one
+had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams had done or could
+do; if he worked at all, it was for social consideration, and social
+pleasure was his pay. For this he was willing to go on working, as an
+artist goes on painting when no one buys his pictures. Artists have
+done it from the beginning of time, and will do it after time has
+expired, since they cannot help themselves, and they find their return
+in the pride of their social superiority as they feel it. Society
+commonly abets them and encourages their attitude of contempt. The
+society of Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel
+anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists produced
+elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it had the chance,
+and respected itself the more for the frailty. Adams found even the
+Government at his service, and every one willing to answer his
+questions. He worked, after a fashion; not very hard, but as much as
+the Government would have required of him for nine hundred dollars a
+year; and his work defied frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing
+than the world ever got from reading him, for his work was not amusing,
+nor was he. One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and
+this was the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months
+to an article on the finances of the United States, just then a subject
+greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it, he sent it to
+London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous editor of the Edinburgh
+Review. Reeve probably thought it good; at all events, he said so; and
+he printed it in April. Of course it was reprinted in America, but in
+England such articles were still anonymous, and the author remained
+unknown.
+
+  The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
+claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a place on
+the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow of Lord
+Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank seemed
+colossal--the highest in the literary world--as it had been only
+five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had flowed since then, but
+the position still flattered vanity, though it brought no other
+flattery or reward except the regular thirty pounds of pay--fifty
+dollars a month, measured in time and labor.
+
+  The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
+scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert Cecil had
+invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of politics which he
+called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and the name--he thought he
+had been enough in Lord Robert's house, in days of his struggle with
+adversity, to excuse the theft--and began what he meant for a permanent
+series of annual political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a
+political authority. With his sources of information, and his social
+intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that would
+command attention. He had the field to himself, and he meant to give
+himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the newspapers liked it or
+not, they would have to reckon with him; for such a power, once
+established, was more effective than all the speeches in Congress or
+reports to the President that could be crammed into the Government
+presses.
+
+  The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could
+not be condensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in
+October by another which bore the title of "Civil Service Reform," and
+was really a part of the same review. A good deal of authentic history
+slipped into these papers. Whether any one except his press associates
+ever read them, he never knew and never greatly cared. The difference
+is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five
+hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five
+hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870
+was near at hand, which was to mark the close of the literary epoch,
+when quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration;
+volumes to pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and
+Robert Louis Stevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling
+brought up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found
+himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers
+kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or
+illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, at longer and
+longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within
+hearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially
+conservative. Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority, or the
+quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could surely say
+where the real authority, or the real law, lay. Science did not know.
+Truths a priori held their own against truths surely relative.
+According to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was
+forever on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.
+Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he could
+still depend on a certain number of listeners--mostly respectable, and
+some rich.
+
+  Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
+that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if this
+had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point where he
+always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of ten make their
+errors. One may be more or less certain of organized forces; one can
+never be certain of men. He belonged to the eighteenth century, and the
+eighteenth century upset all his plans. For the moment, America was
+more eighteenth century than himself; it reverted to the stone age.
+
+  As education--of a certain sort--the story had probably a
+certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see much
+education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule.
+The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal's way.
+This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in
+politics since 1860.
+
+  At least four-fifths of the American people--Adams among the
+rest--had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency,
+and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the
+parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more
+obvious. Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the
+soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he
+pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million
+or a million men in the field, must know how to administer. Even
+Washington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller,
+had known how to organize a government, and had found Jeffersons and
+Hamiltons to organize his departments. The task of bringing the
+Government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and
+mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was
+ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the
+confusion, especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was
+considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every one had
+echoed that famous phrase: "Let us have peace."
+
+  Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
+adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
+reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one
+would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never
+expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public
+spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower
+House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed,
+one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and
+tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke
+out: "You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog!
+You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too
+little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he
+thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average
+Congressman of 1869--he saw little or nothing of later ones--but he
+knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If a
+Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question, put
+in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a
+week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief.
+The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but
+faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole
+Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent
+reason. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be
+burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them;
+even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their
+account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter.
+They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and
+even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of
+a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.
+
+  Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
+that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians
+would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by
+reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood what the
+world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more
+serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with
+eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The
+newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his
+person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one
+sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote,
+felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was
+eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
+inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the Senate
+and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did
+he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect
+the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920.
+
+  With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
+the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of
+Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness
+of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his
+intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed
+of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements not much
+weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him
+blush, while Grant's nominations had the singular effect of making the
+hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made
+another total misconception of life--another inconceivable false start.
+Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his
+intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of
+saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's nominations betrayed his
+intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier
+might be a baby politician.
+
+  Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
+that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13,
+1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, "the
+incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without absolutely
+saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams had laid out
+for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no thought of
+effectual reform could revive for at least one generation, and he had
+no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could he sail next? He
+had tried so many, and society had barred them all! For the moment, he
+saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launched
+himself. The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile.
+Subsequently Grant made changes in the list which were mostly welcome
+to a Bostonian--or should have been--although fatal to Adams. The name
+of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism
+and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as
+Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious joke;
+Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr. McCulloch,
+and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction for any one
+resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as
+Secretary of the Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of
+Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, the
+personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful,
+and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant
+himself. No one doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform;
+that his aim had been to place his administration above politics; and
+until he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to
+support him. One's little lantern must therefore be turned on Grant.
+One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so little.
+
+  By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
+rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the two
+men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was exceedingly social,
+though not in appearance imposing. He was stout; his face was red, and
+his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very intelligent, a
+good newspaper-man, and an excellent military historian. His life of
+Grant was no ordinary book. Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a
+friendly critic of Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the
+General's staff. As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington
+were unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard
+tales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army
+officers were no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow,
+dull, and vindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a
+consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey
+for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious. He
+talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for
+analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do.
+Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his
+patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive
+about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins
+understood the General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent
+energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in
+repose. He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why
+Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For
+stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others would
+systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but
+by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would
+announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the
+discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the
+energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his
+character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a
+mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.
+
+  In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
+like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act on the
+General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his
+portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to
+add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen
+since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was rather delicate; infinitely
+superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.
+
+  Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced
+him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen
+Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means the
+most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious object of study
+among them all. About no one did opinions differ so widely. Adams had
+no opinion, or occasion to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied
+him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus
+far in life he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or
+unintellectual type--Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a
+trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for
+nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual,
+archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers. Adam,
+according to legend, was such a man.
+
+  In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
+differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the
+greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil
+to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy;
+jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance;
+always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest
+stimulant--the instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature,
+energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of
+scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them
+than in others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect
+at once.
+
+  Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
+only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow;
+only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand
+near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic habits.
+Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he
+resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to
+commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Let us have peace!" or,
+"The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or a score of such
+reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness;
+but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously
+remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a
+fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have
+taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of
+simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual
+commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree, but quite
+distinctly enough for one who knew the American. What worried Adams was
+not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted
+and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first
+principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for
+ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset
+evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years
+after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
+called--and should actually and truly be--the highest product of the
+most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as
+commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity.
+The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant,
+was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.
+
+  Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was
+worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he
+was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was
+archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins. Darwinists
+ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age, but the
+theory of reversion was more absurd than that of evolution. Grant's
+administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch a trait of the
+past, still less of the future. It was not even sensibly American. Not
+an official in it, except perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who
+died in September, suggested an American idea.
+
+  Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
+not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish was
+almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values; he was
+human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no prejudice
+whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or person to attract
+regard; his social gifts were not remarkable; he was not in the least
+magnetic; he was far from young; but he won confidence from the start
+and remained a friend to the finish. As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one
+felt rather happily suited, and one was still better off in the
+Interior Department with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the
+Treasury and Boutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite
+satisfied as far as personal relations went, while, in the
+Attorney-General's Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible
+ideal, both personal and political.
+
+  The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole
+government been filled with them, it would have helped little without
+the President and the Treasury. Grant avowed from the start a policy of
+drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles. At thirty, one
+has no interest in becoming a barnacle, but even in that character
+Henry Adams would have been ill-seen. His friends were reformers,
+critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he was himself an object of
+suspicion. Grant had no objects, wanted no help, wished for no
+champions. The Executive asked only to be let alone. This was his
+meaning when he said: "Let us have peace!"
+
+  No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
+hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to
+support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest. He was for
+sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively cheap, for he
+did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Government, but
+on New York. All he wanted was something to support; something that
+would let itself be supported. Luck went dead against him. For once, he
+was fifty years in advance of his time.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
+
+  THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the
+young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his son Sam
+to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the
+charm of Washington spring. Education for education, none ever compared
+with the delight of this. The Potomac and its tributaries squandered
+beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a
+negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the
+azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of
+struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the
+landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The
+brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the
+running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the
+deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No
+European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace
+and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too
+much, as though it were Greek and half human. He could not leave it,
+but loitered on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer
+village about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance
+could not be questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to question them.
+
+  In spite of the fatal deception--or undeception--about
+Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington had so
+much amused him that he had not a thought of change. He loved it too
+much to question its value. What did he know about its value, or what
+did any one know? His father knew more about it than any one else in
+Boston, and he was amused to find that his father, whose recollections
+went back to 1820, betrayed for Washington much the same sentimental
+weakness, and described the society about President Monroe much as his
+son felt the society about President Johnson. He feared its effect on
+young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his
+brothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in
+Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it.
+
+  Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
+Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every tree.
+Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him by
+mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining
+perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would have been a
+success. One of these errors was the inclination of the ecliptic; the
+other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddest thought
+about the last was that it should have been so modern. Adams, in his
+splenetic temper, held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked
+their worst on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and sex
+was a species of crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond
+recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in
+the wrong. The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a
+story of education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his
+time. Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except in
+Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object. Every one
+complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there were
+no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better than its
+neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove it, even to
+Adams's confusion.
+
+  Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over,
+and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's character
+showed themselves. They were startling--astounding--terrifying. The
+mystery that shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to
+corner gold in September, 1869, has never been cleared up--at least so
+far as to make it intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by the change
+at Washington, into the belief that he could safely corner gold without
+interference from the Government. He took a number of precautions,
+which he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also
+testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have
+satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any criminal
+lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously, that no
+such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead that he had
+taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances which did satisfy
+him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.
+
+  This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to
+start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from the
+White House or the Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him.
+To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for want of some one to
+hire their services at three dollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was
+Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly,
+with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had
+ever shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences. They
+risked something; no one could say what; but the people about the Erie
+office were not regarded as lambs.
+
+  The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
+was a task that might have given months of labor to the most efficient
+District Attorney, with all his official tools to work with. Charles
+took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold Conspiracy; and
+they went to New York to work it up. The surface was in full view. They
+had no trouble in Wall Street, and they paid their respects in person
+to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House Palace; but the New York side
+of the story helped Henry little. He needed to penetrate the political
+mystery, and for this purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At
+first he feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the
+Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew
+all that was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by
+the Government.
+
+  Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
+historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery, and
+as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any
+mystery existed. All Adams's great friends--Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts,
+Sumner, and their surroundings--were precisely the persons most
+mystified. They knew less than Adams did; they sought information, and
+frankly admitted that their relations with the White House and the
+Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one
+offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although
+press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
+their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
+quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.
+Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie
+nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the point where
+any member of the Administration became visible. Every one dreaded to
+press inquiry. Adams himself feared finding out too much. He found out
+too much already, when he saw in evidence that Jay Gould had actually
+succeeded in stretching his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and
+that Boutwell's incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation.
+With the conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
+assured every one else that the President himself was the savior of the
+situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had
+not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the
+ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this was wildly exciting
+to Adams. That Grant should have fallen, within six months, into such a
+morass--or should have let Boutwell drop him into it--rendered the
+outlook for the next four years--probably eight--possibly
+twelve--mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched
+his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
+might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth
+century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched
+executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and
+people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool
+of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man,
+fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an
+honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new
+Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping
+the stables of American society clear of the endless corruption which
+his second Washington was quite certain to breed.
+
+  By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
+Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
+scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
+were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
+showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar Wall
+Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view Grant had
+been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled by Grant. One
+could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished and disgusted by
+the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute American
+mind--still less the complex Jew--could ever have accustomed itself to
+the incredible and inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and
+perhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if
+victims they both were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap
+which might easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States
+Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confusion,
+cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scandalous in a
+boarding-school of girls. For satirists or comedians, the study was
+rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with happy results,
+but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity of London noticed with
+horror that the grossest satires on the American Senator and politician
+never failed to excite the laughter and applause of every audience.
+Rich and poor joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives.
+Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.
+Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except to
+laugh too.
+
+  Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
+might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford
+to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot
+be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead;
+but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it. Any
+one in power above him can extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the
+mercy of fools and cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive
+out every active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every
+intelligent man about the Government prepared to go. The people would
+have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some
+laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to content
+themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on
+their railroads and foundries. They were strong enough to carry even
+their politics. Only the helpless remained stranded in Washington.
+
+  The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
+he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one
+who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in it,
+alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues asked him in
+vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in the Cabinet or out
+of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital interest.
+The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell
+waited with confidence for society to drag his department out of the
+mire, as it was sure to do if he waited long enough.
+
+  Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
+that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive
+none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments left to serve.
+He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition was his horror; pure
+waste of energy; a union with Northern Democrats and Southern rebels
+who never had much in common with any Adams, and had never shown any
+warm interest about them except to drive them from public life. If Mr.
+Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or
+contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State
+Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any
+newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this last
+plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized champion of
+Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once thought of his disaster
+between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an accident could not occur
+again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable, and their policy was sure to
+be safe enough for support. No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be
+caught a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both
+his friends.
+
+  This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
+Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he approved; he
+saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and he was delighted;
+but when he renewed his relations with Sumner in the winter of 1869-70,
+he began slowly to grasp the idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of
+his own which he proposed also to force on the Department. This was not
+all. Secretary Fish seemed to have vanished. Besides the Department of
+State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on
+Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations
+over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
+finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
+Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a policy
+of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man ever
+approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place himself
+among all these forces. Officially he would have followed the
+responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the Secretary.
+Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant,
+but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As for Grant's policy,
+Adams never had a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he
+did know, he was ready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came
+only when he heard Sumner's views, which, as he had reason to know,
+were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.
+
+  Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
+gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed. To
+his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto on all
+extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St. Thomas to
+the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an alternative, and
+ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with incredulous stupor while
+Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible
+American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession
+of Canada to the United States.
+
+  Adams did not then know--in fact, he never knew, or could
+find any one to tell him--what was going on behind the doors of the
+White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis knew much
+more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as impenetrable in Foreign
+Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy. President Grant let every one go on,
+but whom he supported, Adams could not be expected to divine. One point
+alone seemed clear to a man--no longer so very young--who had lately
+come from a seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as
+much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
+more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the gravest
+doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and Canada were worth
+it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams was ready to treat it
+seriously; but if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as a
+voluntary set-off to the Alabama Claims, he drivelled. On the point of
+fact, Adams was as peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he
+could only wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr.
+Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
+Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad
+as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and
+Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel
+with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as
+far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a
+man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner,
+whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican
+Party, if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party
+manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were
+unknown to him.
+
+  Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
+how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then it was
+not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcerting than the
+complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards told Adams, with the
+rather grim humor he sometimes indulged in, that Grant took a dislike
+to Motley because he parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated the
+story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was
+denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as good
+a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a
+part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less
+material than hair--on clothes, for example, according to Mr. Carlyle,
+or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz--and nine men in ten could
+hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes or dislikes. In
+truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in
+common; and for the same reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason
+he would be sure to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish
+could not be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which
+wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.
+
+  The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
+break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but another
+quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish and Sumner,
+worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet, the one whom he
+had most personal interest in cultivating was Attorney General Hoar.
+The Legal Tender decision, which had been the first stumbling-block to
+Adams at Washington, grew in interest till it threatened to become
+something more serious than a block; it fell on one's head like a
+plaster ceiling, and could not be escaped. The impending battle between
+Fish and Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between
+Hoar and Chief Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington hoping to
+support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the Senate, but he
+never dreamed that he would be required to help in breaking down the
+Supreme Court. Although, step by step, he had been driven, like the
+rest of the world, to admit that American society had outgrown most of
+its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme Court, much as a
+churchman clings to his bishops, because they are his only symbol of
+unity; his last rag of Right. Between the Executive and the
+Legislature, citizens could have no Rights; they were at the mercy of
+Power. They had created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power,
+and it was little enough protection at best. Adams wanted to save the
+independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not
+conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.
+
+  Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
+Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an article
+on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a volume just then
+published by Spaulding, the putative father of the legal-tender clause
+in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who alone sympathized with reform,
+saved from Boutwell's decree of banishment such reformers as he could
+find place for, and he saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census
+of 1870. Walker was obliged to abandon his article for the North
+American in order to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his
+notes, and Adams completed the article.
+
+  He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
+He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks and
+bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
+newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic" value,
+gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was paid half the
+wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of attacking or
+defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice and
+the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the
+necessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time
+the Act was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections,
+Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number of the
+North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to
+abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and
+the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams's
+restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this
+treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had serious
+historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of Spaulding's
+contention that legal tender was necessary at the time; and the Chief
+Justice told his part of the story with conviction. The Chief Justice
+seemed to be pleased. The Attorney General, pleased or not, made no
+sign. The article had enough historical interest to induce Adams to
+reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its
+historical value was not its point in education. The point was that, in
+spite of the best intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the
+strongest wish to escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into
+opposition. Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.
+
+  Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams
+went on, drifting further and further from the Administration. He did
+this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself. Scarcely a
+newspaper in the country kept discipline. The New York Tribune was one
+of the most criminal. Dissolution of ties in every direction marked the
+dissolution of temper, and the Senate Chamber became again a scene of
+irritated egotism that passed ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each
+other, and no one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the
+Executive and threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
+quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.
+
+  That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
+who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success at
+Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule, must have
+had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could only have
+understood what it was. He studied, but failed. Sympathy with him was
+not their weakness. Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could
+hope as little from them as from Boutwell. So far from inviting
+attachment they, like other New Englanders, blushed to own a friend.
+Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to
+help Adams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although they
+would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
+lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics was the
+earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to learn
+from its study; but the situation struck him as curious--so curious
+that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four most powerful
+friends had matched themselves, two and two, and were fighting in pairs
+to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the
+judiciary as prizes! What value had the fight in education?
+
+  Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
+stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or
+Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The statesmen of the
+old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars or Lamars, were
+personally as honest as human nature could produce. They trod with
+lofty contempt on other people's jobs, especially when there was good
+in them. Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling cost the
+country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just
+as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, who were also honest in
+money-matters, cost the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt
+worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it
+affected the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
+discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield,
+and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs,
+and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence
+by their insistence on points of morals. Society hesitated, wavered,
+oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the
+weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite of all such
+criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the
+Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the
+question; until young men were forced to see that either some new
+standard must be created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had
+expired--like the Constitution.
+
+  Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
+but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare,
+were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency. What it
+wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who
+could work it; but it found neither. Adams had tried his own little
+hands on it, and had failed. His friends had been driven out of
+Washington or had taken to fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared
+helplessly into the future.
+
+  The result was a review of the Session for the July North
+American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he
+had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good history then,
+and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even
+good enough to reprint. As it happened, in the process of his devious
+education, this "Session" of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in
+current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of
+the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he
+gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The
+political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970.
+The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century
+fabric of a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given
+it up. Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's
+political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece
+out--to patch--or, in vulgar language, to tinker--the political machine
+as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might last
+centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as
+a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world--the
+clumsiest--the most inefficient.
+
+  Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
+guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
+triumphant results of politics--to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even
+Mr. Sumner--he could not honestly say that such an education, even when
+it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything.
+There were men, as yet standing on lower levels--clever and amusing men
+like Garfield and Blaine--who took no little pleasure in making fun of
+the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself
+which the North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
+doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn. What
+kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive
+political education?
+
+  Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
+attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it.
+If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working, new
+morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An eternity of
+Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds, refused
+to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans laughed, and went
+their way. Society paid them to be practical. Whenever society cared to
+pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and hold his
+tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with Democratic
+Congressmen and educate them. He served David Wells as an active
+assistant professor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a
+college. The Administration drove him, and thousands of other young
+men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want
+of system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
+thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
+one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the
+blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.
+
+  All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
+so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew Congressmen
+by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote for his various
+organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He enjoyed the life
+enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much
+happier than his friends Fish or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or
+Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to
+the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what
+Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms
+more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
+Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree.
+They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by
+remarking what a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest
+possible distance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of
+forest foliage. At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of
+St. Peter's and the steps of Ara Coeli.
+
+  Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to
+London for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy,"
+which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review. It
+was the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for
+publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of
+revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well as among some who were
+not so respectable; and the attack on Erie was beginning to promise
+success. London was a sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it
+was thought well to strike them there, where they were socially and
+financially exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
+expression about America in an English review attracted ten times the
+attention in America that the same article would attract in the North
+American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in
+full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest
+ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any
+case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase he was
+becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+CHAOS (1870)
+
+  ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's
+Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine years had
+passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861. Outwardly London was
+the same. Outwardly Europe showed no great change. Palmerston and
+Russell were forgotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much
+alive. One's friends were more than ever prominent. John Bright was in
+the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about to enter it; reform ran riot.
+Never had the sun of progress shone so fair. Evolution from lower to
+higher raged like an epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of prophets in
+the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown the Irish
+Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass an
+Education Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping and
+bounding over every country road. Even America, with her Erie scandals
+and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.
+
+  At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
+forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no one
+cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The smart set had
+come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had frequented, from 1861
+to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870. Death had ravaged one's circle
+of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were
+both dead, and Mr. James Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament.
+That field of education seemed closed too.
+
+  One found one's self in a singular frame of mind--more
+eighteenth-century than ever--almost rococo--and unable to catch
+anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate.
+London taught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading
+to another--that the older men were more amusing than the younger--that
+Lord Houghton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill--that there
+were fewer men one wanted to meet--these, and a hundred more such
+remarks, helped little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity.
+For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
+mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him
+a guaranty against all education he had use for. He resented change. He
+would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle
+as historical monuments. He did not care to Americanize Europe. The
+Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if
+preserved; and so was a Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was
+the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came
+back to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or
+reform. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.
+
+  Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
+House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have
+cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in
+partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker. Common-sense
+dictated it; but Adams and his friends were unfashionable by some law
+of Anglo-Saxon custom--some innate atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as
+already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no
+idea of making a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw
+nothing ahead of him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk
+with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the
+Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him and his
+father long before they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to
+make notes for his next year's articles; but he had not a thought that,
+within three months, his world was to be upset, and he under it. Frank
+Palgrave came one day, more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical
+than ever, because Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with
+Germany. Palgrave said that "Germany would beat France into scraps" if
+there was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
+catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave
+was always extreme; his language was incautious--violent!
+
+  In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education.
+Things began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of
+familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight the
+coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Oxford
+Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as it did to
+the returned American. The country never smiled its velvet smile of
+trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as to be asked
+on a country visit. He loved it all--everything--had always loved it!
+He felt almost attached to the Royal Exchange. He thought he owned the
+St. James's Club. He patronized the Legation.
+
+  The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
+tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
+herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams had
+become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies, and that
+his writing would be printed of course; but he was stunned by the
+reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen libel suits
+on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as great in England
+as in America, but one was hardly prepared to find it controlling the
+Quarterlies. The English press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the
+Erie scandal, as it had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal
+of slavery, but when invited to support those who were trying to abate
+these scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
+refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North American
+Review were running greater risks every day, and no one thought of
+fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an official document,
+should scare the Edinburgh Review into silence for fear of Jay Gould
+and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's experience of English eccentricity,
+though it was large.
+
+  He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
+respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to
+the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The
+literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest
+that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and
+willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he
+had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and
+the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, when an ally
+was needed, the American was driven into the arms of the radicals.
+Respectability, everywhere and always, turned its back the moment one
+asked to do it a favor. Called suddenly away from England, he
+despatched the article, at the last moment, to the Westminster Review
+and heard no more about it for nearly six months.
+
+  He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram
+from his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his
+sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he had better
+come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni di Lucca on the
+second day. Tetanus had already set in.
+
+  The last lesson--the sum and term of education--began then.
+He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without
+having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen
+Nature--only her surface--the sugar-coating that she shows to youth.
+Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the
+terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition
+made it more than the will could struggle with; more than he could call
+on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and
+brilliant in the terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun
+of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that
+had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the
+mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died
+in convulsion.
+
+  One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen
+a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion
+and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror.
+Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being
+mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to
+him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played
+with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and
+smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning.
+The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the
+picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan
+atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
+with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy
+of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
+shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer,
+the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of
+Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
+gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence,
+as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
+hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
+same air of sensual pleasure.
+
+  Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
+mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels
+them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought of a
+different power and a different person. The first serious consciousness
+of Nature's gesture--her attitude towards life--took form then as a
+phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time, the
+stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself
+stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with
+resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what
+these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
+Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical
+motion; and its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
+pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine became
+evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion was the most
+human; but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or
+profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty
+known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be
+held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
+God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a
+Person.
+
+  With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
+tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped
+for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world; for the
+fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the world, which he thought
+real, mimic and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his personal
+horror. He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years in finding it
+out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake below and of the
+Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the first time in
+his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was--a chaos of
+anarchic and purposeless forces--and he needed days of repose to see it
+clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity
+of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its
+heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond
+itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but man became
+chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were wholly restored, the
+illusions of Europe suddenly vanished, leaving a new world to learn.
+
+  On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
+in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one might
+have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal with the
+chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams; the Emperor
+Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck: himself
+hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-break of the war was
+wholly lost on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand, who could not
+throw it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only when he got up to
+Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe. Providence set up
+no affiches to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut
+herself adrift, and floated off, on an unknown stream, towards a less
+known ocean. Standing on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as
+much as though one stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an
+army corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the war,
+as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of
+decorative art. The French, like true artists, always regarded war as
+one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it;
+and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with
+singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like
+an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a supernumerary hired to
+fill the scene. Every evening at the theatre the comedy was interrupted
+by order, and one stood up by order, to join in singing the
+Marseillaise to order. For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden
+to sing the Marseillaise under any circumstances, but at last regiment
+after regiment marched through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while
+the bystanders cared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been
+brought out of the Government stores, and distributed by grammes per
+capita. One had seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into a war,
+and had watched one's own regiments march to the front without sign of
+enthusiasm; on the contrary, most serious, anxious, and conscious of
+the whole weight of the crisis; but in Paris every one conspired to
+ignore the crisis, which every one felt at hand. Here was education for
+the million, but the lesson was intricate. Superficially Napoleon and
+his Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers and
+Gambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the
+result. How could Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he
+spoke of his Paris and its tastes, people would smile at his dotage?
+
+  As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
+refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining
+monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII--three or four
+young Englishmen--survived there, with Milnes Gaskell acting as Prior.
+The August sun was warm; the calm of the Abbey was ten times secular;
+not a discordant sound--hardly a sound of any sort except the cawing of
+the ancient rookery at sunset--broke the stillness; and, after the
+excitement of the last month, one felt a palpable haze of peace
+brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of
+Pteraspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying
+on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, the monks studied the
+war correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded in educating
+himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.
+
+  While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
+inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
+created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen years
+for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a Terebratula
+would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which implied that the
+new President of Harvard College wanted his help; but Adams knew
+nothing about history, and much less about teaching, while he knew more
+than enough about Harvard College; and wrote at once to thank President
+Eliot, with much regret that the honor should be above his powers. His
+mind was full of other matters. The summer, from which he had expected
+only amusement and social relations with new people, had ended in the
+most intimate personal tragedy, and the most terrific political
+convulsion he had ever known or was likely to know. He had failed in
+every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had refused his best essay.
+He had made no acquaintances and hardly picked up the old ones. He
+sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to begin again where he had
+started two years before, but with no longer a hope of attaching
+himself to a President or a party or a press. He was a free lance and
+no other career stood in sight or mind. To that point education had
+brought him.
+
+  Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
+badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
+American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
+partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment that it
+had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and circulated
+as a campaign document by the hundred thousand copies. He was
+henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a Massachusetts
+Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or return for this
+partisan service consisted in being formally answered by Senator
+Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document, presumed
+to be also freely circulated, in which the Senator, besides refuting
+his opinions, did him the honor--most unusual and picturesque in a
+Senator's rhetoric--of likening him to a begonia.
+
+  The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial
+qualities as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering. Far
+from charming in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable for curious
+and showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to have no useful
+purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the most prominent
+positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia in
+Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful statesman,
+and he thought about it still more when the Westminster Review for
+October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy, which was also
+instantly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth
+driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to
+be paid; but the honors of piracy resemble the colors of the begonia;
+they are showy but not useful. Here was a tour de force he had never
+dreamed himself equal to performing: two long, dry, quarterly, thirty
+or forty page articles, appearing in quick succession, and pirated for
+audiences running well into the hundred thousands; and not one person,
+man or woman, offering him so much as a congratulation, except to call
+him a begonia.
+
+  Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as
+before, but the ways of America to a young person of literary and
+political tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized man
+had not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington what he
+modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole family set on
+him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861 his father
+interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles argued and
+urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles had views of
+further joint operations in a new field. He said that Henry had done at
+Washington all he could possibly do; that his position there wanted
+solidity; that he was, after all, an adventurer; that a few years in
+Cambridge would give him personal weight; that his chief function was
+not to be that of teacher, but that of editing the North American
+Review which was to be coupled with the professorship, and would lead
+to the daily press. In short, that he needed the university more than
+the university needed him.
+
+  Henry knew the university well enough to know that the
+department of history was controlled by one of the most astute and
+ideal administrators in the world--Professor Gurney--and that it was
+Gurney who had established the new professorship, and had cast his net
+over Adams to carry the double load of mediaeval history and the
+Review. He could see no relation whatever between himself and a
+professorship. He sought education; he did not sell it. He knew no
+history; he knew only a few historians; his ignorance was mischievous
+because it was literary, accidental, indifferent. On the other hand he
+knew Gurney, and felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot take
+one's self quite seriously in such matters; it could not much affect
+the sum of solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in
+Washington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good people who
+thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide. One could not
+reject their advice; still less disregard their wishes.
+
+  The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and
+had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him almost as
+American as the talk about diplomacy with his father ten years before.
+"But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know nothing about Mediaeval
+History." With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the
+next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, "If
+you will point out to me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will
+appoint him." The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams
+could not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not say
+that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all
+seemed to him unnecessary.
+
+  So, at twenty-four hours' notice, he broke his life in halves
+again in order to begin a new education, on lines he had not chosen, in
+subjects for which he cared less than nothing; in a place he did not
+love, and before a future which repelled. Thousands of men have to do
+the same thing, but his case was peculiar because he had no need to do
+it. He did it because his best and wisest friends urged it, and he
+never could make up his mind whether they were right or not. To him
+this kind of education was always false. For himself he had no doubts.
+He thought it a mistake; but his opinion did not prove that it was one,
+since, in all probability, whatever he did would be more or less a
+mistake. He had reached cross-roads of education which all led astray.
+What he could gain at Harvard College he did not know, but in any case
+it was nothing he wanted. What he lost at Washington he could partly
+see, but in any case it was not fortune. Grant's administration wrecked
+men by thousands, but profited few. Perhaps Mr. Fish was the solitary
+exception. One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and
+Executive during the twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little
+but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in
+results.
+
+  Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any
+politician, and knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent at
+Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in his opinion, the
+best equipped, the most active-minded, and most industrious was Abram
+Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen years, between 1874 and 1886,
+sometimes leading the House and always wielding influence second to
+none. With nobody did Adams form closer or longer relations than with
+Mr. Hewitt, whom he regarded as the most useful public man in
+Washington; and he was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end
+of his laborious career as legislator, that he left behind him no
+permanent result except the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew
+no other man who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is
+accepted as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would
+probably have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil service
+reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should never have
+been allowed to be born. These were the men who succeeded.
+
+  The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political
+writer, and no public administrator achieved enough good reputation to
+preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them achieved bad
+reputations, or damaged good ones that had been gained in the Civil
+War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplomats, and Cabinet officers,
+the period was wearisome and stale.
+
+  None of Adams's generation profited by public activity unless
+it were William C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to return
+to it. Such ambitions as these were out of one's reach, but supposing
+one tried for what was feasible, attached one's self closely to the
+Garfields, Arthurs, Frelinghuysens, Blaines, Bayards, or Whitneys, who
+happened to hold office; and supposing one asked for the mission to
+Belgium or Portugal, and obtained it; supposing one served a term as
+Assistant Secretary or Chief of Bureau; or, finally, supposing one had
+gone as sub-editor on the New York Tribune or Times--how much more
+education would one have gained than by going to Harvard College? These
+questions seemed better worth an answer than most of the questions on
+examination papers at college or in the civil service; all the more
+because one never found an answer to them, then or afterwards, and
+because, to his mind, the value of American society altogether was
+mixed up with the value of Washington.
+
+  At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles,
+wanted to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare and
+toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social or political
+stupidity; but the American people had no more to do with it than with
+the customs of Peking. American character might perhaps account for it,
+but what accounted for American character? All Boston, all New England,
+and all respectable New York, including Charles Francis Adams the
+father and Charles Francis Adams the son, agreed that Washington was no
+place for a respectable young man. All Washington, including
+Presidents, Cabinet officers, Judiciary, Senators, Congressmen, and
+clerks, expressed the same opinion, and conspired to drive away every
+young man who happened to be there or tried to approach. Not one young
+man of promise remained in the Government service. All drifted into
+opposition. The Government did not want them in Washington. Adams's
+case was perhaps the strongest because he thought he had done well. He
+was forced to guess it, since he knew no one who would have risked so
+extravagant a step as that of encouraging a young man in a literary
+career, or even in a political one; society forbade it, as well as
+residence in a political capital; but Harvard College must have seen
+some hope for him, since it made him professor against his will; even
+the publishers and editors of the North American Review must have felt
+a certain amount of confidence in him, since they put the Review in his
+hands. After all, the Review was the first literary power in America,
+even though it paid almost as little in gold as the United States
+Treasury. The degree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephemeral
+as the commission of a President of the United States; but the
+government of the college, measured by money alone, and patronage, was
+a matter of more importance than that of some branches of the national
+service. In social position, the college was the superior of them all
+put together. In knowledge, she could assert no superiority, since the
+Government made no claims, and prided itself on ignorance. The service
+of Harvard College was distinctly honorable; perhaps the most honorable
+in America; and if Harvard College thought Henry Adams worth employing
+at four dollars a day, why should Washington decline his services when
+he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a career he liked in a
+place he loved, into a career he detested, in a place and climate he
+shunned? Was it enough to satisfy him, that all America should call
+Washington barren and dangerous? What made Washington more dangerous
+than New York?
+
+  The American character showed singular limitations which
+sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his
+own ignorance--lost in the darkness of his own gropings--the scholar
+finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to him
+ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have forgotten how
+to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that they are bored.
+The American thought of himself as a restless, pushing, energetic,
+ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his
+neighbors. Perhaps this idea of the national character might be correct
+for New York or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the
+American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy
+figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes
+pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain,
+distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by
+money. That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true;
+work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he
+never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement
+of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it; he had no use for
+wealth. Jim Fisk alone seemed to know what he wanted; Jay Gould never
+did. At Washington one met mostly such true Americans, but if one
+wanted to know them better, one went to study them in Europe. Bored,
+patient, helpless; pathetically dependent on his wife and daughters;
+indulgent to excess; mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable
+citizen; the American was to be met at every railway station in Europe,
+carefully explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his
+life would be the day he should land on the pier at New York. He was
+ashamed to be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of
+variety; he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength, his
+intense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in
+one direction, and he could not change it. Congress was full of such
+men; in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the
+Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type--political
+specimens--pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power
+when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse themselves; they could
+not conceive how other people were amused. Work, whiskey, and cards
+were life. The atmosphere of political Washington was theirs--or was
+supposed by the outside world to be in their control--and this was the
+reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal even for
+a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety of
+temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who never
+played cards, and who loathed whiskey.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FAILURE (1871)
+
+FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams could
+recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have been nine years
+old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter afternoons which
+beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out to visit his aunt,
+Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then President of the college and
+lived in the old President's House on Harvard Square. The boy
+remembered the drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which
+Mrs. Everett received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the
+corner. The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed
+even a nine-year-old child.
+
+  When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
+the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had been
+turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent to it
+were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother Brooks, then a law
+student, had rooms, with a private staircase. Opposite was J. R.
+Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary as Adams himself, and
+more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry revealed a boarding-table,
+somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior in its
+class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their
+equivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, among three or
+four law students like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements,
+all of them had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of
+Washington, but it was, for the moment, the best.
+
+  For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
+waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
+trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
+till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he
+were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him,
+rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.
+
+  The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
+must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great
+effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot
+in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the
+leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of
+History. The two full Professors of History--Torrey and Gurney,
+charming men both--could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's
+classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand
+years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already
+elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be
+taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea
+was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
+their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the
+moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had
+given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the
+Middle Ages.
+
+  Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
+ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had
+tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but
+even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as
+parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.
+A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence
+stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter
+himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the
+multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat
+with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more
+complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
+record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies
+evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes
+of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists,
+judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent
+and immoral, history had either to be taught as such--or falsified.
+
+  Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
+teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
+telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order to
+publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel his
+students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by
+heart. He saw no relation whatever between his students and the Middle
+Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground was particularly
+dangerous. He knew better than though he were a professional historian
+that the man who should solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring
+them into the line of evolution from past to present, would be a
+greater man than Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken
+down so pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there.
+Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had lost even
+the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental
+sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter
+Scott and Alexandre Dumas.
+
+  All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
+McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from
+time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous. No
+doubt, a teacher might make some use of these writers or their
+theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory of his own. The
+college expected him to pass at least half his time teaching the boys a
+few elementary dates and relations, that they might not be a disgrace
+to the university. This was formal; and he could frankly tell the boys
+that, provided they passed their examinations, they might get their
+facts where they liked, and use the teacher only for questions. The
+only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of
+talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it.
+His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had
+to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce
+them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students
+stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen
+students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in
+money.
+
+  The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
+that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
+philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
+something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds were
+of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in
+ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a teacher
+could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven years of contact,
+Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in ten take
+polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.
+
+  Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
+would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
+expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a teacher,
+who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach his
+scholars what he did not know, but should join them in trying to find
+the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious name of historical
+method was sometimes given to this process of instruction, but the name
+smacked of German pedagogy, and a young professor who respected neither
+history nor method, and whose sole object of interest was his students'
+minds, fell into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.
+
+  The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
+control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when
+learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that one may
+take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but
+complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins horribly from the
+closed entrance. One may not begin at the beginning, and one has but
+the loosest relative truths to follow up. Adams found himself obliged
+to force his material into some shape to which a method could be
+applied. He could think only of law as subject; the Law School as end;
+and he took, as victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly
+intelligent young men who seemed willing to work. The course began with
+the beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man,
+and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
+textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no more
+than his students, and the students read what they pleased and compared
+their results. As pedagogy, nothing could be more triumphant. The boys
+worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic
+society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown languages yielded before
+their attack, and customary law became familiar as the police court;
+undoubtedly they learned, after a fashion, to chase an idea, like a
+hare, through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely
+to meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience that
+his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to exert
+themselves to get rid of it in the Law School even more than they
+exerted themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science had no
+system, and could have none, since its subject was merely antiquarian.
+Try as hard as he might, the professor could not make it actual.
+
+  What was the use of training an active mind to waste its
+energy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor, but
+this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the boys to
+a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the intellectual
+reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or the students.
+For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the system, which could
+lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he possessed
+warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
+competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He too
+wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the system would
+have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He would have seated a
+rival assistant professor opposite him, whose business should be
+strictly limited to expressing opposite views. Nothing short of this
+would ever interest either the professor or the student; but of all
+university freaks, no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere
+so much as contradiction or competition between teachers. In that
+respect the thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole
+teaching of the modern school.
+
+  All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
+students failed for want of system. None met the needs of instruction.
+In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady, generous, liberal
+support, the system remained costly, clumsy and futile. The
+university--as far as it was represented by Henry Adams--produced at
+great waste of time and money results not worth reaching.
+
+  He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to
+inflict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he was in
+the full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their new emperor
+at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo of Pepins and
+Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had even discovered the
+Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so powerful, and the Assistant
+Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade. He imposed
+Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he
+sometimes doubted whether they should be grateful. On the whole, he was
+content neither with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught
+it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.
+
+  The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
+professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
+thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments,
+and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to the weight of the
+system. He had accomplished nothing that he tried to do. He regarded
+the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachers than to the
+students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted the
+university at last, in 1877, with a feeling, that, if it had not been
+for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it, from
+the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his failure.
+
+  These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
+the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so much
+disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college insisted on
+expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in his notice of
+the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that Henry had left a
+great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John Fiske's
+personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the kind
+expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when President
+Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adams
+could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for
+the rare good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow
+the college to think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction.
+He knew better, and his was among the failures which were respectable
+enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life
+struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had
+persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone
+have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness.
+Harvard College might have its faults, but at least it redeemed
+America, since it was true to its own.
+
+  The only part of education that the professor thought a success
+was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or less in
+the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment, and, except for
+the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that man had ever
+thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight
+of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and
+incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos
+that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with
+education when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of them,
+and was surprised at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is
+worth money to me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the
+degree of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young man in
+Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was good, and
+settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had given
+twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no nearer a result
+than they. He still had to take for granted many things that they need
+not--among the rest, that his teaching did them more good than harm. In
+his own opinion the greatest good he could do them was to hold his
+tongue. They needed much faith then; they were likely to need more if
+they lived long.
+
+  He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
+their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
+business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
+social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical atom
+whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend that
+mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics smiled at
+evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of the Church and the
+triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had to treat
+them as waste of force. They knew what they had to teach; he did not.
+They might perhaps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly
+nothing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was
+only educating himself at their cost.
+
+  Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
+instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a
+priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they gained
+something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in the twentieth
+century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams fervently hoped
+that they might remain content; but supposing twenty years more to
+pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely as he had turned on his
+old instructors--what answer could he make? The college had pleaded
+guilty, and tried to reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and
+his reforms had failed before those of the college.
+
+  The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
+worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
+political and corporate administration, but it could not look for help
+to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen and
+professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked the
+society of a college. Several score of the best-educated, most
+agreeable, and personally the most sociable people in America united in
+Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.
+The liveliest and most agreeable of men--James Russell Lowell, Francis
+J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William
+James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or
+Paris--tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge
+and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had
+to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all
+were famished for want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without
+business. The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of
+elements--people who are expected to be silent unless they have
+observations to make--and all the elements are bound to remain apart if
+required to make observations.
+
+  Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
+thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to admit
+that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner still. The
+editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write. If copy fell
+short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the virtues of the
+Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew more about Edward
+the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did about President Grant. For
+seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived on his brother Charles's
+railway articles. The editor could help others, but could do nothing
+for himself. As a writer, he was totally forgotten by the time he had
+been an editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to
+take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review
+became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him
+to keep it literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes,
+if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures might
+easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink of money with
+captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily
+learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of
+advertising made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The
+merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results
+except when they led to adversity.
+
+  A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
+appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
+experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let any
+one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog's
+life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A
+professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students;
+an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a
+pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On
+the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was educated
+enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a
+month.
+
+  With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
+life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best
+could, with such accidental education as luck had given him; but he
+held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again, he would
+do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly what system to
+pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not yet got his head above
+water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twenty or thirty years
+afterwards; but the editorship of the North American Review had one
+solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a distance with almost
+every one in the country who could write or who could be the cause of
+writing. Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever
+people as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at
+their treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
+them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and
+model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American,
+as he conceived, should have been and was not.
+
+  Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
+friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
+less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were as
+a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely few.
+One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neighbor in
+Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined the Fortieth
+Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington in the winter of
+1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out with him on one of the
+field-parties in summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he put it
+at the service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not do
+more. When the first year of professing and editing was at last over,
+and his July North American appeared, he drew a long breath of relief,
+and took the next train for the West. Of his year's work he was no
+judge. He had become a small spring in a large mechanism, and his work
+counted only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody,
+and he felt at home even in Boston. Putting in his pocket the July
+number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Parallel
+Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he started for the plains and the
+Rocky Mountains.
+
+  In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
+Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere
+of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old
+education, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adams
+sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future. The
+Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in case
+of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers and
+geologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux. They held
+under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all its
+riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt
+the future in their hands.
+
+  Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
+Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge of
+Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter nothing to the
+story of education. They were all hardened mountaineers and surveyors
+who took everything for granted, and spared each other the most
+wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, the stories of the big game
+they killed. A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti was a
+constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man was a
+rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusement, but one had other
+matters to talk about.
+
+  Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
+cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a
+manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
+alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
+exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped high above
+Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed a rod, and rode
+down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some trout. The day was
+fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand miles away;
+the park stretched its English beauties off to the base of its
+bordering mountains in natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream
+was just fishy enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour after
+hour the sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared
+altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule, sunset
+was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he could catch
+his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot hole, he "allowed"
+he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he was out of the hills,
+and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw no prospect of supper or
+of bed.
+
+  Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
+night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
+difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
+and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule
+cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest against the
+stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded on without
+other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some two hours must
+have passed before a light showed in the distance. As the mule came up
+to the cabin door, two or three men came out to see the stranger.
+
+  One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
+Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
+matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons; they
+were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with
+the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley in a
+light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat
+mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went back in the buggy. In
+the cabin, luxury provided a room and one bed for guests. They shared
+the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.
+
+  King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
+than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of
+the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by
+heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He
+knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman,
+which is saying much. Incidentally he knew more practical geology than
+was good for him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than
+the text-books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the
+beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right; the
+charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great deal more.
+His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the
+current of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
+faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought
+or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him almost alone
+among Americans. He had in him something of the Greek--a touch of
+Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world.
+
+  A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
+old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar.
+One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
+possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
+of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their
+generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his
+career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
+the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
+fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle--the same
+stock of implements--the same field to work in; above all, the same
+obstacles to overcome.
+
+As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality
+that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry
+on this ground. Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he
+always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a witticism, unless by
+accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel influenced him in a way far
+more vital. The lines of their lives converged, but King had moulded
+and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought
+American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of
+a piece, yet broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their
+paths at last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
+straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life,
+past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no
+base at all. King's abnormal energy had already won him great success.
+None of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
+likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress to
+adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized, as
+a civil--not military--measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled
+the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
+governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
+creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
+chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
+Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper or
+coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted
+lay ready for him--scientific social, literary, political--and he knew
+how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the
+richest and most many-sided genius of his day.
+
+  So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
+his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
+women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many
+and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the
+ideal American they all wanted to be. The women were jealous because,
+at heart, King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more
+robust.
+
+  The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
+instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings
+towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little
+proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the
+law of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for
+complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or
+even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them
+like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but
+they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to persuade
+him that history was more amusing than science. The only question left
+open to doubt was their relative money value.
+
+  In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
+continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History and
+science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no longer far
+away. No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were,
+they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when
+Adams started back to Cambridge, to take up again the humble tasks of
+schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education,
+systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on,
+submissive.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)
+
+  ONCE more! this is a story of education, not of adventure! It
+is meant to help young men--or such as have intelligence enough to seek
+help--but it is not meant to amuse them. What one did--or did not
+do--with one's education, after getting it, need trouble the inquirer
+in no way; it is a personal matter only which would confuse him.
+Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth educating; most keen judges incline
+to think that barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of
+reacting to any purpose on the forces that surround him, and fully half
+of these react wrongly. The object of education for that mind should be
+the teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy. No doubt the
+world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as to make
+a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did for Henry Adams; but
+education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction,
+invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at
+haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their
+world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough
+who know how to learn. Throughout human history the waste of mind has
+been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has
+conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal,
+but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
+The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly
+fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or the
+viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths
+of their energy in doing it.
+
+  Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871,
+and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At the
+end of twenty years, he found that he had finished, and could sum up
+the result. He had no complaint to make against man or woman. They had
+all treated him kindly; he had never met with ill-will, ill-temper, or
+even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He had never seen serious
+dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a readiness in the young to
+respond to suggestion that seemed to him far beyond all he had reason
+to expect. Considering the stock complaints against the world, he could
+not understand why he had nothing to complain of.
+
+  During these twenty years he had done as much work, in
+quantity, as his neighbors wanted; more than they would ever stop to
+look at, and more than his share. Merely in print, he thought
+altogether ridiculous the number of volumes he counted on the shelves
+of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served a useful
+purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of his friends,
+even the artists, none of whom held any lofty opinion of their success
+in raising the standards of society, or felt profound respect for the
+methods or manners of their time, at home or abroad, but all of whom
+had tried, in a way, to hold the standard up. The effort had been, for
+the older generation, exhausting, as one could see in the Hunts; but
+the generation after 1870 made more figure, not in proportion to public
+wealth or in the census, but in their own self-assertion. A fair number
+of the men who were born in the thirties had won names--Phillips
+Brooks; Bret Harte; Henry James; H. H. Richardson; John La Farge; and
+the list might be made fairly long if it were worth while; but from
+their school had sprung others, like Augustus St. Gaudens, McKim,
+Stanford White, and scores born in the forties, who counted as force
+even in the mental inertia of sixty or eighty million people. Among all
+these Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest
+existences, trying to fill in the social gaps of a class which, as yet,
+showed but thin ranks and little cohesion. The combination offered no
+very glittering prizes, but they pursued it for twenty years with as
+much patience and effort as though it led to fame or power, until, at
+last, Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficiently performed and his
+account with society settled. He had enjoyed his life amazingly, and
+would not have exchanged it for any other that came in his way; he was,
+or thought he was, perfectly satisfied with it; but for reasons that
+had nothing to do with education, he was tired; his nervous energy ran
+low; and, like a horse that wears out, he quitted the race-course, left
+the stable, and sought pastures as far as possible from the old.
+Education had ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest
+mattered so little!
+
+  As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the
+question of return imposed its verdict on him after much fruitless
+effort to rest elsewhere. The time was the month of January, 1892; he
+was alone, in hospital, in the gloom of midwinter. He was close on his
+fifty-fourth birthday, and Pall Mall had forgotten him as completely as
+it had forgotten his elders. He had not seen London for a dozen years,
+and was rather amused to have only a bed for a world and a familiar
+black fog for horizon. The coal-fire smelt homelike; the fog had a
+fruity taste of youth; anything was better than being turned out into
+the wastes of Wigmore Street. He could always amuse himself by living
+over his youth, and driving once more down Oxford Street in 1858, with
+life before him to imagine far less amusing than it had turned out to
+be.
+
+  The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week he
+reflected on what he could do next. He had just come up from the South
+Seas with John La Farge, who had reluctantly crawled away towards New
+York to resume the grinding routine of studio-work at an age when life
+runs low. Adams would rather, as choice, have gone back to the east, if
+it were only to sleep forever in the trade-winds under the southern
+stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean, with its purple sense of
+solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the
+most unearthly he had felt. He had not yet happened on Rudyard
+Kipling's "Mandalay," but he knew the poetry before he knew the poem,
+like millions of wanderers, who have perhaps alone felt the world
+exactly as it is. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of beginning
+a new education. The old one had been poor enough; any new one could
+only add to its faults. Life had been cut in halves, and the old half
+had passed away, education and all, leaving no stock to graft on.
+
+  The new world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him
+fantastic. Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some kind of
+existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it reasonable. In
+Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the dismal ballets at the
+Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at the old Palais Royal; but,
+except for them, his own Paris of the Second Empire was as extinct as
+that of the first Napoleon. At the galleries and exhibitions, he was
+racked by the effort of art to be original, and when one day, after
+much reflection, John La Farge asked whether there might not still be
+room for something simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the
+world, it was no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It
+should express what it was; and this was something that neither Adams
+nor La Farge understood.
+
+  Under the first blast of this furnace-heat, the lights seemed
+fairly to go out. He felt nothing in common with the world as it
+promised to be. He was ready to quit it, and the easiest path led back
+to the east; but he could not venture alone, and the rarest of animals
+is a companion. He must return to America to get one. Perhaps, while
+waiting, he might write more history, and on the chance as a last
+resource, he gave orders for copying everything he could reach in
+archives, but this was mere habit. He went home as a horse goes back to
+his stable, because he knew nowhere else to go.
+
+  Home was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration ended,
+in 1877, and Evarts became Secretary of State, Adams went back there,
+partly to write history, but chiefly because his seven years of
+laborious banishment, in Boston, convinced him that, as far as he had a
+function in life, it was as stable-companion to statesmen, whether they
+liked it or not. At about the same time, old George Bancroft did the
+same thing, and presently John Hay came on to be Assistant Secretary of
+State for Mr. Evarts, and stayed there to write the "Life" of Lincoln.
+In 1884 Adams joined him in employing Richardson to build them
+adjoining houses on La Fayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this
+was it. To the house on La Fayette Square he must turn, for he had no
+other status--no position in the world.
+
+  Never did he make a decision more reluctantly than this of
+going back to his manger. His father and mother were dead. All his
+family led settled lives of their own. Except for two or three friends
+in Washington, who were themselves uncertain of stay, no one cared
+whether he came or went, and he cared least. There was nothing to care
+about. Every one was busy; nearly every one seemed contented. Since
+1871 nothing had ruffled the surface of the American world, and even
+the progress of Europe in her side-way track to dis-Europeaning herself
+had ceased to be violent. After a dreary January in Paris, at last when
+no excuse could be persuaded to offer itself for further delay, he
+crossed the channel and passed a week with his old friend, Milnes
+Gaskell, at Thornes, in Yorkshire, while the westerly gales raved a
+warning against going home. Yorkshire in January is not an island in
+the South Seas. It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti; not many to
+Fiji or Samoa; but, as so often before, it was a rest between past and
+future, and Adams was grateful for it.
+
+  At last, on February 3, he drove, after a fashion, down the
+Irish Channel, on board the Teutonic. He had not crossed the Atlantic
+for a dozen years, and had never seen an ocean steamer of the new type.
+He had seen nothing new of any sort, or much changed in France or
+England. The railways made quicker time, but were no more comfortable.
+The scale was the same. The Channel service was hardly improved since
+1858, or so little as to make no impression. Europe seemed to have been
+stationary for twenty years. To a man who had been stationary like
+Europe, the Teutonic was a marvel. That he should be able to eat his
+dinner through a week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That he
+should have a deck stateroom, with fresh air, and read all night, if he
+chose, by electric light, was matter for more wonder than life had yet
+supplied, in its old forms. Wonder may be double--even treble. Adams's
+wonder ran off into figures. As the Niagara was to the Teutonic--as
+1860 was to 1890--so the Teutonic and 1890 must be to the next
+term--and then? Apparently the question concerned only America. Western
+Europe offered no such conundrum. There one might double scale and
+speed indefinitely without passing bounds.
+
+  Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling, on his wedding
+trip to America, thanks to the mediation of Henry James, dashed over
+the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and wit--as though
+playing a garden hose on a thirsty and faded begonia. Kipling could
+never know what peace of mind he gave, for he could hardly ever need it
+himself so much; and yet, in the full delight of his endless fun and
+variety, one felt the old conundrum repeat itself. Somehow, somewhere,
+Kipling and the American were not one, but two, and could not be glued
+together. The American felt that the defect, if defect it were, was in
+himself; he had felt it when he was with Swinburne, and, again, with
+Robert Louis Stevenson, even under the palms of Vailima; but he did not
+carry self-abasement to the point of thinking himself singular.
+Whatever the defect might be, it was American; it belonged to the type;
+it lived in the blood. Whatever the quality might be that held him
+apart, it was English; it lived also in the blood; one felt it little
+if at all, with Celts, and one yearned reciprocally among Fiji
+cannibals. Clarence King used to say that it was due to discord between
+the wave-lengths of the man-atoms; but the theory offered difficulties
+in measurement. Perhaps, after all, it was only that genius soars; but
+this theory, too, had its dark corners. All through life, one had seen
+the American on his literary knees to the European; and all through
+many lives back for some two centuries, one had seen the European snub
+or patronize the American; not always intentionally, but effectually.
+It was in the nature of things. Kipling neither snubbed nor patronized;
+he was all gaiety and good-nature; but he would have been first to feel
+what one meant. Genius has to pay itself that unwilling self-respect.
+
+  Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again
+in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return
+to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying
+dead. Changes had taken place there; improvements had been made; with
+time--much time--the city might become habitable according to some
+fashionable standard; but all one's friends had died or disappeared
+several times over, leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or
+London. Slowly, a certain society had built itself up about the
+Government; houses had been opened and there was much dining; much
+calling; much leaving of cards; but a solitary man counted for less
+than in 1868. Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both
+Executive and Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have
+the ear of anybody in Government. No one in Government knew any reason
+for consulting any one in society. The world had ceased to be wholly
+political, but politics had become less social. A survivor of the Civil
+War--like George Bancroft, or John Hay--tried to keep footing, but
+without brilliant success. They were free to say or do what they liked;
+but no one took much notice of anything said or done.
+
+  A presidential election was to take place in November, and no
+one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were
+singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of them had
+no friends; the other, only enemies. Calvin Brice, who was at that time
+altogether the wittiest and cleverest member of the Senate, was in the
+habit of describing Mr. Cleveland in glowing terms and at great length,
+as one of the loftiest natures and noblest characters of ancient or
+modern time; "but," he concluded, "in future I prefer to look on at his
+proceedings from the safe summit of some neighboring hill." The same
+remark applied to Mr. Harrison. In this respect, they were the greatest
+of Presidents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies, was as
+nothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on their friends.
+Men fled them as though they had the evil eye. To the American people,
+the two candidates and the two parties were so evenly balanced that the
+scales showed hardly a perceptible difference. Mr. Harrison was an
+excellent President, a man of ability and force; perhaps the best
+President the Republican Party had put forward since Lincoln's death;
+yet, on the whole, Adams felt a shade of preference for President
+Cleveland, not so much personally as because the Democrats represented
+to him the last remnants of the eighteenth century; the survivors of
+Hosea Biglow's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants against a
+banker's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years, more and
+more despotic over Esop's frog-empire. One might no longer croak except
+to vote for King Log, or--failing storks--for Grover Cleveland; and
+even then could not be sure where King Banker lurked behind. The costly
+education in politics had led to political torpor. Every one did not
+share it. Clarence King and John Hay were loyal Republicans who never
+for a moment conceived that there could be merit in other ideals. With
+King, the feeling was chiefly love of archaic races; sympathy with the
+negro and Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies; but with
+Hay, party loyalty became a phase of being, a little like the loyalty
+of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw all the failings
+of the party, and still more keenly those of the partisans; but he
+could not live outside. To Adams a Western Democrat or a Western
+Republican, a city Democrat or a city Republican, a W. C. Whitney or a
+J. G. Blaine, were actually the same man, as far as their usefulness to
+the objects of King, Hay, or Adams was concerned. They graded
+themselves as friends or enemies not as Republicans or Democrats. To
+Hay, the difference was that of being respectable or not.
+
+  Since 1879, King, Hay, and Adams had been inseparable. Step by
+step, they had gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shunning than
+inviting public position, until, in 1892, none of them held any post at
+all. With great effort, in Hayes's administration, all King's friends,
+including Abram Hewitt and Carl Schurz, had carried the bill for
+uniting the Surveys and had placed King at the head of the Bureau; but
+King waited only to organize the service, and then resigned, in order
+to seek his private fortune in the West. Hay, after serving as
+Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary Evarts during a part of
+Hayes's administration, then also insisted on going out, in order to
+write with Nicolay the "Life" of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and
+when his friends asked the reason, he could not go into long
+explanations, but preferred to answer simply that no President had ever
+invited him to fill one. The reason was good, and was also conveniently
+true, but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or capacity. Why had
+no President ever cared to employ him? The question needed a volume of
+intricate explanation. There never was a day when he would have refused
+to perform any duty that the Government imposed on him, but the
+American Government never to his knowledge imposed duties. The point
+was never raised with regard to him, or to any one else. The Government
+required candidates to offer; the business of the Executive began and
+ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social formula carried
+this passive attitude a shade further. Any public man who may for years
+have used some other man's house as his own, when promoted to a
+position of patronage commonly feels himself obliged to inquire,
+directly or indirectly, whether his friend wants anything; which is
+equivalent to a civil act of divorce, since he feels awkward in the old
+relation. The handsomest formula, in an impartial choice, was the
+grandly courteous Southern phrase of Lamar: "Of course Mr. Adams knows
+that anything in my power is at his service." A la disposicion de
+Usted! The form must have been correct since it released both parties.
+He was right; Mr. Adams did know all about it; a bow and a conventional
+smile closed the subject forever, and every one felt flattered.
+
+  Such an intimate, promoted to power, was always lost. His
+duties and cares absorbed him and affected his balance of mind. Unless
+his friend served some political purpose, friendship was an effort. Men
+who neither wrote for newspapers nor made campaign speeches, who rarely
+subscribed to the campaign fund, and who entered the White House as
+seldom as possible, placed themselves outside the sphere of usefulness,
+and did so with entirely adequate knowledge of what they were doing.
+They never expected the President to ask for their services, and saw no
+reason why he should do so. As for Henry Adams, in fifty years that he
+knew Washington, no one would have been more surprised than himself had
+any President ever asked him to perform so much of a service as to
+cross the square. Only Texan Congressmen imagined that the President
+needed their services in some remote consulate after worrying him for
+months to find one.
+
+  In Washington this law or custom is universally understood, and
+no one's character necessarily suffered because he held no office. No
+one took office unless he wanted it; and in turn the outsider was never
+asked to do work or subscribe money. Adams saw no office that he
+wanted, and he gravely thought that, from his point of view, in the
+long run, he was likely to be a more useful citizen without office. He
+could at least act as audience, and, in those days, a Washington
+audience seldom filled even a small theatre. He felt quite well
+satisfied to look on, and from time to time he thought he might risk a
+criticism of the players; but though he found his own position regular,
+he never quite understood that of John Hay. The Republican leaders
+treated Hay as one of themselves; they asked his services and took his
+money with a freedom that staggered even a hardened observer; but they
+never needed him in equivalent office. In Washington Hay was the only
+competent man in the party for diplomatic work. He corresponded in his
+powers of usefulness exactly with Lord Granville in London, who had
+been for forty years the saving grace of every Liberal administration
+in turn. Had usefulness to the public service been ever a question, Hay
+should have had a first-class mission under Hayes; should have been
+placed in the Cabinet by Garfield, and should have been restored to it
+by Harrison. These gentlemen were always using him; always invited his
+services, and always took his money.
+
+  Adams's opinion of politics and politicians, as he frankly
+admitted, lacked enthusiasm, although never, in his severest temper,
+did he apply to them the terms they freely applied to each other; and
+he explained everything by his old explanation of Grant's character as
+more or less a general type; but what roused in his mind more rebellion
+was the patience and good-nature with which Hay allowed himself to be
+used. The trait was not confined to politics. Hay seemed to like to be
+used, and this was one of his many charms; but in politics this sort of
+good-nature demands supernatural patience. Whatever astonishing lapses
+of social convention the politicians betrayed, Hay laughed equally
+heartily, and told the stories with constant amusement, at his own
+expense. Like most Americans, he liked to play at making Presidents,
+but, unlike most, he laughed not only at the Presidents he helped to
+make, but also at himself for laughing.
+
+  One must be rich, and come from Ohio or New York, to gratify an
+expensive taste like this. Other men, on both political flanks, did the
+same thing, and did it well, less for selfish objects than for the
+amusement of the game; but Hay alone lived in Washington and in the
+centre of the Ohio influences that ruled the Republican Party during
+thirty years. On the whole, these influences were respectable, and
+although Adams could not, under any circumstances, have had any value,
+even financially, for Ohio politicians, Hay might have much, as he
+showed, if they only knew enough to appreciate him. The American
+politician was occasionally an amusing object; Hay laughed, and, for
+want of other resource, Adams laughed too; but perhaps it was partly
+irritation at seeing how President Harrison dealt his cards that made
+Adams welcome President Cleveland back to the White House.
+
+  At all events, neither Hay nor King nor Adams had much to gain
+by reelecting Mr. Harrison in 1892, or by defeating him, as far as he
+was concerned; and as far as concerned Mr. Cleveland, they seemed to
+have even less personal concern. The whole country, to outward
+appearance, stood in much the same frame of mind. Everywhere was
+slack-water. Hay himself was almost as languid and indifferent as
+Adams. Neither had occupation. Both had finished their literary work.
+The "Life" of Lincoln had been begun, completed, and published hand in
+hand with the "History" of Jefferson and Madison, so that between them
+they had written nearly all the American history there was to write.
+The intermediate period needed intermediate treatment; the gap between
+James Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially filled by
+either of them. Both were heartily tired of the subject, and America
+seemed as tired as they. What was worse, the redeeming energy of
+Americans which had generally served as the resource of minds otherwise
+vacant, the creation of new force, the application of expanding power,
+showed signs of check. Even the year before, in 1891, far off in the
+Pacific, one had met everywhere in the East a sort of stagnation--a
+creeping paralysis--complaints of shipping and producers--that spread
+throughout the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange and
+silver-production loomed large. Credit was shaken, and a change of
+party government might shake it even in Washington. The matter did not
+concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always richest when the rich
+were poor; but it helped to dull the vibration of society.
+
+  However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the
+last twenty years, for the three friends, King, Hay, and Adams, was
+exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years, but what had
+they gained? They often discussed the question. Hay had a singular
+faculty for remembering faces, and would break off suddenly the thread
+of his talk, as he looked out of the window on La Fayette Square, to
+notice an old corps commander or admiral of the Civil War, tottering
+along to the club for his cards or his cocktail: "There is old Dash who
+broke the rebel lines at Blankburg! Think of his having been a
+thunderbolt of war!" Or what drew Adams's closer attention: "There goes
+old Boutwell gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they went! Men
+who had swayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King,
+and Adams, less valued than the ephemeral Congressman behind them, who
+could not have told whether the general was a Boutwell or Boutwell a
+general. Theirs was the highest known success, and one asked what it
+was worth to them. Apart from personal vanity, what would they sell it
+for? Would any one of them, from President downwards, refuse ten
+thousand a year in place of all the consideration he received from the
+world on account of his success?
+
+  Yet consideration had value, and at that time Adams enjoyed
+lecturing Augustus St. Gaudens, in hours of depression, on its
+economics: "Honestly you must admit that even if you don't pay your
+expenses you get a certain amount of advantage from doing the best
+work. Very likely some of the really successful Americans would be
+willing you should come to dinner sometimes, if you did not come too
+often, while they would think twice about Hay, and would never stand
+me." The forgotten statesman had no value at all; the general and
+admiral not much; the historian but little; on the whole, the artist
+stood best, and of course, wealth rested outside the question, since it
+was acting as judge; but, in the last resort, the judge certainly
+admitted that consideration had some value as an asset, though hardly
+as much as ten--or five--thousand a year.
+
+  Hay and Adams had the advantage of looking out of their windows
+on the antiquities of La Fayette Square, with the sense of having all
+that any one had; all that the world had to offer; all that they wanted
+in life, including their names on scores of title-pages and in one or
+two biographical dictionaries; but this had nothing to do with
+consideration, and they knew no more than Boutwell or St. Gaudens
+whether to call it success. Hay had passed ten years in writing the
+"Life" of Lincoln, and perhaps President Lincoln was the better for it,
+but what Hay got from it was not so easy to see, except the privilege
+of seeing popular book-makers steal from his book and cover the theft
+by abusing the author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to
+Jefferson and Madison, with expenses which, in any mercantile business,
+could hardly have been reckoned at less than a hundred thousand
+dollars, on a salary of five thousand a year; and when he asked what
+return he got from this expenditure, rather more extravagant in
+proportion to his means than a racing-stable, he could see none
+whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Parkman never
+printed a first edition of his relatively cheap and popular volumes,
+numbering more than seven hundred copies, until quite at the end of his
+life. A thousand copies of a book that cost twenty dollars or more was
+as much as any author could expect; two thousand copies was a visionary
+estimate unless it were canvassed for subscription. As far as Adams
+knew, he had but three serious readers--Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh,
+and Hay himself. He was amply satisfied with their consideration, and
+could dispense with that of the other fifty-nine million, nine hundred
+and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven; but neither he
+nor Hay was better off in any other respect, and their chief title to
+consideration was their right to look out of their windows on great
+men, alive or dead, in La Fayette Square, a privilege which had nothing
+to do with their writings.
+
+  The world was always good-natured; civil; glad to be amused;
+open-armed to any one who amused it; patient with every one who did not
+insist on putting himself in its way, or costing it money; but this was
+not consideration, still less power in any of its concrete forms, and
+applied as well or better to a comic actor. Certainly a rare soprano or
+tenor voice earned infinitely more applause as it gave infinitely more
+pleasure, even in America; but one does what one can with one's means,
+and casting up one's balance sheet, one expects only a reasonable
+return on one's capital. Hay and Adams had risked nothing and never
+played for high stakes. King had followed the ambitious course. He had
+played for many millions. He had more than once come close to a great
+success, but the result was still in doubt, and meanwhile he was
+passing the best years of his life underground. For companionship he
+was mostly lost.
+
+  Thus, in 1892, neither Hay, King, nor Adams knew whether they
+had attained success, or how to estimate it, or what to call it; and
+the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than they. Indeed,
+the American people had no idea at all; they were wandering in a
+wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had ever trodden about
+Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden calves to worship. They had
+lost the sense of worship; for the idea that they worshipped money
+seemed a delusion. Worship of money was an old-world trait; a healthy
+appetite akin to worship of the Gods, or to worship of power in any
+concrete shape; but the American wasted money more recklessly than any
+one ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant
+court aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not
+what to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make more,
+or throw it away. Probably, since human society began, it had seen no
+such curious spectacle as the houses of the San Francisco millionaires
+on Nob Hill. Except for the railway system, the enormous wealth taken
+out of the ground since 1840, had disappeared. West of the Alleghenies,
+the whole country might have been swept clean, and could have been
+replaced in better form within one or two years. The American mind had
+less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its
+loss more easily; but it had been deflected by its pursuit till it
+could turn in no other direction. It shunned, distrusted, disliked, the
+dangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in history for its
+ignorance of the past.
+
+  Personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's
+notice. His first step, on returning to Washington, took him out to the
+cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see the bronze figure which St.
+Gaudens had made for him in his absence. Naturally every detail
+interested him; every line; every touch of the artist; every change of
+light and shade; every point of relation; every possible doubt of St.
+Gaudens's correctness of taste or feeling; so that, as the spring
+approached, he was apt to stop there often to see what the figure had
+to tell him that was new; but, in all that it had to say, he never once
+thought of questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the
+one commonplace about it--the oldest idea known to human thought. He
+knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man, woman, or
+child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more than a glance to
+reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura Daibuts; from
+Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to Shelley, art had wrought
+on this eternal figure almost as though it had nothing else to say. The
+interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of
+the observer. As Adams sat there, numbers of people came, for the
+figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know
+its meaning. Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were
+vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would
+have been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese
+jinricksha-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a
+lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions there, and,
+apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately
+against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism,
+of denial. Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought. Like
+all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more. The
+American layman had lost sight of ideals; the American priest had lost
+sight of faith. Both were more American than the old, half-witted
+soldiers who denounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which
+should have been given for drink.
+
+  Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain
+of self-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to which all
+others were subservient, and which absorbed the energies of some sixty
+million people to the exclusion of every other force, real or
+imaginary. The power of the railway system had enormously increased
+since 1870. Already the coal output of 160,000,000 tons closely
+approached the 180,000,000 of the British Empire, and one held one's
+breath at the nearness of what one had never expected to see, the
+crossing of courses, and the lead of American energies. The moment was
+deeply exciting to a historian, but the railway system itself
+interested one less than in 1868, since it offered less chance for
+future profit. Adams had been born with the railway system; had grown
+up with it; had been over pretty nearly every mile of it with curious
+eyes, and knew as much about it as his neighbors; but not there could
+he look for a new education. Incomplete though it was, the system
+seemed on the whole to satisfy the wants of society better than any
+other part of the social machine, and society was content with its
+creation, for the time, and with itself for creating it. Nothing new
+was to be done or learned there, and the world hurried on to its
+telephones, bicycles, and electric trams. At past fifty, Adams solemnly
+and painfully learned to ride the bicycle.
+
+  Nothing else occurred to him as a means of new life. Nothing
+else offered itself, however carefully he sought. He looked for no
+change. He lingered in Washington till near July without noticing a new
+idea. Then he went back to England to pass his summer on the Deeside.
+In October he returned to Washington and there awaited the reelection
+of Mr. Cleveland, which led to no deeper thought than that of taking up
+some small notes that happened to be outstanding. He had seen enough of
+the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of
+bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+CHICAGO (1893)
+
+  DRIFTING in the dead-water of the fin-de-siecle--and during
+this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel
+fin-de-siecle--where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or
+fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had
+long ceased going into society. For years he had not dined out of his
+own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct
+statesman. He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to
+newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a
+man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.
+
+  His friends sometimes took pity on him, and came to share a
+meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but
+existence was, on the whole, exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him.
+Of the society favorites who made the life of every dinner-table and of
+the halls of Congress--Tom Reed, Bourke Cockran, Edward Wolcott--he
+knew not one. Although Calvin Brice was his next neighbor for six
+years, entertaining lavishly as no one had ever entertained before in
+Washington, Adams never entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivalled
+Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of
+the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief,
+President Cleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or
+Blaine or Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No
+one may pick and choose between houses, or accept hospitality without
+returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did; but he was
+unfit for social work, and he sank under the surface.
+
+  Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is
+not only good-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to
+pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social offences
+were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than himself; but a few
+houses always remained which he could enter without being asked, and
+quit without being noticed. One was John Hay's; another was Cabot
+Lodge's; a third led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of
+educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politician who
+had done most to block his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of
+Pennsylvania had married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman
+of Ohio, thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics,
+and in society a reign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron and
+Mrs. Lodge led a career, without precedent and without succession, as
+the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both of them had been kind
+to Adams, and a dozen years of this intimacy had made him one of their
+habitual household, as he was of Hay's. In a small society, such ties
+between houses become political and social force. Without intention or
+consciousness, they fix one's status in the world. Whatever one's
+preferences in politics might be, one's house was bound to the
+Republican interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay,
+and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all,
+and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The relation
+was daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or patronage, since
+Mr. Harrison, in those respects, showed little more taste than Mr.
+Cleveland for the society and interests of this particular band of
+followers, whose relations with the White House were sometimes comic,
+but never intimate.
+
+  In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South
+Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point on
+St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken, with the
+rest, to open the new experience. From there he went on to Havana, and
+came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near April. In May the
+Senator took his family to Chicago to see the Exposition, and Adams
+went with them. Early in June, all sailed for England together, and at
+last, in the middle of July, all found themselves in Switzerland, at
+Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt. On July 22 they drove across the
+Furka Pass and went down by rail to Lucerne.
+
+  Months of close contact teach character, if character has
+interest; and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since
+it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President Grant. Perhaps
+it owed life to Scotch blood; perhaps to the blood of Adam and Eve, the
+primitive strain of man; perhaps only to the blood of the cottager
+working against the blood of the townsman; but whatever it was, one
+liked it for its simplicity. The Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was
+not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but in practical
+matters it was the steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most
+efficient; certainly the safest.
+
+  Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never
+been able to find a type to describe, the two great historical
+Pennsylvanians having been, as every one had so often heard, Benjamin
+Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of Albert Gallatin,
+indeed, he had made a voluminous study and an elaborate picture, only
+to show that he was, if American at all, a New Yorker, with a
+Calvinistic strain--rather Connecticut than Pennsylvanian. The true
+Pennsylvanian was a narrower type; as narrow as the kirk; as shy of
+other people's narrowness as a Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan
+farmer. To him, none but Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, negro,
+Dago, Italian, Englishman, Yankee--all was one in the depths of
+Pennsylvanian consciousness. The mental machine could run only on what
+it took for American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's study
+of President Grant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was
+admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same
+lines. Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when he
+allied his interests. He then became supple in action and large in
+motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he happened to be
+right--which was, of course, whenever one agreed with him--he was the
+strongest American in America. As an ally he was worth all the rest,
+because he understood his own class, who were always a majority; and
+knew how to deal with them as no New Englander could. If one wanted
+work done in Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a New Englander
+to do it. A Pennsylvanian not only could do it, but did it willingly,
+practically, and intelligently.
+
+  Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron
+believed in an Adams--or an Adams in a Cameron--but they had curiously
+enough, almost always worked together. The Camerons had what the
+Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their objects without
+much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue of the Pennsylvania
+machine had never been its scrupulous purity or sparkling professions.
+The machine worked by coarse means on coarse interests, but its
+practical success had been the most curious subject of study in
+American history. When one summed up the results of Pennsylvanian
+influence, one inclined to think that Pennsylvania set up the
+Government in 1789; saved it in 1861; created the American system;
+developed its iron and coal power; and invented its great railways.
+Following up the same line, in his studies of American character, Adams
+reached the result--to him altogether paradoxical--that Cameron's
+qualities and defects united in equal share to make him the most useful
+member of the Senate.
+
+  In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable
+specimen of this American type which had so persistently suppressed his
+own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron strongly influenced him, but
+he could not see a trace of any influence which he exercised on
+Cameron. Not an opinion or a view of his on any subject was ever
+reflected back on him from Cameron's mind; not even an expression or a
+fact. Yet the difference in age was trifling, and in education slight.
+On the other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and in
+nothing so much as on the great subject of discussion that year--the
+question of silver.
+
+  Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing
+about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana Horton; but
+inevitably, from the moment he was forced to choose sides, he was sure
+to choose silver. Every political idea and personal prejudice he ever
+dallied with held him to the silver standard, and made a barrier
+between him and gold. He knew well enough all that was to be said for
+the gold standard as economy, but he had never in his life taken
+politics for a pursuit of economy. One might have a political or an
+economical policy; one could not have both at the same time. This was
+heresy in the English school, but it had always been law in the
+American. Equally he knew all that was to be said on the moral side of
+the question, and he admitted that his interests were, as Boston
+maintained, wholly on the side of gold; but, had they been ten times as
+great as they were, he could not have helped his bankers or croupiers
+to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure his winning the
+stakes. At least he was bound to profess disapproval--or thought he
+was. From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly
+with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all
+others--masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals.
+Morality is a private and costly luxury. The morality of the silver or
+gold standards was to be decided by popular vote, and the popular vote
+would be decided by interests; but on which side lay the larger
+interest? To him the interest was political; he thought it probably his
+last chance of standing up for his eighteenth-century principles,
+strict construction, limited powers, George Washington, John Adams, and
+the rest. He had, in a half-hearted way, struggled all his life against
+State Street, banks, capitalism altogether, as he knew it in old
+England or new England, and he was fated to make his last resistance
+behind the silver standard.
+
+  For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in
+company with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little
+difference on the merits. Adams was sure to learn backwards, but the
+case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian, a
+practical politician, whom all the reformers, including all the
+Adamses, had abused for a lifetime for subservience to moneyed
+interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go with the banks and
+corporations which had made and sustained him. On the contrary, he
+stood out obstinately as the leading champion of silver in the East.
+The reformers, represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose
+personal interests lay with the gold standard, at once assumed that
+Senator Cameron had a personal interest in silver, and denounced his
+corruption as hotly as though he had been convicted of taking a bribe.
+
+  More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams.
+His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver; the Evening
+Post's and Godkin's interests were with gold, and they frankly said so,
+yet they avowedly pursued their interests even into politics; Cameron's
+interests had always been with the corporations, yet he supported
+silver. Thus morality required that Adams should be condemned for going
+against his interests; that Godkin was virtuous in following his
+interests; and that Cameron was a scoundrel whatever he did.
+
+Granting that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it:--Adams
+or Godkin or Cameron? Until a Council or a Pope or a Congress or the
+newspapers or a popular election has decided a question of doubtful
+morality, individuals are apt to err, especially when putting money
+into their own pockets; but in democracies, the majority alone gives
+law. To any one who knew the relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin,
+the idea of a popular vote between them seemed excessively humorous;
+yet the popular vote in the end did decide against Cameron, for Godkin.
+
+  The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr.
+Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his interests, or
+his antipathies; but the true American, slow to grasp new and
+complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover where his greater
+interest lay. As usual, the banks taught him. In the course of fifty
+years the banks taught one many wise lessons for which an insect had to
+be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all the lessons Adams
+learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that of July
+22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with Senator
+Cameron on the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka
+Pass, they reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters
+from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because the
+community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.
+
+  If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a
+lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was
+himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had struck
+him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first thought was
+of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a sleepless night, but
+although his mind tried to wrestle with the problem how any man could
+be ruined who had, months before, paid off every dollar of debt he knew
+himself to owe, he gave up that insoluble riddle in order to fall back
+on the larger principle that beggary could be no more for him than it
+was for others who were more valuable members of society, and, with
+that, he went to sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started
+for Quincy where he arrived August 7.
+
+  As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years
+old, the shock of finding one's self suspended, for several months,
+over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how
+to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the
+situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him, among others, some
+money--thousands of millions were--as bankruptcy--the same--for which
+he, among others, was responsible and of which he knew no more than
+they. The humor of this situation seemed to him so much more pointed
+than the terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he
+had been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend, he had nothing
+to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose their
+existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was
+their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could
+afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position,
+though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks
+were going to do about it. To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but
+the more he saw of it, the less he understood it. He was quite sure
+that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful
+energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams
+went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit,
+the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted
+the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the
+banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Each
+wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he
+could find no answer to the question which was responsible for getting
+the other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same
+interest and socially the same person. Evidently the force was one; its
+operation was mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its power;
+but no one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as an
+emotion--a panic--that meant nothing.
+
+  Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly
+old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at
+last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education,
+interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it were worth
+finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the first time since
+1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the
+world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the forces at work;
+the old machine ran far behind its duty; somewhere--somehow--it was
+bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely over one's
+head, it gave the better chance for study.
+
+  For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother
+Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same
+perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong
+writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions
+ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each
+other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had
+discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the
+exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working
+it out for the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things
+European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new
+equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the
+advantages of ten years' study, had swept away much rubbish in the
+effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that
+no paradox compared with that of daily events. The facts were
+constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability was greater than he
+calculated; the speed of acceleration passed bounds. Among other
+general rules he laid down the paradox that, in the social
+disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical outcome was not
+collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.
+
+  By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the
+storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one
+so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the Exposition
+again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of
+study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos.
+Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year, education went mad. The
+silver question, thorny as it was, fell into relations as simple as
+words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit and
+exchange that came to complicate it; and when one sought rest at
+Chicago, educational game started like rabbits from every building, and
+ran out of sight among thousands of its kind before one could mark its
+burrow. The Exposition itself defied philosophy. One might find fault
+till the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed
+explanation. As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but
+the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at
+all--more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent,
+Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway system
+thrown in, since these were all natural products in their place; while,
+since Noah's Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill joined, such vague and
+ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental
+outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.
+
+  The first astonishment became greater every day. That the
+Exposition should be a natural growth and product of the Northwest
+offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin; but that it should be
+anything else seemed an idea more startling still; and even granting it
+were not--admitting it to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth
+and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer
+on the shore of Lake Michigan--could it be made to seem at home there?
+Was the American made to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air
+of enjoying it as though it were all his own; he felt it was good; he
+was proud of it; for the most part, he acted as though he had passed
+his life in landscape gardening and architectural decoration. If he had
+not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as he
+knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth's or Paquin's.
+Perhaps he could not do it again; the next time he would want to do it
+himself and would show his own faults; but for the moment he seemed to
+have leaped directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the
+heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic
+Chicago. Critics had no trouble in criticising the classicism, but all
+trading cities had always shown traders' taste, and, to the stern
+purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All
+trader's taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her
+taste a look of unity.
+
+  One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome
+almost as deeply as on the steps of Ara Coeli, and much to the same
+purpose. Here was a breach of continuity--a rupture in historical
+sequence! Was it real, or only apparent? One's personal universe hung
+on the answer, for, if the rupture was real and the new American world
+could take this sharp and conscious twist towards ideals, one's
+personal friends would come in, at last, as winners in the great
+American chariot-race for fame. If the people of the Northwest actually
+knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk about
+Hunt and Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and
+Stanford White when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise
+forgotten. The artists and architects who had done the work offered
+little encouragement to hope it; they talked freely enough, but not in
+terms that one cared to quote; and to them the Northwest refused to
+look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for themselves;
+as though art, to the Western people, was a stage decoration; a diamond
+shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the architects of Paestum and
+Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had said the same
+thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.
+
+  Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits
+for help, and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much
+and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste. Some millions of
+other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking
+education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and normal, for they
+had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as
+natural as the sun, and expected to understand one as little as the
+other. For the historian alone the Exposition made a serious effort.
+Historical exhibits were common, but they never went far enough; none
+were thoroughly worked out. One of the best was that of the Cunard
+steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself obliged
+to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to calculate
+exactly when, according to the given increase of power, tonnage, and
+speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach its limits. His
+figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927; another generation
+to spare before force, space, and time should meet. The ocean steamer
+ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was
+the nearest of man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because
+they seemed already finished except for mere increase in number;
+explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and
+mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught least because it had
+barely reached infancy, and, if its progress was to be constant at the
+rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite costless energy
+within a generation. One lingered long among the dynamos, for they were
+new, and they gave to history a new phase. Men of science could never
+understand the ignorance and naivete; of the historian, who, when he
+came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull
+or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was
+it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such questions to
+which he expected answers and was astonished to get none.
+
+  Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds
+which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they
+were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever--who had never run a
+steam-engine, the simplest of forces--who had never put their hands on
+a lever--had never touched an electric battery--never talked through a
+telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was
+meant by a watt or an ampere or an erg, or any other term of
+measurement introduced within a hundred years--had no choice but to sit
+down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of
+Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what they
+had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the
+childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them
+say and do it. The historical mind can think only in historical
+processes, and probably this was the first time since historians
+existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical
+sequence. Before a metaphysical or a theological or a political
+sequence, most historians had felt helpless, but the single clue to
+which they had hitherto trusted was the unity of natural force.
+
+  Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he
+had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been
+complete at once. Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question
+whether the American people knew where they were driving. Adams
+answered, for one, that he did not know, but would try to find out. On
+reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the shadow of Richard Hunt's
+architecture, he decided that the American people probably knew no more
+than he did; but that they might still be driving or drifting
+unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said
+to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if
+relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago
+was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start
+there.
+
+  Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell
+headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the Silver
+Act. The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to prevent it, and
+most of the majority had little heart in the creation of a single gold
+standard. The banks alone, and the dealers in exchange, insisted upon
+it; the political parties divided according to capitalistic
+geographical lines, Senator Cameron offering almost the only exception;
+but they mixed with unusual good-temper, and made liberal allowance for
+each others' actions and motives. The struggle was rather less
+irritable than such struggles generally were, and it ended like a
+comedy. On the evening of the final vote, Senator Cameron came back
+from the Capitol with Senator Brice, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and
+Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest of humors as though they were rid of
+a heavy responsibility. Adams, too, in a bystander's spirit, felt light
+in mind. He had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution
+of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and
+his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as any one would stand up with him. He
+had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in
+the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself
+altogether alone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and
+capitalistic society until he had become little better than a crank. He
+had known for years that he must accept the regime, but he had known a
+great many other disagreeable certainties--like age, senility, and
+death--against which one made what little resistance one could. The
+matter was settled at last by the people. For a hundred years, between
+1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed
+forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other
+capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on
+the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself,
+once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its
+necessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens,
+reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks
+to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the
+mere law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the
+one he liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the
+rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted,
+and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by
+capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of
+trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern and
+Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as had
+been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple
+conditions.
+
+  There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was
+question of gear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved no
+disputed principle. Once admitted that the machine must be efficient,
+society might dispute in what social interest it should be run, but in
+any case it must work concentration. Such great revolutions commonly
+leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever surprised
+Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and his silver friends
+slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single gold standard and
+the capitalistic system with its methods; the protective tariff; the
+corporations and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalism
+which necessarily made their complement; the whole mechanical
+consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the
+class into which Adams was born, but created monopolies capable of
+controlling the new energies that America adored.
+
+  Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders
+of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing
+remained for a historian but to ask--how long and how far!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+SILENCE (1894-1898)
+
+The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed much
+education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such as no
+one had thought within its powers, the individual crawled as he best
+could, through the wreck, and found many values of life upset. But for
+connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893
+to 1897, had no value in the drama of education, and might be left out.
+Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the
+ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been the fortunes of Clarence
+King. The lesson taught whatever the bystander chose to read in it; but
+to Adams it seemed singularly full of moral, if he could but understand
+it. In 1871 he had thought King's education ideal, and his personal
+fitness unrivalled. No other young American approached him for the
+combination of chances--physical energy, social standing, mental scope
+and training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively
+American and irresistibly strong. His nearest rival was Alexander
+Agassiz, and, as far as their friends knew, no one else could be
+classed with them in the running. The result of twenty years' effort
+proved that the theory of scientific education failed where most theory
+fails--for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he
+thought, quite outside of every possible financial risk, had been
+caught in the cogs, and held for months over the gulf of bankruptcy,
+saved only by the chance that the whole class of millionaires were more
+or less bankrupt too, and the banks were forced to let the mice escape
+with the rats; but, in sum, education without capital could always be
+taken by the throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped
+by the knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered.
+Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education was the same.
+The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to back it, was
+flagrant.
+
+  The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
+should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless without
+money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to be frozen out.
+Education must fit the complex conditions of a new society, always
+accelerating its movement, and its fitness could be known only from
+success. One looked about for examples of success among the educated of
+one's time--the men born in the thirties, and trained to professions.
+Within one's immediate acquaintance, three were typical: John Hay,
+Whitelaw Reid, and William C. Whitney; all of whom owed their free hand
+to marriage, education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in
+1893, William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type.
+
+  Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was
+exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich
+for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might
+occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them, and
+never showed them respect. Scarcely one of the very rich men held any
+position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been elected
+to an office, or even into a good club. Setting aside the few, like
+Pierpont Morgan, whose social position had little to do with greater or
+less wealth, riches were in New York no object of envy on account of
+the joys they brought in their train, and Whitney was not even one of
+the very rich; yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason
+for it. Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having
+gratified every ambition, and swung the country almost at his will; he
+had thrown away the usual objects of political ambition like the ashes
+of smoked cigarettes; had turned to other amusements, satiated every
+taste, gorged every appetite, won every object that New York afforded,
+and, not yet satisfied, had carried his field of activity abroad, until
+New York no longer knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He
+had succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed.
+
+  Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
+bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal;
+but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an American education
+ought to be in order to count as success. Even granting that it counted
+as money, its value could not be called general. America contained
+scores of men worth five millions or upwards, whose lives were no more
+worth living than those of their cooks, and to whom the task of making
+money equivalent to education offered more difficulties than to Adams
+the task of making education equivalent to money. Social position
+seemed to have value still, while education counted for nothing. A
+mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if fortunate
+might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open market. An
+administrator, organizer, manager, with mediaeval qualities of energy
+and will, but no education beyond his special branch, would probably be
+worth at least ten times as much. Society had failed to discover what
+sort of education suited it best. Wealth valued social position and
+classical education as highly as either of these valued wealth, and the
+women still tended to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could
+see he was himself as contented as though he had been educated; while
+Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory, had
+failed; and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams, had
+achieved phenomenal success.
+
+  Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
+must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile use of
+the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With
+these he could still make his way to any object within his vision, and
+would have a decisive advantage over nine rivals in ten. Statesman or
+lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest or professor, native or foreign,
+he would fear none.
+
+  King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
+indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced him
+to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted into the little
+town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society, which King knew well,
+was more amusing than any other that one had yet discovered in the
+whole broad world, but made no profession of teaching anything unless
+it were Cuban Spanish or the danza; and neither on his own nor on
+King's account did the visitor ask any loftier study than that of the
+buzzards floating on the trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or
+the colors of sea and shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran
+Piedra; but, as though they were still twenty years old and revolution
+were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid,
+fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief. In
+the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were always falling on
+one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant political convulsions
+taught least. Since the time of Rameses, revolutions have raised more
+doubts than they solved, but they have sometimes the merit of changing
+one's point of view, and the Cuban rebellion served to sever the last
+tie that attached Adams to a Democratic administration. He thought that
+President Cleveland could have settled the Cuban question, without war,
+had he chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the
+Democratic Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and the
+gold standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave no
+choice between parties. The new American, whether consciously or not,
+had turned his back on the nineteenth century before he was done with
+it; the gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass
+could have no other outcome, and, as so often before, the movement,
+once accelerated by attempting to impede it, had the additional, brutal
+consequence of crushing equally the good and the bad that stood in its
+way.
+
+  The lesson was old--so old that it became tedious. One had
+studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
+another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex, among the
+picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never been fairly
+involved in the general motion, and were the more amusing for their
+torpor. After passing the winter with King in the West Indies, he
+passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and found there little
+to study. The Geysers were an old story; the Snake River posed no vital
+statistics except in its fordings; even the Tetons were as calm as they
+were lovely; while the wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and
+corners, laid no traps. In return the party treated them with
+affection. Never did a band less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the
+roof of the continent. Hay loved as little as Adams did, the labor of
+skinning and butchering big game; he had even outgrown the sedate,
+middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found the trout of
+the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself, who managed
+the party loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so much as a
+fieldmouse; Iddings the geologist was reduced to shooting only for the
+table, and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the simple
+life. Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had
+vanished; one saw no possible adventures except to break one's neck as
+in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent ponies scented an
+occasional friendly and sociable bear.
+
+  When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
+to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway systems
+yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and no sooner had
+he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography than with desperate
+thirst for exhausting the American field, he set out for Mexico and the
+Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean and clearing up, in these six or
+eight months, at least twenty thousand miles of American land and water.
+
+  He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
+April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life--tropical
+islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types.
+Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque than
+civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's sixtieth year
+approached, the artist began to die; only a certain intense cerebral
+restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensual stimulants;
+one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art were a
+trotting-match. For this, one was in some degree prepared, for the old
+man had been a stage-type since drama began; but one felt some
+perplexity to account for failure on the opposite or mechanical side,
+where nothing but cerebral action was needed.
+
+  Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic, he
+plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find the
+surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had ever
+approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited statistics,
+endless columns of figures, bottomless averages merely for the asking.
+At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Ford supplied any material that
+curiosity could imagine for filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and
+methods for applying the plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be
+winning ground, and one's averages projected themselves as laws into
+the future. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the
+attitude of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in
+their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they talked
+like other men who knew less. The method did not result in faith. Indeed,
+every increase of mass--of volume and velocity--seemed to bring in new
+elements, and, at last, a scholar, fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of
+algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of
+facts. Nothing came out as it should. In principle, according to
+figures, any one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame
+no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam
+Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the
+anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the
+ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the
+prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the
+future; but meanwhile these societies which violated every law, moral,
+arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated each other, but
+produced also fresh complexities with every propagation and developed
+mass with every complexity.
+
+  The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying
+discovery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as
+the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very much
+concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the
+anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams
+disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future
+society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at
+finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind
+march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from
+one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason but
+temper, falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres had
+become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed
+up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost
+continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South
+Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them
+all not merely unnecessary, but foolish--induced by greed of the
+coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still robbing
+their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and inevitable, but the
+murder seemed altogether archaic.
+
+  At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of
+Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral
+improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press.
+Possibly growth in human nature might show itself there. He found no
+need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he preferred
+on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment;
+and he very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness of religious
+void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or
+even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an act, or an
+expression, or an image, showed depth of faith or hope.
+
+  The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
+it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care for;
+if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the mass of
+mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics, travel
+had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair had only confused
+the roads. Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind was
+already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of chance
+images stored away without order in the memory. One might as well try
+to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student
+less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself
+ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
+
+  For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
+Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe
+with the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is useful to
+the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of
+this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called
+historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The
+woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one
+or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself. The
+American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw
+her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth;
+none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so
+familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to
+history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much
+better company than the American man; she was probably much better
+company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, Senator
+since 1893, Adams's relations had been those of elder brother or uncle
+since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left his examination-papers on
+Assistant Professor Adams's desk, and crossed the street to Christ
+Church in Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself, as scholar,
+fellow instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and
+political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but
+with him afterwards as politician he had not much relation; and since
+Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not
+only a Senator but a Senator from Massachusetts--a singular social
+relation which Adams had known only as fatal to friends--a
+superstitious student, intimate with the laws of historical fatality,
+would rather have recognized him only as an enemy; but apart from this
+accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the waste places of average
+humanity had been greatly dependent on his house. Senators can never be
+approached with safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and
+several superior children who feel no deference for Senators as such,
+may be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep him
+under restraint.
+
+Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it
+chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at Caen,
+Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history had a chapter
+with which he thought himself familiar, it was the twelfth and
+thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do with knowledge that
+these bare playgrounds of the lecture system turned into green and
+verdurous virgin forests merely through the medium of younger eyes and
+fresher minds. His German bias must have given his youth a terrible
+twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessential
+because un-German. They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a
+compliment which would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or
+even in sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life
+in trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed
+nothing less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in the
+touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of the
+senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an unusual chance, even
+a Senator became natural, simple, interested, cultivated, artistic,
+liberal--genial.
+
+  Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
+it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One could
+not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of mere
+antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it expelled
+archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without seeming conscious
+of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington with a new sense of
+history. Again he wandered south, and in April returned to Mexico with
+the Camerons to study the charms of pulque and Churriguerresque
+architecture. In May he ran through Europe again with Hay, as far south
+as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage. After thus covering once
+more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home in
+October, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and start the
+world anew.
+
+  For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams
+wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or
+historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything he wanted
+to save; and in this respect he reflected only the public mind which
+balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both parties as
+to express no sympathy with either. Even among the most powerful men of
+that generation he knew none who had a good word to say for it. No
+period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in American politics since
+Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society;
+but the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a
+small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to depend
+abjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged one's self down
+the long vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's
+friends, and avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown
+narrow with years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses
+round La Fayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in power
+except in the case of Mr. Blaine whose tumultuous struggle for
+existence held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House
+and laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole
+nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the
+world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders for London.
+Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had been buried in
+Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life either at home or
+abroad, and broke up his house on the Square. Only the Lodges and
+Roosevelts remained, but even they were at once absorbed in the
+interests of power. Since 1861, no such social convulsion had occurred.
+
+  Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
+chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most strongly
+the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the man in the
+State Department seemed more important than the man in the White House.
+Adams knew no one in the United States fit to manage these matters in
+the face of a hostile Europe, and had no candidate to propose; but he
+was shocked beyond all restraints of expression to learn that the
+President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the State Department in
+order to make a place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himself had
+done nothing that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long
+enough to distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not
+between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for the
+place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was notoriously
+feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to Adams the
+betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Department. One might
+have shrugged one's shoulders had the President named Mr. Hanna his
+Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna was a man of force if not of
+experience, and selections much worse than this had often turned out
+well enough; but John Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down.
+
+  The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
+bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
+Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the
+petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor was the matter
+improved by hints that the President might call John Hay to the
+Department whenever John Sherman should retire. Indeed, had Hay been
+even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, he would have put an end,
+once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his friend's
+part; but even without this last disaster, one felt that Washington had
+become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary
+contemplation of Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more
+amusing than the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which
+offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls
+embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely cause
+anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!
+
+  Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
+since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached the
+month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years' dogged
+effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend it to the
+young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had become more
+and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the Civil Law had been
+locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860. Noah's dove had not
+searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so little
+success. Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove who wants and finds
+rest; but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone and
+uneducated, who has lost his taste even for olives. To this, also, the
+young may be driven, as education, and the lesson fails in humor; but
+it may be worth knowing to some of them that the planet offers hardly a
+dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui,
+and none at all where he can pass a year.
+
+  Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
+no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
+original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his
+years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the task
+of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a right to
+require amusement--or at least education, since this costs nothing to
+any one--and that a world which cannot educate, will not amuse, and is
+ugly besides, has even less right to exist than he. Both views seem
+sound; but the world wearily objects to be called by epithets what
+society always admits in practice; for no one likes to be told that he
+is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having nothing to say in its
+defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is pardonable in youth, the
+man of sixty who wishes consideration had better hold his tongue. This
+truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for
+men of half that age Only the very young have the right to betray their
+ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to
+betray themselves.
+
+  Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
+acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one
+point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in others. Of all
+characteristics in human nature, this has been one of the most abiding.
+Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long history of human
+expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid by the wise, shows
+that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever existed on this.
+"Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he holdeth his peace, is
+counted wise," and still more often, the wisest of men, when he spoke
+the highest wisdom, has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the
+merits of silence in others. Socrates made remarks in its favor, which
+should have struck the Athenians as new to them; but of late the
+repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlyle vociferated his
+admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best form of
+expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of
+expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most noble to
+the end. Alfred de Vigny's dying wolf remarked:--
+
+    "A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
+     Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse."
+    "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,
+  Only silence is strong,--all the rest is but lies."
+
+Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have decided
+to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm that--
+
+  "The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen
+   Than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest;"
+
+with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
+torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The evidence
+of the poets could not be more emphatic:--
+
+  "Silent, while years engrave the brow!
+   Silent,--the best are silent now!"
+
+  Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in
+silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all
+philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, had ever
+been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few were believed to
+have attained ignorance, which was in result the same. More than this,
+in every society worth the name, the man of sixty had been encouraged
+to ride this hobby--the Pursuit of Ignorance in Silence--as though it
+were the easiest way to get rid of him. In America the silence was more
+oppressive than the ignorance; but perhaps elsewhere the world might
+still hide some haunt of futilitarian silence where content
+reigned--although long search had not revealed it--and so the
+pilgrimage began anew!
+
+  The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
+established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in London
+that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about it;
+education could not be expected there; but there Adams arrived, April
+21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many days, for Queen
+Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in St. James's Street.
+True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets of Rome, actually
+squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like Odysseus before
+the press of shadows, daunted by a "bloodless fear"; but in spring
+London is pleasant, and it was more cheery than ever in May, 1897, when
+every one was welcoming the return of life after the long winter since
+1893. One's fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes, were again in flood.
+
+  This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
+the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars
+better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled
+Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled Venus to show
+him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a sort
+of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris, and set up a household at
+St. Germain where he taught and learned French history for nieces who
+swarmed under the venerable cedars of the Pavillon d'Angouleme, and
+rode about the green forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time
+to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the
+summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel at
+home in France as in other countries he had thought more homelike. At
+length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because he could go
+nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hays came by, in January,
+1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a stanch and strong ally for twenty
+years, bade him go with them to Egypt.
+
+  Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
+Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and what
+they said had as little to do with education as possible, until one
+evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the Nile from
+Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to announce the sinking
+of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the greatest stride in
+education since 1865, but what did it teach? One leant on a fragment of
+column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep down the
+debris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the same
+wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of
+silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx.
+Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between civilizations was
+that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He
+tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to
+Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of Tiryns;
+together they went on to Constantinople and studied the great walls of
+Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian. His hobby had turned
+into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long enough in silence, that at
+last he might come on a city of thought along the great highways of
+exchange.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)
+
+  The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life
+to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap in
+peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had reason to
+be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no such sense of
+power and momentum, and had seen no such number of personal friends
+wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for much in one's
+contentment, but the sense of winning one's game counts for more; and
+in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly interesting to the last
+survivor of the Legation of 1861. He thought himself perhaps the only
+person living who could get full enjoyment of the drama. He carried
+every scene of it, in a century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite
+alive in his mind--all the interminable disputes of his disputatious
+ancestors as far back as the year 1750--as well as his own
+insignificance in the Civil War, every step in which had the object of
+bringing England into an American system. For this they had written
+libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war,
+losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle and patient
+Puritan nature of their descendants, until even their private
+secretaries at times used language almost intemperate; and suddenly, by
+pure chance, the blessing fell on Hay. After two hundred years of
+stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument and no violence
+affected, the people of England learned their lesson just at the moment
+when Hay would otherwise have faced a flood of the old anxieties. Hay
+himself scarcely knew how grateful he should be, for to him the change
+came almost of course. He saw only the necessary stages that had led to
+it, and to him they seemed natural; but to Adams, still living in the
+atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance of
+Germany as the grizzly terror which, in twenty years effected what
+Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain--frightened England into
+America's arms--seemed as melodramatic as any plot of Napoleon the
+Great. He could feel only the sense of satisfaction at seeing the
+diplomatic triumph of all his family, since the breed existed, at last
+realized under his own eyes for the advantage of his oldest and closest
+ally.
+
+  This was history, not education, yet it taught something
+exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For
+the first time in his life, he felt a sense of possible purpose working
+itself out in history. Probably no one else on this earthly planet--not
+even Hay--could have come out on precisely such extreme personal
+satisfaction, but as he sat at Hay's table, listening to any member of
+the British Cabinet, for all were alike now, discuss the Philippines as
+a question of balance of power in the East, he could see that the
+family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand
+perspective of true empire-building, which Hay's work set off with
+artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations looked
+stronger and larger in scale for the refinement and certainty of the
+arcade. In the long list of famous American Ministers in London, none
+could have given the work quite the completeness, the harmony, the
+perfect ease of Hay.
+
+  Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law
+in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it, for
+chaos cannot be taught; but he thought he had a personal property by
+inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in the affairs
+of man--a property which no one else had right to dispute; and this
+personal triumph left him a little cold towards the other diplomatic
+results of the war. He knew that Porto Rico must be taken, but he would
+have been glad to escape the Philippines. Apart from too intimate an
+acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas, he knew the
+West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the American
+people might think or say about it, they would sooner or later have to
+police those islands, not against Europe, but for Europe, and America
+too. Education on the outskirts of civilized life teaches not very
+much, but it taught this; and one felt no call to shoulder the load of
+archipelagoes in the antipodes when one was trying painfully to pluck
+up courage to face the labor of shouldering archipelagoes at home. The
+country decided otherwise, and one acquiesced readily enough since the
+matter concerned only the public willingness to carry loads; in London,
+the balance of power in the East came alone into discussion; and in
+every point of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the
+result as though one had shared in the danger, instead of being
+vigorously employed in looking on from a great distance. After all,
+friends had done the work, if not one's self, and he too serves a
+certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
+
+  In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and
+took the fine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they made a
+sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms rivalling those
+of Shropshire, and, even compared with the many beautiful places
+scattered along the Welsh border, few are nobler or more genial than
+Surrenden with its unbroken descent from the Saxons, its avenues, its
+terraces, its deer-park, its large repose on the Kentish hillside, and
+its broad outlook over what was once the forest of Anderida. Filled
+with a constant stream of guests, the house seemed to wait for the
+chance to show its charms to the American, with whose activity the
+whole world was resounding; and never since the battle of Hastings
+could the little telegraph office of the Kentish village have done such
+work. There, on a hot July 4, 1898, to an expectant group under the
+shady trees, came the telegram announcing the destruction of the
+Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen Elizabeth in 1588; and
+there, later in the season, came the order summoning Hay to the State
+Department.
+
+  Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to
+remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as he.
+No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries of State,
+or how little strength he had in reserve against it. Even at Surrenden
+he showed none too much endurance, and he would gladly have found a
+valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on both sides was earnest,
+but the decided voice of the conclave was that, though if he were a
+mere office-seeker he might certainly decline promotion, if he were a
+member of the Government he could not. No serious statesman could
+accept a favor and refuse a service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in
+that case he must resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen
+fascination for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old
+drawback of all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes, even
+though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him, no doubt,
+the service, though hard, might bring some share of profit, but for the
+friends who gave this unselfish decision, all would prove loss. For
+one, Adams on that subject had become a little daft. No one in his
+experience had ever passed unscathed through that malarious marsh. In
+his fancy, office was poison; it killed--body and soul--physically and
+socially. Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in
+proportion as it held more power; but the poison he complained of was
+not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for
+that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison
+was that of the will--the distortion of sight--the warping of mind--the
+degradation of tissue--the coarsening of taste--the narrowing of
+sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed no office in order
+to wield influence. For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting
+for him to stoop to it; he enjoyed more than enough power without
+office; no one of his position, wealth, and political experience,
+living at the centre of politics in contact with the active party
+managers, could escape influence. His only ambition was to escape
+annoyance, and no one knew better than he that, at sixty years of age,
+sensitive to physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality,
+vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost of life.
+
+  Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made pretence of
+gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and
+lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the lighter for
+their humor, and his obedience to the President's order was the
+gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark views, too,
+not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, while Hay had at least
+the honors of office, his friends would share only the ennuis of it;
+but, as usual with Hay, nothing was gained by taking such matters
+solemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left their mark of military
+drill on every one who lived through it. He shouldered his pack and
+started for home. Adams had no mind to lose his friend without a
+struggle, though he had never known such sort of struggle to avail. The
+chance was desperate, but he could not afford to throw it away; so, as
+soon as the Surrenden establishment broke up, on October 17, he
+prepared for return home, and on November 13, none too gladly, found
+himself again gazing into La Fayette Square.
+
+  He had made another false start and lost two years more of
+education; nor had he excuse; for, this time, neither politics nor
+society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do with Hay's
+politics at home or abroad, and never affected agreement with his views
+or his methods, nor did Hay care whether his friends agreed or
+disagreed. They all united in trying to help each other to get along
+the best way they could, and all they tried to save was the personal
+relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten had he not been
+helped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her
+husband into the habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend
+off for an hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay
+afterwards, and a chat with any one who called.
+
+  For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in
+outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits which
+were slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right to be called
+pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued nothing, but drifted as
+attraction offered itself. The short session broke up the Washington
+circle, so that, on March 22, Adams was able to sail with the Lodges
+for Europe and to pass April in Sicily and Rome.
+
+  With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had
+left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860,
+but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and
+violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its study
+on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy, without a shade of
+sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse teaches
+more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli
+seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to a centre,
+for every new journey led back to its steps--Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi,
+Mycenæ, Constantinople, Syracuse--all lying on the road to the
+Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not
+yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral; and New York
+sent most of all, for, in forty years, America had made so vast a
+stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant
+horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic of Brutus and
+Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius
+Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school
+history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as
+familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under
+Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year,
+as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.
+
+  Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and
+obvious--in no way unpleasant--truth; therefore one sat silent as ever
+on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added
+a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose
+solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory--or
+sufficient--ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and
+better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St.
+Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh
+cross-lights on the old Assistant Professor of 1874 was due to the
+astonishing contrast between what he had taught then and what he found
+himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years
+afterwards--between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of
+his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes
+of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of
+derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and
+Soc:--
+
+     HIC JACET
+HOMUNCULUS SCRIPTOR
+ DOCTOR BARBARICUS
+   HENRICUS ADAMS
+ ADAE FILIUS ET EVAE
+   PRIMO EXPLICUIT
+       SOCNAM
+
+  The Latin was as twelfth-century as the law, and he meant as
+satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of
+Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a
+shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of
+view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph
+Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. Convinced that the
+clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one
+had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School,
+because one could see no other path to a profession.
+
+  The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
+other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
+continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own.
+St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the
+whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with
+a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no
+meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered. He
+passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with the last at
+Surrenden; but the solitude did what the society did not--it forced and
+drove him into the study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last he
+entered the practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could
+no longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a methodical
+survey--a triangulation--of the twelfth century. The pursuit had a
+singular French charm which France had long lost--a calmness, lucidity,
+simplicity of expression, vigor of action, complexity of local color,
+that made Paris flat. In the long summer days one found a sort of
+saturated green pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in
+the little twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassuming as
+their own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches;
+but churches were many and summer was short, so that he was at last
+driven back to the quays and photographs. For weeks he lived in silence.
+
+  His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of
+John La Farge. At that moment, contact with La Farge had a new value.
+Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since 1850 John La
+Farge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat at
+his feet since 1872, the question how much he owed to La Farge could be
+answered only by admitting that he had no standard to measure it by. Of
+all his friends La Farge alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast
+against the commonplaces of American uniformity, and in the process had
+vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The
+American mind--the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western--likes
+to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it
+takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional
+analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional
+expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality. The
+most disconcerting trait of John La Farge was his reversal of the
+process. His approach was quiet and indirect; he moved round an object,
+and never separated it from its surroundings; he prided himself on
+faithfulness to tradition and convention; he was never abrupt and
+abhorred dispute. His manners and attitude towards the universe were
+the same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sketching
+the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of sea-sickness, or
+drinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of Japan, or sipping his
+cocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of Samoan chiefs, or reflecting
+under the sacred bo-tree at Anaradjpura.
+
+  One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to
+respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of
+contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okakura, his
+thought ran as a stream runs through grass, hidden perhaps but always
+there; and one felt often uncertain in what direction it flowed, for
+even a contradiction was to him only a shade of difference, a
+complementary color, about which no intelligent artist would dispute.
+Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams, you reason too much!" was one
+of his standing reproaches even in the mild discussion of rice and
+mangoes in the warm night of Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed
+Adams for being born in Boston. The mind resorts to reason for want of
+training, and Adams had never met a perfectly trained mind.
+
+  To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really
+eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone--a shade--a
+nuance--and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of course
+all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, but
+few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive
+between their art and their talk. One evening Humphreys Johnston, who
+was devoted to La Farge, asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge
+was ill--more ill than usual even for him--but he admired and liked
+Whistler, and insisted on going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to
+overhear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear that
+of Whistler, which engrossed the table. At that moment the Boer War was
+raging, and, as every one knows, on that subject Whistler raged worse
+than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed against England--witty,
+declamatory, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and noisy; but in substance
+what he said was not merely commonplace--it was true! That is to say,
+his hearers, including Adams and, as far as he knew, La Farge, agreed
+with it all, and mostly as a matter of course; yet La Farge was silent,
+and this difference of expression was a difference of art. Whistler in
+his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point
+reached by La Farge, or even attempted; but in talk he showed, above or
+below his color-instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real
+eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed.
+
+  This vehemence, which Whistler never betrayed in his painting,
+La Farge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value of La
+Farge's glass in the history of glass-decoration, Adams was too
+ignorant to meddle, and as a rule artists were if possible more
+ignorant than he; but whatever it was, it led him back to the twelfth
+century and to Chartres where La Farge not only felt at home, but felt
+a sort of ownership. No other American had a right there, unless he too
+were a member of the Church and worked in glass. Adams himself was an
+interloper, but long habit led La Farge to resign himself to Adams as
+one who meant well, though deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, though
+near sixty years old before he knew anything either of glass or of
+Chartres, asked no better than to learn, and only La Farge could help
+him, for he knew enough at least to see that La Farge alone could use
+glass like a thirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been dead
+for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge felt the
+early glass rather as a document than as a historical emotion, and in
+hundreds of windows at Chartres and Bourges and Paris, Adams knew
+barely one or two that were meant to hold their own against a
+color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La Farge's mind was
+opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color
+toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it
+was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and
+vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.
+
+  Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel
+was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a step
+backwards towards Chartres, but La Farge's health became more and more
+alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back to New York,
+January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to Washington to find
+out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could be hoped, for Hay's
+troubles had begun, and were quite as great as he had foreseen. Adams
+saw as little encouragement as Hay himself did, though he dared not say
+so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness in supporting
+him, and the loyalty of his party friends; but all this worry on Hay's
+account fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War did on his own.
+Here was a problem in his political education that passed all
+experience since the Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to his
+astonishment, very few Americans seemed to share his point of view;
+their hostility to England seemed mere temper; but to Adams the war
+became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from childhood,
+even in England, that his forbears and their associates in 1776 had
+settled, once for all, the liberties of the British free colonies, and
+he very strongly objected to being thrown on the defensive again, and
+forced to sit down, a hundred and fifty years after John Adams had
+begun the task, to prove, by appeal to law and fact, that George
+Washington was not a felon, whatever might be the case with George III.
+For reasons still more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain
+question of the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even
+further, and avow the opinion that if at any time England should take
+towards Canada the position she took towards her Boer colonies, the
+United States would be bound, by their record, to interpose, and to
+insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him the
+attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed exceedingly
+un-American, and terribly embarrassing to Hay.
+
+  Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue,
+and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could
+never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical
+objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms. Hay's
+chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck should turn, and
+to him the only object was time; but as political education the point
+seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shutting his eyes or denying an
+evident fact. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but
+education and politics are two different and often contradictory
+things. In this case, the contradiction seemed crude.
+
+  With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing
+whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram Hewitt,
+Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden--men who played the game for
+ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the
+professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of
+the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of
+the work. In return, the professionals felt no great love for them, and
+set them aside when they could. Only their control of money made them
+inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. The story
+of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman series, and that
+of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside the one; President
+Harrison set aside the other. "There is no politics in it," was his
+comment on Hay's appointment to office. Hay held a different opinion
+and turned to McKinley whose judgment of men was finer than common in
+Presidents. Mr. McKinley brought to the problem of American government
+a solution which lay very far outside of Henry Adams's education, but
+which seemed to be at least practical and American. He undertook to
+pool interests in a general trust into which every interest should be
+taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should, under
+his management, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results.
+How much they cost was another matter; if the public is ever driven to
+its last resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the result will
+probably cost more.
+
+  Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several
+manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of whom
+was Hay; but unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and his task
+hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by simply paying
+their price; but abroad whatever helped on one side, hurt him on
+another. Hay thought England must be brought first into the combine;
+but at that time Germany, Russia, and France were all combining against
+England, and the Boer War helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally,
+abroad or at home, except Pauncefote, and Adams always maintained that
+Pauncefote alone pulled him through.
+
+  Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the
+obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more unmanageable,
+even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was less the fault of
+the Senate than of the system. "A treaty of peace, in any normal state
+of things," said Hay, "ought to be ratified with unanimity in
+twenty-four hours. They wasted six weeks in wrangling over this one,
+and ratified it with one vote to spare. We have five or six matters now
+demanding settlement. I can settle them all, honorably and
+advantageously to our own side; and I am assured by leading men in the
+Senate that not one of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the
+Senate. I should have a majority in every case, but a malcontent third
+would certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the
+original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of our
+politics. You must understand, it is not merely my solution the Senate
+will reject. They will reject, for instance, any treaty, whatever, on
+any subject, with England. I doubt if they would accept any treaty of
+consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrant third would be
+differently composed, but it would be on hand. So that the real duties
+of a Secretary of State seem to be three: to fight claims upon us by
+other States; to press more or less fraudulent claims of our own
+citizens upon other countries; to find offices for the friends of
+Senators when there are none. Is it worth while--for me--to keep up
+this useless labor?"
+
+  To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances
+struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the
+interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it in a
+dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of a hundred years
+before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as to be humorous. The
+intrigue was too open to be interesting. The interference of the German
+and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with the press and the
+Senate was innocently undisguised. The charming Russian Minister, Count
+Cassini, the ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days
+pass without appealing through the press to the public against the
+government. The German Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously did the
+same thing, and of course every whisper of theirs was brought instantly
+to the Department. These three forces, acting with the regular
+opposition and the natural obstructionists, could always stop action in
+the Senate. The fathers had intended to neutralize the energy of
+government and had succeeded, but their machine was never meant to do
+the work of a twenty-million horse-power society in the twentieth
+century, where much work needed to be quickly and efficiently done. The
+only defence of the system was that, as Government did nothing well, it
+had best do nothing; but the Government, in truth, did perfectly well
+all it was given to do; and even if the charge were true, it applied
+equally to human society altogether, if one chose to treat mankind from
+that point of view. As a matter of mechanics, so much work must be
+done; bad machinery merely added to friction.
+
+  Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had
+treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling it
+to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all: he laughed and
+accepted; he had never known unhappiness and would have gladly lived
+his entire life over again exactly as it happened. In the whole New
+York school, one met a similar dash of humor and cynicism more or less
+pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even the gayest of tempers succumbs
+at last to constant friction. The old friend was rapidly fading. The
+habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual
+humor, the equality of indifference, were sinking into the routine of
+office; the mind lingered in the Department; the thought failed to
+react; the wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and
+the irritations multiplied. To a head of bureau, the result seemed
+ennobling.
+
+  Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar
+and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two
+periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that these
+political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and twentieth
+centuries should be correlated in some relation of movement that could
+be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the
+world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough
+mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s = gt^2/2.
+If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an
+obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square could take
+liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction
+into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even
+infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical
+formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar universe
+weighed heavily on his mind; but a trifling matter like this was one in
+which he could look for no help from anybody--he could look only for
+derision at best.
+
+  All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as
+futile and almost immoral--certainly hostile to sound historical
+system. Adams tried it only because of its hostility to all that he had
+taught for history, since he started afresh from the new point that,
+whatever was right, all he had ever taught was wrong. He had pursued
+ignorance thus far with success, and had swept his mind clear of
+knowledge. In beginning again, from the starting-point of Sir Isaac
+Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in
+Washington cared to overstep the school conventions, and the most
+distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to
+treat such a scheme seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his
+rank in science, Willard Gibbs, never came to Washington, and Adams
+never enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs, one of the most
+distinguished was Langley, of the Smithsonian, who was more accessible,
+to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever he wanted
+an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley listened with
+outward patience to his disputatious questionings; but he too nourished
+a scientific passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its
+avowal. He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know
+nothing between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great
+observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists,
+he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of
+philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers
+to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander
+past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as
+though recognizing their existence, while doubting their
+respectability. He generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to
+affirm; and early put into Adams's hands the "Concepts of Modern
+Science," a volume by Judge Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen
+years by the schools with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably
+meets every revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of
+instruction. Adams read and failed to understand; then he asked
+questions and failed to get answers.
+
+  Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific
+education open to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be as
+ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant
+nothing: he wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough, or was
+too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion; never to direction or
+progress. History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it
+could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything
+must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure; and
+so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more, and found himself on May 12
+settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)
+
+  UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in
+November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to
+find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been
+grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus
+meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley's
+behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself
+to the skin, for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while
+Adams might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the
+Milky Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one
+might not have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but
+though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well as
+one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge counted for
+nothing until some teacher should show how to apply it. Bacon took a
+vast deal of trouble in teaching King James I and his subjects,
+American or other, towards the year 1620, that true science was the
+development or economy of forces; yet an elderly American in 1900 knew
+neither the formula nor the forces; or even so much as to say to
+himself that his historical business in the Exposition concerned only
+the economies or developments of force since 1893, when he began the
+study at Chicago.
+
+  Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
+ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked
+at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art
+Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900.
+He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound
+attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. Langley, with the ease
+of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit
+that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw
+out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, he ignored
+almost the whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to the
+forces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship
+feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new
+Daimler motor, and of the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a
+nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the
+electric tram which was only ten years older; and threatening to become
+as terrible as the locomotive steam-engine itself, which was almost
+exactly Adams's own age.
+
+  Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and
+explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind,
+even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable
+volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any
+time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To him, the dynamo itself
+was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in
+a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept
+out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As
+he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel
+the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians
+felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its
+old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge
+wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and
+barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a
+hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake
+the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to
+pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man
+before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of
+ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the
+most expressive.
+
+  Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar
+of exhibits. For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult
+mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the
+engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal
+fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover
+between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and
+the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but
+he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley
+could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same
+trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were
+anarchical, and especially that he was not responsible for the new
+rays, that were little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit
+towards science. His own rays, with which he had doubled the solar
+spectrum, were altogether harmless and beneficent; but Radium denied
+its God--or, what was to Langley the same thing, denied the truths of
+his Science. The force was wholly new.
+
+  A historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as
+Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed
+himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise
+of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped
+himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged
+Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo; while he
+lost his arithmetic in trying to figure out the equation between the
+discoveries and the economies of force. The economies, like the
+discoveries, were absolute, supersensual, occult; incapable of
+expression in horse-power. What mathematical equivalent could he
+suggest as the value of a Branly coherer? Frozen air, or the electric
+furnace, had some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could
+invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose; but X-rays had played no
+part whatever in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had figured
+only as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man had translated
+himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement
+with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could
+measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible
+to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but
+perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the
+scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable
+number of universes interfused--physics stark mad in metaphysics.
+
+  Historians undertake to arrange sequences,--called stories,
+or histories--assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These
+assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been
+astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if
+any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would
+probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves
+required to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had
+toiled in vain to find out what he meant. He had even published a dozen
+volumes of American history for no other purpose than to satisfy
+himself whether, by severest process of stating, with the least
+possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed
+rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary
+sequence of human movement. The result had satisfied him as little as
+at Harvard College. Where he saw sequence, other men saw something
+quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared
+little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed
+to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, no more honest; but
+he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by
+one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied
+that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their
+society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was
+artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to
+the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years'
+pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great
+Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption
+of forces totally new.
+
+  Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person
+without other cares had no need to betray alarm. The year 1900 was not
+the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo had broken
+many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its
+head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900
+was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross. The rays that
+Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult,
+supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy
+like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediaeval science,
+were called immediate modes of the divine substance.
+
+  The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly
+if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this
+common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his
+own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt; as convertible,
+reversible, interchangeable attractions on thought. He made up his mind
+to venture it; he would risk translating rays into faith. Such a
+reversible process would vastly amuse a chemist, but the chemist could
+not deny that he, or some of his fellow physicists, could feel the
+force of both. When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the
+place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of
+the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamos or
+automobiles or radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of all,
+though the rays were unborn and the women were dead.
+
+  Here opened another totally new education, which promised to be
+by far the most hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he must
+crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms
+of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as
+different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a
+magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still
+felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America
+neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force--at most as sentiment.
+No American had ever been truly afraid of either.
+
+  This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American
+historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed
+potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown
+in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was
+ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so
+profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of
+fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a
+feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was
+notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans
+knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither
+art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that
+neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was
+worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she
+was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction--the greatest and most
+mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. Singularly
+enough, not one of Adams's many schools of education had ever drawn his
+attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps
+the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus
+exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:--
+
+  "Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."
+
+The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
+Schools:--
+
+  "Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
+   Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
+   Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."
+
+  All this was to American thought as though it had never
+existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of
+the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before
+this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless;
+he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly
+coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the
+record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest
+energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art,
+exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the
+steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was
+unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare
+command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
+
+  The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth
+century seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost violently
+to study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys were as useless
+as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos. The idea survived only
+as art. There one turned as naturally as though the artist were himself
+a woman. Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any
+American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as every
+classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret
+Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two
+painters, for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment,
+never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias an
+unfeminine horror. American art, like the American language and
+American education, was as far as possible sexless. Society regarded
+this victory over sex as its greatest triumph, and the historian
+readily admitted it, since the moral issue, for the moment, did not
+concern one who was studying the relations of unmoral force. He cared
+nothing for the sex of the dynamo until he could measure its energy.
+
+  Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit,
+and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's
+General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor. St.
+Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual
+interminable last touches, and listening to the usual contradictory
+suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the American artists who gave
+to American art whatever life it breathed in the seventies, St. Gaudens
+was perhaps the most sympathetic, but certainly the most inarticulate.
+General Grant or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct of rhetoric
+than he. All the others--the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford
+White--were exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss or dilate
+on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the
+forms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the despot,
+or became brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his world. He
+required no incense; he was no egoist; his simplicity of thought was
+excessive; he could not imitate, or give any form but his own to the
+creations of his hand. No one felt more strongly than he the strength
+of other men, but the idea that they could affect him never stirred an
+image in his mind.
+
+  This summer his health was poor and his spirits were low. For
+such a temper, Adams was not the best companion, since his own gaiety
+was not folle; but he risked going now and then to the studio on Mont
+Parnasse to draw him out for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, or
+dinner as pleased his moods, and in return St. Gaudens sometimes let
+Adams go about in his company.
+
+  Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of
+Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves
+actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on
+Adams's mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that spot had more
+interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great
+monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too
+solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol
+Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals: "I darted a contemptuous look on
+the stately monuments of superstition." Even in the footnotes of his
+history, Gibbon had never inserted a bit of humor more human than this,
+and one would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little
+historian, on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to
+persuade his readers--perhaps himself--that he was darting a
+contemptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact
+the respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always
+feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one felt also
+the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789 religious
+monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and
+simple as the green fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of
+other remarks, mostly no more fresh and certainly less simple. Without
+malice, one might find it more instructive than a whole lecture of
+Ruskin. One sees what one brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the
+French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St.
+Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more
+than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity;
+their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their decorative
+sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the force that
+created it all--the Virgin, the Woman--by whose genius "the stately
+monuments of superstition" were built, through which she was expressed.
+He would have seen more meaning in Isis with the cow's horns, at Edfoo,
+who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was
+lost even upon the artist.
+
+  Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500s
+he bore the stamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an image
+of the Virgin round his neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis XI. In
+mere time he was a lost soul that had strayed by chance to the
+twentieth century, and forgotten where it came from. He writhed and
+cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did at his own, but in the
+opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered
+in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devoured by
+curiosity to think like Benvenuto. St. Gaudens's art was starved from
+birth, and Adams's instinct was blighted from babyhood. Each had but
+half of a nature, and when they came together before the Virgin of
+Amiens they ought both to have felt in her the force that made them
+one; but it was not so. To Adams she became more than ever a channel of
+force; to St. Gaudens she remained as before a channel of taste.
+
+  For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the
+horse, as was plain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monument.
+Doubtless Sherman also felt it so. The attitude was so American that,
+for at least forty years, Adams had never realized that any other could
+be in sound taste. How many years had he taken to admit a notion of
+what Michael Angelo and Rubens were driving at? He could not say; but
+he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus
+as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres--perhaps at
+Lourdes--possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely
+naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles--but otherwise one must look for force to
+the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the
+German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less
+sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the
+Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power--only as
+reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely
+even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all
+other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a
+railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the
+world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.
+
+  Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both
+energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man
+all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured
+force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was
+the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician
+cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no
+symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work.
+The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as
+the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by
+ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the
+greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's
+activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
+supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the
+track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to;
+its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents,
+conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could
+hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly
+than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as
+a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were
+occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the
+Virgin easiest to handle.
+
+  The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last
+to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand
+in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as
+stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with
+the instinct of despair could one force one's self into this old
+thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed a score of entrances
+more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere,
+unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of
+study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one
+controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of
+force controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of
+education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled
+over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force
+almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of
+blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen
+works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material
+over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never
+arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist
+knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and
+shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to
+return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The
+result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what
+is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their
+play or variety. Compelled once more to lean heavily on this support,
+Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures as formal as though
+they were algebra, laboriously striking out, altering, burning,
+experimenting, until the year had expired, the Exposition had long been
+closed, and winter drawing to its end, before he sailed from Cherbourg,
+on January 19, 1901, for home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+TWILIGHT (1901)
+
+  WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, and submitted
+meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the Paris
+Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and Besnard,
+the world that thought itself serious, and showed other infallible
+marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at Peking
+and elsewhere such as startled even itself. Of all branches of
+education, the science of gauging people and events by their relative
+importance defies study most insolently. For three or four generations,
+society has united in withering with contempt and opprobrium the
+shameless futility of Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. du Barry; yet, if one
+bid at an auction for some object that had been approved by the taste
+of either lady, one quickly found that it were better to buy
+half-a-dozen Napoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas, or all the
+philosophy and science of their time, than to bid for a cane-bottomed
+chair that either of these two ladies had adorned. The same thing might
+be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire; while, as every one knows,
+the money-value of any hand-stroke of Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or
+Sir Joshua, is out of all proportion to the importance of the men.
+Society seemed to delight in talking with solemn conviction about
+serious values, and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most
+futile. The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in the
+eyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his
+study, since it brought him suddenly to the inevitable struggle for the
+control of China, which, in his view, must decide the control of the
+world; yet, as a money-value, the fall of China was chiefly studied in
+Paris and London as a calamity to Chinese porcelain. The value of a
+Ming vase was more serious than universal war.
+
+  The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though
+it were a novel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on
+future history offered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more
+about it than though he were the best-informed statesman in Europe.
+Like them all, he took for granted that the Legations were massacred,
+and that John Hay, who alone championed China's "administrative
+entity," would be massacred too, since he must henceforth look on, in
+impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China, and shut up
+America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten, in Europe, accepted this
+result in advance, seeing no way to prevent it. Adams saw none, and
+laughed at Hay for his helplessness.
+
+  When Hay suddenly ignored European leadership, took the lead
+himself, rescued the Legations and saved China, Adams looked on, as
+incredulous as Europe, though not quite so stupid, since, on that
+branch of education, he knew enough for his purpose. Nothing so
+meteoric had ever been done in American diplomacy. On returning to
+Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of the world as astonished
+as himself, but less stupid than usual. For a moment, indeed, the world
+had been struck dumb at seeing Hay put Europe aside and set the
+Washington Government at the head of civilization so quietly that
+civilization submitted, by mere instinct of docility, to receive and
+obey his orders; but, after the first shock of silence, society felt
+the force of the stroke through its fineness, and burst into almost
+tumultuous applause. Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century,
+with all its painful scuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the
+American blushed to be told of his submissions in the past. History
+broke in halves.
+
+  Hay was too good an artist not to feel the artistic skill of
+his own work, and the success reacted on his health, giving him fresh
+life, for with him as with most men, success was a tonic, and
+depression a specific poison; but as usual, his troubles nested at
+home. Success doubles strain. President McKinley's diplomatic court had
+become the largest in the world, and the diplomatic relations required
+far more work than ever before, while the staff of the Department was
+little more efficient, and the friction in the Senate had become
+coagulated. Hay took to studying the "Diary" of John Quincy Adams
+eighty years before, and calculated that the resistance had increased
+about ten times, as measured by waste of days and increase of effort,
+although Secretary of State J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly
+treated. Hay cheerfully noted that it was killing him, and proved it,
+for the effort of the afternoon walk became sometimes painful.
+
+  For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly
+team were less fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole load and
+turned the dangerous corners safely, while Cassini and Holleben helped
+the Senate to make what trouble they could, without serious offence,
+and the Irish, after the genial Celtic nature, obstructed even
+themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanks to their sympathetic qualities,
+never made lasting enmities; but the Germans seemed in a fair way to
+rouse ill-will and even ugly temper in the spirit of politics, which
+was by no means a part of Hay's plans. He had as much as he could do to
+overcome domestic friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreign
+powers. Yet so much could be said in favor of the foreigners that they
+commonly knew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive.
+Cassini had for years pursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of
+his own, never disguised, and as little in harmony with his chief as
+with Hay; he made his opposition on fixed lines for notorious objects;
+but Senators could seldom give a reason for obstruction. In every
+hundred men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, and try to invent
+reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no worse than the
+board of a university; but incorporators as a rule have not made this
+class of men dictators on purpose to prevent action. In the Senate, a
+single vote commonly stopped legislation, or, in committee, stifled
+discussion.
+
+  Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations,
+and closing all discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant
+obstruction, which could be overcome only by patience and bargaining in
+executive patronage, if indeed it could be overcome at all. The price
+actually paid was not very great except in the physical exhaustion of
+Hay and Pauncefote, Root and McKinley. No serious bargaining of
+equivalents could be attempted; Senators would not sacrifice five
+dollars in their own States to gain five hundred thousand in another;
+but whenever a foreign country was willing to surrender an advantage
+without an equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty.
+In all such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the
+Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of time
+and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed Hay; "the
+Major will have promised all the consulates in the service; the
+Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe me dis-consulate; I
+shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by one, by the thirty-four
+per cent of kickers and strikers; the only mitigation I can foresee is
+being sick a good part of the time; I am nearing my grand climacteric,
+and the great culbute is approaching."
+
+  He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
+all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
+historian their sufferings had been a long delight--the solitary
+picturesque and tragic element in politics--incidentally requiring
+character-studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and
+Webster and Sumner, with Sir Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and
+stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of
+Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades,
+Falstaffs, and Malvolios--endless varieties of human nature nowhere
+else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or
+because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is so gay
+and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely, but
+what he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the vast
+mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly complained that it had made
+him a bore--of all things the most senatorial, and to him the most
+obnoxious. The old friend was lost, and only the teacher remained,
+driven to madness by the complexities and multiplicities of his new
+world.
+
+  To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
+seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great value
+except as measures of mass and motion. For him the practical interest
+and the practical man were such as looked forward to the next election,
+or perhaps, in corporations, five or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen
+men in America could be named who were known to have looked a dozen
+years ahead; while any historian who means to keep his alignment with
+past and future must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he
+seeks to align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of
+some sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every
+historian--sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably--must have
+put to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn
+system last? He can never give himself less than one generation to show
+the full effects of a changed condition. His object is to triangulate
+from the widest possible base to the furthest point he thinks he can
+see, which is always far beyond the curvature of the horizon.
+
+  To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably
+the practical man is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right--if
+the question of right or wrong enters at all into the matter--the
+historian has no choice but to go on alone. Even in his own profession
+few companions offer help, and his walk soon becomes solitary, leading
+further and further into a wilderness where twilight is short and the
+shadows are dense. Already Hay literally staggered in his tracks for
+weariness. More worn than he, Clarence King dropped. One day in the
+spring he stopped an hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and
+simply telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his
+lungs. All three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that
+if it were not the one it would be the other; but the affectation of
+readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid resource,
+though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed of it even in the
+acting.
+
+  The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that
+a share of it flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared
+from their lives; but Hay had still his family and ambition, while
+Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, his eyes
+rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie
+of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to
+reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far
+look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the
+passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to
+fall into King's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left
+in life. Time had become terribly short, and the sense of knowing so
+little when others knew so much, crushed out hope.
+
+  He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk,
+idly pulling threads out of the tangled skein of science, to see
+whether or why they aligned themselves. The commonest and oldest toy he
+knew was the child's magnet, with which he had played since babyhood,
+the most familiar of puzzles. He covered his desk with magnets, and
+mapped out their lines of force by compass. Then he read all the books
+he could find, and tried in vain to makes his lines of force agree with
+theirs. The books confounded him. He could not credit his own
+understanding. Here was literally the most concrete fact in nature,
+next to gravitation which it defied; a force which must have radiated
+lines of energy without stop, since time began, if not longer, and
+which might probably go on radiating after the sun should fall into the
+earth, since no one knew why--or how--or what it radiated--or even
+whether it radiated at all. Perhaps the earliest known of all natural
+forces after the solar energies, it seemed to have suggested no idea to
+any one until some mariner bethought himself that it might serve for a
+pointer. Another thousand years passed when it taught some other
+intelligent man to use it as a pump, supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir
+for collecting electricity, still without knowing how it worked or what
+it was. For a historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the
+invention of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human
+ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as his
+mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some one,
+somewhere, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could but find
+the book--although he had been forced to admit the same helplessness in
+the face of gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors; and he could
+imagine no reason why society should treat radium as revolutionary in
+science when every infant, for ages past, had seen the magnet doing
+what radium did; for surely the kind of radiation mattered nothing
+compared with the energy that radiated and the matter supplied for
+radiation. He dared not venture into the complexities of chemistry, or
+microbes, so long as this child's toy offered complexities that
+befogged his mind beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless
+variety of pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He
+wanted to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
+radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a magnet.
+He figured the human mind itself as another radiating matter through
+which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.
+
+  In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
+microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the forces.
+To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new relation
+staggered his new education by its evidence of growing complexity, and
+multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He could not escape it;
+politics or science, the lesson was the same, and at every step it
+blocked his path whichever way he turned. He found it in politics; he
+ran against it in science; he struck it in everyday life, as though he
+were still Adam in the Garden of Eden between God who was unity, and
+Satan who was complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth.
+The problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate
+as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and Adams.
+
+  All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
+always won. The National Government and the national unity had overcome
+every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over
+all the curates; yet the greater the unity and the momentum, the worse
+became the complexity and the friction. One had in vain bowed one's
+neck to railways, banks, corporations, trusts, and even to the popular
+will as far as one could understand it--or even further; the
+multiplicity of unity had steadily increased, was increasing, and
+threatened to increase beyond reason. He had surrendered all his
+favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism--except
+for his pet amusement, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulant
+necessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and Pteraspis and
+ice age and tramways and telephones; and now--just when he was ready to
+hang the crowning garland on the brow of a completed education--science
+itself warned him to begin it again from the beginning.
+
+  Maundering among the magnets he bethought himself that once, a
+full generation earlier, he had begun active life by writing a
+confession of geological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell, and
+that it might be worth looking at if only to steady his vision. He read
+it again, and thought it better than he could do at sixty-three; but
+elderly minds always work loose. He saw his doubts grown larger, and
+became curious to know what had been said about them since 1870. The
+Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes, and reading for steady
+months; while, the longer he read, the more he wondered, pondered,
+doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would have
+said about it.
+
+  Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught
+young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of
+learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and
+the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve
+themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one. Adams
+asked whether geology since 1867 had drifted towards unity or
+multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would depend on the age of the
+man who drifted.
+
+  Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see
+what had happened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, the
+Pteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported when
+geological life was young; as though they had all remained together in
+time to act the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat "how
+charming is divine philosophy!" He felt almost aggrieved to find
+Walcott so vigorously acting the part of Comus as to have flung the
+ganoid all the way off to Colorado and far back into the Lower Trenton
+limestone, making the Pteraspis as modern as a Mississippi gar-pike by
+spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely more remote, in the dawn of
+known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone
+were the liveliest amusement to the ganoid, but they buried the
+uniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for
+all the ganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to
+hazard even in secret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection
+by Minute Changes under Uniform Conditions, for he could know no more
+about it than most of his neighbors who knew nothing; but natural
+selection that did not select--evolution finished before it
+began--minute changes that refused to change anything during the whole
+geological record--survival of the highest order in a fauna which had
+no origin--uniformity under conditions which had disturbed everything
+else in creation--to an honest-meaning though ignorant student who
+needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, such sequence
+brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form caused
+evolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural
+selection and minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted
+itself into thought. The ganoid fish seemed to prove--to him--that it
+had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were
+right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in
+intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a huge
+perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid troubled
+Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal that Darwinism
+seemed to survive only in England. In vain he asked what sort of
+evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemed orthodox.
+Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its own lines
+quite beyond mechanical explanation, had cropped up again. A little
+more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species.
+
+  What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
+the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to them;
+but to the historian who sought only the direction of thought and had
+begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter of
+direction seemed vital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the
+glacial epoch, and had surveyed a universe of unities and uniformities.
+In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran
+about in every direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping
+abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and
+sequences that could not be proved. The active geologists had mostly
+become specialists dealing with complexities far too technical for an
+amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve for beginners, as
+they had served when new.
+
+  So the cause of the glacial epoch remained at the mercy of
+Lyell and Croll, although Geikie had split up the period into
+half-a-dozen intermittent chills in recent geology and in the northern
+hemisphere alone, while no geologist had ventured to assert that the
+glaciation of the southern hemisphere could possibly be referred to a
+horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly and wildly sank,
+though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work,
+showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans
+rose and sank. Lyell's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for
+nothing had taken its place, though, in the interval, granite had grown
+young, nothing had been explained, and a bewildering system of huge
+overthrusts had upset geological mechanics. The textbooks refused even
+to discuss theories, frankly throwing up their hands and avowing that
+progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself.
+
+  Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science
+than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no
+way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or
+discuss the principles of any science; but the history of the mind
+concerned the historian alone, and the historian had no vital concern
+in anything else, for he found no change to record in the body. In
+thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignorance to a faith and
+degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobites
+without evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and
+had even plucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord
+Kelvin forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
+experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly to this
+last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical
+Religion in the effort to force unification of the universe; they had
+protested with mild conviction that they could not state the geological
+record in terms of time; they had murmured Ignoramus under their
+breath; but they had never dared to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on
+the tips of their tongues.
+
+  Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
+change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
+attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times
+by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
+electrolytic--who knew what?--defying science, if not denying known
+law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a
+"larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into
+far too much trouble by following schools of theology in their efforts
+to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeat the
+process in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon
+reached where larger synthesis is suicide.
+
+ Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of
+rapidly increasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the
+change might be only in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any
+student, of any age, thinking only of a thought and not of his thought,
+should delight in turning about and trying the opposite motion, as he
+delights in the spring which brings even to a tired and irritated
+statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms, cherry-blossoms, and
+dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knows that this
+sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years help
+nothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape
+floundering through the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed
+to the end; but they could at least float with the stream if they only
+knew which way the current ran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh
+with the Limulus and Lepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by
+side with Adamses and Quincys and Harvard College, all unchanged and
+unchangeable since archaic time; but what purpose would it serve? A
+seeker of truth--or illusion--would be none the less restless, though a
+shark!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+TEUFELSDROCKH (1901)
+
+  INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more and more
+futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no other
+spot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side. Even
+more vigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris taught in the
+twentieth, with no other school approaching it for variety of direction
+and energy of mind. Of the teaching in detail, a man who knew only what
+accident had taught him in the nineteenth century, could know next to
+nothing, since science had got quite beyond his horizon, and
+mathematics had become the only necessary language of thought; but one
+could play with the toys of childhood, including Ming porcelain, salons
+of painting, operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothic architecture,
+theology and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about with Joe
+Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying
+"Louise" at the Opera Comique, or discussing the charm of youth and the
+Seine with Bay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris remained
+Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though China fell.
+Scores of artists--sculptors and painters, poets and dramatists,
+workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs and furniture--hundreds
+of chemists, physicists, even philosophers, philologists, physicians,
+and historians--were at work, a thousand times as actively as ever
+before, and the mass and originality of their product would have
+swamped any previous age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the
+effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as
+before the chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front
+of the movement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall
+behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.
+
+  The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even
+pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced
+student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or
+Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in the
+morning in a beer-garden even after four hours of Mounet Sully at the
+Theatre Francais. In those branches, education might be called closed.
+Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything worth knowing to a man
+who, holding open the door into the next world, regarded himself as
+merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The glance was more
+amusing than any he had known in his active life, but it was
+more--infinitely more--chaotic and complex.
+
+  Still something remained to be done for education beyond the
+chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or there-abouts,
+he had been repeating that he really must go to Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs.
+Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him come. He joined them,
+parents and children, alert and eager and appreciative as ever, at the
+little old town of Rothenburg-on-the Taube, and they went on to the
+Baireuth festival together.
+
+  Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an
+immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would have
+opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different
+from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth
+seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Brunhilde, perhaps even
+for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world, calm, contemplative, and
+remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed, and Wagner had become
+a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo
+element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna--perhaps the
+Potomac itself--had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, and
+one could hardly listen to the "Gotterdammerung" in New York, among
+throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous
+excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as
+though the gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be
+whatever one pleased--venal, sordid, vulgar--but society nursed there,
+in the rottenness of its decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and
+thought them proof of art. Perhaps they were; and at all events, Wagner
+was chiefly responsible for them as artistic emotion. New York knew
+better than Baireuth what Wagner meant, and the frivolities of Paris
+had more than once included the rising of the Seine to drown out the
+Etoile or Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambition that casts
+spells of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtile flattery
+in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men would surely
+happen there, while no one could conceive of its happening at Baireuth,
+or would care if it did. Paris coquetted with catastrophe as though it
+were an old mistress--faced it almost gaily as she had done so often,
+for they were acquainted since Rome began to ravage Europe; while New
+York met it with a glow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable
+earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made
+nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the
+accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had
+lost its charm, but the Fluch-motif went home.
+
+  Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become
+a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy; though not
+with socialism, which, to young men who nourished artistic emotions
+under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest
+middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly
+new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore
+true poetry under the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a
+party saw no inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and
+audience were--relatively--stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
+musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.
+
+  Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
+anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
+singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had supposed
+himself to mean. This end attained as pleased Frau Wagner and the
+Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and the Senator, yearning for
+sterner study, pointed to a haven at Moscow. For years Adams had taught
+American youth never to travel without a Senator who was useful even in
+America at times, but indispensable in Russia where, in 1901,
+anarchists, even though conservative and Christian, were ill-seen.
+
+  This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but
+two members, Adams and Bay Lodge. The conservative Christian anarchist,
+as a party, drew life from Hegel and Schopenhauer rightly understood.
+By the necessity of their philosophical descent, each member of the
+fraternity denounced the other as unequal to his lofty task and
+inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no third member could be so much as
+considered, since the great principle of contradiction could be
+expressed only by opposites; and no agreement could be conceived,
+because anarchy, by definition, must be chaos and collision, as in the
+kinetic theory of a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction
+was itself agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent
+with freedom; but the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement
+provided it were strictly confined to the end of larger contradiction.
+Thus the great end of all philosophy--the "larger synthesis"--was
+attained, but the process was arduous, and while Adams, as the older
+member, assumed to declare the principle, Bay Lodge necessarily denied
+both the assumption and the principle in order to assure its truth.
+
+  Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy
+were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and
+Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the end; and, to
+hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to concentrate energy;
+to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces; to reduce
+friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because this
+was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but
+partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and
+some others complained of; and finally--and chiefly--because a rigorous
+philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and satisfy
+man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate
+contradiction.
+
+  Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this
+scheme was neither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but such
+objection meant only that the critic should begin his education in any
+infant school in order to learn that anarchy which should be logical
+would cease to be anarchic. To the conservative Christian anarchist,
+the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian
+mental inertia covered with the name of anarchy merely to disguise
+their innocence; and the outpourings of Elisee Reclus were ideals of
+the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois
+dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of anarchy except
+as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither of them had
+formed any other conception of the universe than what they had
+inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously
+belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist, or collectivist,
+the mind that followed nature had no relation; if anarchists needed
+order, they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had
+enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian
+anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faith except the
+nature of nature itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault
+of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty
+could scarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only
+the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order--except the
+Church--had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the conservative
+Christian anarchist to prove his own.
+
+  Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that
+hardly more people could understand them than understood Wagner or
+Hegel; for that matter, since the time of Socrates, wise men have been
+mostly shy of claiming to understand anything; but such refinements
+were Greek or German, and affected the practical American but little.
+He admitted that, for the moment, the darkness was dense. He could not
+affirm with confidence, even to himself, that his "largest synthesis"
+would certainly turn out to be chaos, since he would be equally obliged
+to deny the chaos. The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of
+thought for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a
+hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and
+already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the
+riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to
+blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to
+increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.
+
+  Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to
+Russia in order to enlarge his "synthesis"--and much he needed it! In
+America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the faith was
+national, racial, geographic. The true American had never seen such
+supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades between social anarchy
+and social order as to mark it for exclusively human and his own. He
+never had known a complete union either in Church or State or thought,
+and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to
+meet any contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly
+the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire was
+a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history
+than all the complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts,
+sects, frauds, and Congressmen. These were Nature--pure and anarchic as
+the conservative Christian anarchist saw Nature--active, vibrating,
+mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first
+glimpse one caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning,
+of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird
+horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle
+and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St.
+Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic.
+Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that
+history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilization in
+Europe, and had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever
+known such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution
+whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in
+the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth.
+Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia
+became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity
+as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out--an
+inert residuum--with movement of pure inertia. From the car window one
+seemed to float past undulations of nomad life--herders deserted by
+their leaders and herds--wandering waves stopped in their
+wanderings--waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them
+westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had
+lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence.
+They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and
+could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy
+like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and
+snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day, in the
+Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study
+Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh
+his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in
+words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkin answered every purpose.
+
+  The Russian people could never have changed--could they ever
+be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up, or
+take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller scale, the
+question was old and unanswered. All the so-called primitive races, and
+some nearer survivals, had raised doubts which persisted against the
+most obstinate convictions of evolution. The Senator himself shook his
+head, and after surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to
+St. Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff.
+Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had been
+immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the people
+seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or fifteen years
+of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for, since 1898,
+Russia lagged.
+
+  The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
+whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
+Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed disposed
+to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For him, all opinion
+founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be complete,
+and their relations must be always infinite. Very likely, Russia would
+instantly become the most brilliant constellation of human progress
+through all the ordered stages of good; but meanwhile one might give a
+value as movement of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow
+acceleration that would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap
+between east and west relatively the same. This result reached, the
+Lodges thought their moral improvement required a visit to Berlin; but
+forty years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams's memories of
+Berlin, and he preferred, at any cost, to escape new ones. When the
+Lodges started for Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed
+happily, in a day or two, at Stockholm.
+
+Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he gains
+little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt whether
+Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand Duke, or the
+Emperor, knew much more about it than their neighbors; and Adams was
+quite sure that, even in America, he should listen with uncertain
+confidence to the views of any Secretary of the Treasury, or railway
+president, or President of the United States whom he had ever known,
+that should concern the America of the next generation. The mere fact
+that any man should dare to offer them would prove his incompetence to
+judge. Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as an object of
+unconcern. As inertia, if in no other way, she represented
+three-fourths of the human race, and her movement might be the true
+movement of the future, against the hasty and unsure acceleration of
+America. No one could yet know what would best suit humanity, and the
+tourist who carried his La Fontaine in mind, caught himself talking as
+bear or as monkey according to the mirror he held before him. "Am I
+satisfied?" he asked:--
+
+                          "Moi? pourquoi non?
+  N'ai-je pas quatre pieds aussi bien que les autres?
+  Mon portrait jusqu'ici ne m'a rien reproche;
+  Mais pour mon frere l'ours, on ne l'a qu'ebauche;
+  Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."
+
+  Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in
+details, his own figure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or
+decorative, nor was he in the least sure what form it might take even
+in one generation. He had himself never ventured to dream of three. No
+man could guess what the Daimler motor and X-rays would do to him; but
+so much was sure; the monkey and motor were terribly afraid of the
+bear; how much,--only a man close to their foreign departments knew. As
+the monkey looked back across the Baltic from the safe battlements of
+Stockholm, Russia looked more portentous than from the Kremlin.
+
+  The image was that of the retreating ice-cap--a wall of
+archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
+archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
+northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever at its
+mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that crossed the
+level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea, merely extended the
+northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and Poles on one side still
+struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained their own
+energies under the same conditions that caused inertia across the
+frontier. Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race;
+and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it
+should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the
+sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very
+existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue,
+history was a nursery tale.
+
+  The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
+they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous mass of
+inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever Russia moved.
+From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it were an ice-sheet,
+and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries. In contrast with the
+dreary forests of Russia and the stern streets of St. Petersburg,
+Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and Sweden lured the tourist on.
+Through a cheerful New England landscape and bright autumn, he rambled
+northwards till he found himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway.
+Education crowded upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these
+vast surfaces of history about which he had lectured and read for a
+life-time. When the historian fully realizes his ignorance--which
+sometimes happens to Americans--he becomes even more tiresome to
+himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible. Adams
+could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse
+doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors
+whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced
+Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and,
+under their illusions, he took the mail steamer to the north, and on
+September 14, reached Hammerfest.
+
+  Frivolous amusement was hardly what one saw, through the
+equinoctial twilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the deep
+fiords, from dim patches of snow, where the last Laps and reindeer were
+watching the mail-steamer thread the intricate channels outside, as
+their ancestors had watched the first Norse fishermen learn them in the
+succession of time; but it was not the Laps, or the snow, or the arctic
+gloom, that impressed the tourist, so much as the lights of an
+electro-magnetic civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia,
+which more and more insisted on taking the first place in historical
+interest. Nowhere had the new forces so vigorously corrected the errors
+of the old, or so effectively redressed the balance of the ecliptic. As
+one approached the end--the spot where, seventy years before, a futile
+Carlylean Teufelsdrockh had stopped to ask futile questions of the
+silent infinite--the infinite seemed to have become loquacious, not to
+say familiar, chattering gossip in one's ear. An installation of
+electric lighting and telephones led tourists close up to the polar
+ice-cap, beyond the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer
+Teufelsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the permanent
+electric lights of Hammerfest.
+
+  He had good reason--better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in
+his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever
+told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without means of
+speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to
+gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, breakfasting in the
+restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across, the neighboring
+table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, announcing an attempt on the
+life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Trondhjem, and so up
+the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling of the
+President's condition, and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt,
+until at last a little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven,
+announcing the President's death a few hours before. To Adams the death
+of McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
+personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his depth of
+wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate friends, sent
+to him far within the realm of night, not to please him, but to correct
+the faults of the solar system. The electro-dynamo-social universe
+worked better than the sun.
+
+  No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
+and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
+anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines of
+unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across the gulf
+to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an abyss. Russia
+was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial ice-cap still
+pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision, and no one could
+look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these spectral islands
+without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward would
+bring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which
+obliged tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen
+had stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost.
+Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to make
+of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian fishermen
+ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands, jammed with their
+faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the ice-cap of Russian inertia
+pressing from behind, and the ice a trifling danger compared with the
+inertia. From the day they first followed the retreating ice-cap round
+the North Cape, down to the present moment, their problem was the same.
+
+  The new Teufelsdrockh, though considerably older than the old
+one, saw no clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much
+perplexed. From the archaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line
+of division, permanent since ice and inertia first took possession,
+divided his lines of force, with no relation to climate or geography or
+soil.
+
+  The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for
+he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he
+carried letters and sought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one
+knows; he needs too much and ignorance is learning. He wandered south
+again, and came out at Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Cologne. A mere
+glance showed him that here was a Germany new to mankind. Hamburg was
+almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the green rusticity of
+Dusseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham. The Rhine in
+1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as it resembled the Rhine of the
+Salic Franks. Cologne was a railway centre that had completed its
+cathedral which bore an absent-minded air of a cathedral of Chicago.
+The thirteenth century, carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked
+up, was visible to tourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling,
+curiosity. The Rhine was more modern than the Hudson, as might well be,
+since it produced far more coal; but all this counted for little beside
+the radical change in the lines of force.
+
+  In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the
+Danube in the south, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric
+highway between Asia and the ocean. The trade-route followed the old
+routes of invasion, and Cologne was a resting-place between Warsaw and
+Flanders. Throughout northern Germany, Russia was felt even more
+powerfully than France. In 1901 Russia had vanished, and not even
+France was felt; hardly England or America. Coal alone was felt--its
+stamp alone pervaded the Rhine district and persisted to Picardy--and
+the stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The Rhine
+produced the same power, and the power produced the same people--the
+same mind--the same impulse. For a man sixty-three years old who had no
+hope of earning a living, these three months of education were the most
+arduous he ever attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel
+he ever met; but the sum of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable.
+From Hammerfest to Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean--from Halifax to
+Norfolk on the other--one great empire was ruled by one great
+emperor--Coal. Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or
+divide it, but the power and the empire were one. Unity had gained that
+ground. Beyond lay Russia, and there an older, perhaps a surer, power,
+resting on the eternal law of inertia, held its own.
+
+  As a personal matter, the relative value of the two powers
+became more interesting every year; for the mass of Russian inertia was
+moving irresistibly over China, and John Hay stood in its path. As long
+as de Witte ruled, Hay was safe. Should de Witte fall, Hay would
+totter. One could only sit down and watch the doings of Mr. de Witte
+and Mr. de Plehve.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
+
+  AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the
+activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans ignore
+tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the
+world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death
+as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political
+murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have
+thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House.
+
+  The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
+centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of his
+son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that of his
+chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his recovery." The
+world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have acquired the funeral
+habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him yesterday, and he did not
+know me." Among the letters of condolence showered upon him was one
+from Clarence King at Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace and
+tenderness--the old King manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till
+nature and the foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of King
+impressed him intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said--"the
+best and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
+beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often sickened
+me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind luck; hounded
+by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he
+was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering alone and
+uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ca vous amuse, la vie?"
+
+  The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on
+the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's funeral, and
+from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel than that which
+led to Washington, where a revolution had occurred that must in any
+case have made the men of his age instantly old, but which, besides
+hurrying to the front the generation that till then he had regarded as
+boys, could not fail to break the social ties that had till then held
+them all together.
+
+  Ca vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
+becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt half
+glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only to save
+himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure loss. On
+that side, his education had been finished at school. His friends in
+power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total wreck by
+trying to save them.
+
+  As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them
+at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken seriously
+in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new one. Power
+when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all
+Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was
+more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within
+the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that
+belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that mediaeval theology
+assigned to God--he was pure act. With him wielding unmeasured power
+with immeasurable energy, in the White House, the relation of age to
+youth--of teacher to pupil--was altogether out of place; and no other
+was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, while Adams's ceased
+of itself. History's truths are little valuable now; but human nature
+retains a few of its archaic, proverbial laws, and the wisest courtier
+that ever lived--Lucius Seneca himself--must have remained in some
+shade of doubt what advantage he should get from the power of his
+friend and pupil Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he
+received Nero's filial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the
+vast circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a
+friend lost--a fact very much worth insisting upon--while the
+gray-headed moth that had fluttered through many moth-administrations
+and had singed his wings more or less in them all, though he now slept
+nine months out of the twelve, acquired an instinct of
+self-preservation that kept him to the north side of La Fayette Square,
+and, after a sufficient habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred
+him from hovering between them.
+
+  Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
+deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
+advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound
+to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is
+poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an
+almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but
+also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of
+seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding
+it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives
+depend on snatching the carrion. Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct
+nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally in restless agitation
+that would have worn out most tempers in a month, and his first year of
+Presidency showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The
+effect of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
+because it must represent the same process in society, and the power of
+self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the control of the
+infinite.
+
+  Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but
+this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of
+history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The personal
+lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason why
+Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result was mathematically
+certain. With Hay, it was only the steady decline of strength, and the
+necessary economy of force; but with Lodge it was law of politics. He
+could not help himself, for his position as the President's friend and
+independent statesman at once was false, and he must be unsure in both
+relations.
+
+  To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great--much
+greater than that of the usual Senator--but it hung on his position in
+Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive patronage; and
+his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure. Nowhere in America
+was society so complex or change so rapid. No doubt the Bostonian had
+always been noted for a certain chronic irritability--a sort of
+Bostonitis--which, in its primitive Puritan forms, seemed due to
+knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of himself.
+Many years earlier William M. Evarts had pointed out to Adams the
+impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The
+trait led to good ends--such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and
+George Washington--but the virtue was exacting; for New England
+standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and
+constantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened
+to become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough--State
+Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old Congregational clergy
+another; Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in social influence,
+a third; the foreign element, especially the Irish, held aloof, and
+seldom consented to approve any one; the new socialist class, rapidly
+growing, promised to become more exclusive than the Irish. New power
+was disintegrating society, and setting independent centres of force to
+work, until money had all it could do to hold the machine together. No
+one could represent it faithfully as a whole.
+
+  Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the
+task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that
+of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for study, or
+a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two.
+Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature
+of teaching--Boston incarnate--the child of his local parentage; and
+while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous,
+was--as Adams admitted in his own case--restless. An excellent talker,
+a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear
+mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease
+whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of
+temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose
+as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the
+still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and
+historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his
+thought--saturated with English literature, English tradition, English
+taste--revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and
+Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy
+among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare--standing first on the
+social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning;
+shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license
+of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always
+intelligent--Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual
+statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's
+plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He
+betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they
+dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.
+
+  Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
+attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
+understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences
+of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were also at variance. He
+professed in theory equal distrust of English thought, and called it a
+huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac, sometimes precious but never sure. For
+him, only the Greek, the Italian or the French standards had claims to
+respect, and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to
+Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice. He knew that his
+artistic standard was the illusion of his own mind; that English
+disorder approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French
+measure or Italian line, or German logic; he read his Shakespeare as
+the Evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very
+conservative nor very Christian, but stupendously anarchistic. He loved
+the atrocities of English art and society, as he loved Charles Dickens
+and Miss Austen, not because of their example, but because of their
+humor. He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying
+consistency--but he was not a Senator.
+
+  Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they
+are apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care whether
+his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than he;
+but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they were always
+liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion yield suddenly
+under their feet. With this game an elderly friend had long before
+carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There was nothing in it for
+him but the amusement of the pugilist or acrobat. The larger study was
+lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men;
+but foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and made personal
+relation possible with Hay which could not be maintained with Roosevelt
+or Lodge. As an affair of pure education the point is worth notice from
+young men who are drawn into politics. The work of domestic progress is
+done by masses of mechanical power--steam, electric, furnace, or
+other--which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals who
+have shown capacity to manage it. The work of internal government has
+become the task of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as
+heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell
+nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of them have
+nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in
+the development or economy of power. They are trustees for the public,
+and whenever society assumes the property, it must confer on them that
+title; but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and
+will then control society without appeal, as it controls its stokers
+and pit-men. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but
+of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force,
+massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between
+the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to
+succumb to their own motive forces.
+
+  This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially
+in mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while
+for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that in
+domestic politics, every one works for an immediate object, commonly
+for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon, while in
+foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide as the
+world. There the merest scholar could see what he was doing. For
+history, international relations are the only sure standards of
+movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adams had
+always insisted that international relation was the only sure base for
+a chart of history.
+
+  He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
+view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he found
+it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as
+the historian. Required to look far ahead and round him, he measures
+forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less
+hostile ever since Congress first sat. The Secretary of State exists
+only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather
+ignore; of obligations which Congress repudiates whenever it can; of
+bargains which Congress distrusts and tries to turn to its advantage or
+to reject. Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always
+intrigued against the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has
+been obliged to extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls
+in Senators' service.
+
+  This is a matter of history which any one may approve or
+dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an old
+scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865. Hay had
+become the most imposing figure ever known in the office. He had an
+influence that no other Secretary of State ever possessed, as he had a
+nation behind him such as history had never imagined. He needed to
+write no state papers; he wanted no help, and he stood far above
+counsel or advice; but he could instruct an attentive scholar as no
+other teacher in the world could do; and Adams sought only
+instruction--wanted only to chart the international channel for fifty
+years to come; to triangulate the future; to obtain his dimension, and
+fix the acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he
+was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and force.
+
+  Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at
+last the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he had
+achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate, with
+only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to renounce, without
+equivalent, treaty rights which she had for fifty years defended tooth
+and nail. This unprecedented triumph in his negotiations with the
+Senate enabled him to carry one step further his measures for general
+peace. About England the Senate could make no further effective
+opposition, for England was won, and Canada alone could give trouble.
+The next difficulty was with France, and there the Senate blocked
+advance, but England assumed the task, and, owing to political changes
+in France, effected the object--a combination which, as late as 1901,
+had been visionary. The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring
+Germany into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most
+unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed. This
+was the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism; the system of
+combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home, and realizable
+abroad.
+
+  With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
+century, had nothing to do, and made not the least presence of
+meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
+astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining governments,
+like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist scheme
+of Jaures and Bebel. That John Hay, of all men, should adopt a
+socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservative Christian
+anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy in politics as in
+science. When one saw the field, one realized that Hay could not help
+himself, nor could Bebel. Either Germany must destroy England and
+France to create the next inevitable unification as a system of
+continent against continent--or she must pool interests. Both schemes
+in turn were attributed to the Kaiser; one or the other he would have
+to choose; opinion was balanced doubtfully on their merits; but,
+granting both to be feasible, Hay's and McKinley's statesmanship turned
+on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the
+Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible
+alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in Russia. Thus
+Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were partners.
+
+  The problem was pretty--even fascinating--and, to an old
+Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometrical
+demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life, it had all sorts of
+ultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet--theory and
+practice--it risks going astray; and Hay was probably the most
+accomplished master of both then living. He knew not only the forces
+but also the men, and he had no other thought than his policy.
+
+  Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a
+scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole educational
+staff of the Government at a time when the Government had just reached
+the heights of highest activity and influence. Since 1860, education
+had done its worst, under the greatest masters and at enormous expense
+to the world, to train these two minds to catch and comprehend every
+spring of international action, not to speak of personal influence; and
+the entire machinery of politics in several great countries had little
+to do but supply the last and best information. Education could be
+carried no further.
+
+  With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its
+effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his
+ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing--to be groping
+in darkness--to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth
+consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one knew
+more. He had, at least, the mechanical assurance of certain values to
+guide him--like the relative intensities of his Coal-powers, and
+relative inertia of his Gun-powers--but he conceived that had he known,
+besides the mechanics, every relative value of persons, as well as he
+knew the inmost thoughts of his own Government--had the Czar and the
+Kaiser and the Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught him
+all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew nothing
+themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the student
+measure his own.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)
+
+  THE years hurried past, and gave hardly time to note their
+work. Three or four months, though big with change, come to an end
+before the mind can catch up with it. Winter vanished; spring burst
+into flower; and again Paris opened its arms, though not for long. Mr.
+Cameron came over, and took the castle of Inverlochy for three months,
+which he summoned his friends to garrison. Lochaber seldom laughs,
+except for its children, such as Camerons, McDonalds, Campbells and
+other products of the mist; but in the summer of 1902 Scotland put on
+fewer airs of coquetry than usual. Since the terrible harvest of 1879
+which one had watched sprouting on its stalks on the Shropshire
+hillsides, nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled
+to Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much
+gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last, in
+desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne,
+and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better citizen.
+Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to Berlin, abandoned
+his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers to come, he hid in
+ignorance and silence.
+
+  Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a
+working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift,
+the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with
+a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as summer taught, winter
+tested, and one had only to watch the apparent movement of the stars in
+order to guess one's declination. The process is possible only for men
+who have exhausted auto-motion. Adams never knew why, knowing nothing
+of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force
+all about him, where he had always seen lines of will. Perhaps the
+effect of knowing no mathematics is to leave the mind to imagine
+figures--images--phantoms; one's mind is a watery mirror at best; but,
+once conceived, the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of force
+presented themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted only as
+battle of attractions. By this path, the mind stepped into the
+mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a
+distinct new phase of education.
+
+  This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres.
+Like his masters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the
+eternal mystery of Force--the sink of all science. For thousands of
+years in history, he found that Force had been felt as occult
+attraction--love of God and lust for power in a future life. After
+1500, when this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on
+some vis a tergo--instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's
+survival of the fittest; and one of the greatest minds, between
+Descartes and Newton--Pascal--saw the master-motor of man in ennui,
+which was also scientific: "I have often said that all the troubles of
+man come from his not knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness
+forces action. "So passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in
+order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we
+think either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and
+even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord
+spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature,
+and would fill the mind with its venom."
+
+   "If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
+          May toss him to My breast."
+
+  Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for change, but failed
+to account for direction of change. For that, an attractive force was
+essential; a force from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal and all
+the old philosophies called this outside force God or Gods. Caring but
+little for the name, and fixed only on tracing the Force, Adams had
+gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres, and asked her to show him God,
+face to face, as she did for St. Bernard. She replied, kindly as ever,
+as though she were still the young mother of to-day, with a sort of
+patient pity for masculine dulness: "My dear outcast, what is it you
+seek? This is the Church of Christ! If you seek him through me, you are
+welcome, sinner or saint; but he and I are one. We are Love! We have
+little or nothing to do with God's other energies which are infinite,
+and concern us the less because our interest is only in man, and the
+infinite is not knowable to man. Yet if you are troubled by your
+ignorance, you see how I am surrounded by the masters of the schools!
+Ask them!"
+
+  The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British
+science which had repeated since Bacon that one must not try to know
+the unknowable, though one was quite powerless to ignore it; but the
+Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of interest in
+all perfections except her own was honester than the formal phrase of
+science; since nothing was easier than to follow her advice, and turn
+to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern physicists, answered at once and
+plainly: "To me," said St. Thomas, "Christ and the Mother are one
+Force--Love--simple, single, and sufficient for all human wants; but
+Love is a human interest which acts even on man so partially that you
+and I, as philosophers, need expect no share in it. Therefore we turn
+to Christ and the Schools who represent all other Force. We deal with
+Multiplicity and call it God. After the Virgin has redeemed by her
+personal Force as Love all that is redeemable in man, the Schools
+embrace the rest, and give it Form, Unity, and Motive."
+
+  This chart of Force was more easily studied than any other
+possible scheme, for one had but to do what the Church was always
+promising to do--abolish in one flash of lightning not only man, but
+also the Church itself, the earth, the other planets, and the sun, in
+order to clear the air; without affecting mediaeval science. The
+student felt warranted in doing what the Church threatened--abolishing
+his solar system altogether--in order to look at God as actual;
+continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable force. This
+was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist; at least as pantheistic
+as the Energetik of the Germans; and their deity was the ultimate
+energy, whose thought and act were one.
+
+  Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas seemed
+rather more scientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach.
+Contradiction for contradiction, Attraction for attraction, Energy for
+energy, St. Thomas's idea of God had merits. Modern science offered not
+a vestige of proof, or a theory of connection between its forces, or
+any scheme of reconciliation between thought and mechanics; while St.
+Thomas at least linked together the joints of his machine. As far as a
+superficial student could follow, the thirteenth century supposed mind
+to be a mode of force directly derived from the intelligent prime
+motor, and the cause of all form and sequence in the
+universe--therefore the only proof of unity. Without thought in the
+unit, there could be no unity; without unity no orderly sequence or
+ordered society. Thought alone was Form. Mind and Unity flourished or
+perished together.
+
+  This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty
+educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a
+Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no
+unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors,
+caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of religion.
+
+  In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the
+first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second
+is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will
+have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price. In wandering
+through the forests of ignorance, one necessarily fell upon the famous
+old bear that scared children at play; but, even had the animal shown
+more logic than its victim, one had learned from Socrates to distrust,
+above all other traps, the trap of logic--the mirror of the mind. Yet
+the search for a unit of force led into catacombs of thought where
+hundreds of thousands of educations had found their end. Generation
+after generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content
+to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in
+company with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had
+ever found a logical highroad of escape.
+
+  Adams cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear
+that he could not stop there, even to enjoy the society of Spinoza and
+Thomas Aquinas. True, the Church alone had asserted unity with any
+conviction, and the historian alone knew what oceans of blood and
+treasure the assertion had cost; but the only honest alternative to
+affirming unity was to deny it; and the denial would require a new
+education. At sixty-five years old a new education promised hardly more
+than the old. Possibly the modern legislator or magistrate might no
+longer know enough to treat as the Church did the man who denied unity,
+unless the denial took the form of a bomb; but no teacher would know
+how to explain what he thought he meant by denying unity. Society would
+certainly punish the denial if ever any one learned enough to
+understand it. Philosophers, as a rule, cared little what principles
+society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher commonly held that
+though he might sometimes be right by good luck on some one point, no
+complex of individual opinions could possibly be anything but wrong;
+yet, supposing society to be ignored, the philosopher was no further
+forward. Nihilism had no bottom. For thousands of years every
+philosopher had stood on the shore of this sunless sea, diving for
+pearls and never finding them. All had seen that, since they could not
+find bottom, they must assume it. The Church claimed to have found it,
+but, since 1450, motives for agreeing on some new assumption of Unity,
+broader and deeper than that of the Church, had doubled in force until
+even the universities and schools, like the Church and State, seemed
+about to be driven into an attempt to educate, though specially
+forbidden to do it.
+
+  Like most of his generation, Adams had taken the word of
+science that the new unit was as good as found. It would not be an
+intelligence--probably not even a consciousness--but it would serve. He
+passed sixty years waiting for it, and at the end of that time, on
+reviewing the ground, he was led to think that the final synthesis of
+science and its ultimate triumph was the kinetic theory of gases; which
+seemed to cover all motion in space, and to furnish the measure of
+time. So far as he understood it, the theory asserted that any portion
+of space is occupied by molecules of gas, flying in right lines at
+velocities varying up to a mile in a second, and colliding with each
+other at intervals varying up to 17,750,000 times in a second. To this
+analysis--if one understood it right--all matter whatever was
+reducible, and the only difference of opinion in science regarded the
+doubt whether a still deeper analysis would reduce the atom of gas to
+pure motion.
+
+  Thus, unless one mistook the meaning of motion, which might
+well be, the scientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the
+scientific analysis commonly called Multiplicity. The two things were
+the same, all forms being shifting phases of motion. Granting this
+ocean of colliding atoms, the last hope of humanity, what happened if
+one dropped the sounder into the abyss--let it go--frankly gave up
+Unity altogether? What was Unity? Why was one to be forced to affirm it?
+
+  Here everybody flatly refused help. Science seemed content with
+its old phrase of "larger synthesis," which was well enough for
+science, but meant chaos for man. One would have been glad to stop and
+ask no more, but the anarchist bomb bade one go on, and the bomb is a
+powerful persuader. One could not stop, even to enjoy the charms of a
+perfect gas colliding seventeen million times in a second, much like an
+automobile in Paris. Science itself had been crowded so close to the
+edge of the abyss that its attempts to escape were as metaphysical as
+the leap, while an ignorant old man felt no motive for trying to
+escape, seeing that the only escape possible lay in the form of vis a
+tergo commonly called Death. He got out his Descartes again; dipped
+into his Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered
+solemnly over his Hegel and Schopenhauer and Hartmann; strayed gaily
+away with his Greeks--all merely to ask what Unity meant, and what
+happened when one denied it.
+
+  Apparently one never denied it. Every philosopher, whether sane
+or insane, naturally affirmed it. The utmost flight of anarchy seemed
+to have stopped with the assertion of two principles, and even these
+fitted into each other, like good and evil, light and darkness.
+Pessimism itself, black as it might be painted, had been content to
+turn the universe of contradictions into the human thought as one Will,
+and treat it as representation. Metaphysics insisted on treating the
+universe as one thought or treating thought as one universe; and
+philosophers agreed, like a kinetic gas, that the universe could be
+known only as motion of mind, and therefore as unity. One could know it
+only as one's self; it was psychology.
+
+  Of all forms of pessimism, the metaphysical form was, for a
+historian, the least enticing. Of all studies, the one he would rather
+have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so
+heartrending as introspection, and the more, because--as Mephistopheles
+said of Marguerite--he was not the first. Nearly all the highest
+intelligence known to history had drowned itself in the reflection of
+its own thought, and the bovine survivors had rudely told the truth
+about it, without affecting the intelligent. One's own time had not
+been exempt. Even since 1870 friends by scores had fallen victims to
+it. Within five-and-twenty years, a new library had grown out of it.
+Harvard College was a focus of the study; France supported hospitals
+for it; England published magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to
+take one's mind in one's hand, and ask one's psychological friends what
+they made of it, and the more because it mattered so little to either
+party, since their minds, whatever they were, had pretty nearly ceased
+to reflect, and let them do what they liked with the small remnant,
+they could scarcely do anything very new with it. All one asked was to
+learn what they hoped to do.
+
+  Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance in silence had, by this
+time, led the weary pilgrim into such mountains of ignorance that he
+could no longer see any path whatever, and could not even understand a
+signpost. He failed to fathom the depths of the new psychology, which
+proved to him that, on that side as on the mathematical side, his power
+of thought was atrophied, if, indeed, it ever existed. Since he could
+not fathom the science, he could only ask the simplest of questions:
+Did the new psychology hold that the IvXn--soul or mind--was or was not
+a unit? He gathered from the books that the psychologists had, in a few
+cases, distinguished several personalities in the same mind, each
+conscious and constant, individual and exclusive. The fact seemed
+scarcely surprising, since it had been a habit of mind from earliest
+recorded time, and equally familiar to the last acquaintance who had
+taken a drug or caught a fever, or eaten a Welsh rarebit before bed;
+for surely no one could follow the action of a vivid dream, and still
+need to be told that the actors evoked by his mind were not himself,
+but quite unknown to all he had ever recognized as self. The new
+psychology went further, and seemed convinced that it had actually
+split personality not only into dualism, but also into complex groups,
+like telephonic centres and systems, that might be isolated and called
+up at will, and whose physical action might be occult in the sense of
+strangeness to any known form of force. Dualism seemed to have become
+as common as binary stars. Alternating personalities turned up
+constantly, even among one's friends. The facts seemed certain, or at
+least as certain as other facts; all they needed was explanation.
+
+  This was not the business of the searcher of ignorance, who
+felt himself in no way responsible for causes. To his mind, the
+compound IvXn took at once the form of a bicycle-rider, mechanically
+balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities, and
+sure to fall into the sub-conscious chaos below, if one of his inferior
+personalities got on top. The only absolute truth was the sub-conscious
+chaos below, which every one could feel when he sought it.
+
+  Whether the psychologists admitted it or not, mattered little
+to the student who, by the law of his profession, was engaged in
+studying his own mind. On him, the effect was surprising. He woke up
+with a shudder as though he had himself fallen off his bicycle. If his
+mind were really this sort of magnet, mechanically dispersing its lines
+of force when it went to sleep, and mechanically orienting them when it
+woke up--which was normal, the dispersion or orientation? The mind,
+like the body, kept its unity unless it happened to lose balance, but
+the professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself,
+knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did
+know--what the idiot could hardly do--that his normal condition was
+idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice.
+His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence; the
+simultaneous action of different thought-centres without central
+control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an acrobat,
+with a dwarf on his back, crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and
+commonly breaking his neck.
+
+By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead--nothing but a
+dissolving mind--and the historian felt himself driven back on thought
+as one continuous Force, without Race, Sex, School, Country, or Church.
+This has been always the fate of rigorous thinkers, and has always
+succeeded in making them famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste
+Comte. Their method made what progress the science of history knew,
+which was little enough, but they did at last fix the law that, if
+history ever meant to correct the errors she made in detail, she must
+agree on a scale for the whole. Every local historian might defy this
+law till history ended, but its necessity would be the same for man as
+for space or time or force, and without it the historian would always
+remain a child in science.
+
+  Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
+motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a
+unit--the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as
+a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams
+to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens
+Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he
+might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as
+true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once
+in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a
+volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a
+Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he proposed to fix
+a position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of Henry
+Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." With the help of
+these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and
+backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should
+know better. Thereupon, he sailed for home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+VIS INERTIAE (1903)
+
+  WASHINGTON was always amusing, but in 1900, as in 1800, its
+chief interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of New
+York had become planetary--beyond control--while the task of
+Washington, in 1900 as in 1800, was to control it. The success of
+Washington in the past century promised ill for its success in the next.
+
+  To a student who had passed the best years of his life in
+pondering over the political philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin, and
+Madison, the problem that Roosevelt took in hand seemed alive with
+historical interest, but it would need at least another half-century to
+show its results. As yet, one could not measure the forces or their
+arrangement; the forces had not even aligned themselves except in
+foreign affairs; and there one turned to seek the channel of wisdom as
+naturally as though Washington did not exist. The President could do
+nothing effectual in foreign affairs, but at least he could see
+something of the field.
+
+  Hay had reached the summit of his career, and saw himself on
+the edge of wreck. Committed to the task of keeping China "open," he
+saw China about to be shut. Almost alone in the world, he represented
+the "open door," and could not escape being crushed by it. Yet luck had
+been with him in full tide. Though Sir Julian Pauncefote had died in
+May, 1902, after carrying out tasks that filled an ex-private secretary
+of 1861 with open-mouthed astonishment, Hay had been helped by the
+appointment of Michael Herbert as his successor, who counted for double
+the value of an ordinary diplomat. To reduce friction is the chief use
+of friendship, and in politics the loss by friction is outrageous. To
+Herbert and his wife, the small knot of houses that seemed to give a
+vague unity to foreign affairs opened their doors and their hearts, for
+the Herberts were already at home there; and this personal sympathy
+prolonged Hay's life, for it not only eased the effort of endurance,
+but it also led directly to a revolution in Germany. Down to that
+moment, the Kaiser, rightly or wrongly, had counted as the ally of the
+Czar in all matters relating to the East. Holleben and Cassini were
+taken to be a single force in Eastern affairs, and this supposed
+alliance gave Hay no little anxiety and some trouble. Suddenly
+Holleben, who seemed to have had no thought but to obey with almost
+agonized anxiety the least hint of the Kaiser's will, received a
+telegram ordering him to pretext illness and come home, which he obeyed
+within four-and-twenty hours. The ways of the German Foreign Office had
+been always abrupt, not to say ruthless, towards its agents, and yet
+commonly some discontent had been shown as excuse; but, in this case,
+no cause was guessed for Holleben's disgrace except the Kaiser's wish
+to have a personal representative at Washington. Breaking down all
+precedent, he sent Speck von Sternburg to counterbalance Herbert.
+
+  Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy, and valuable
+as his presence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling compared
+with the political. Of Hay's official tasks, one knew no more than any
+newspaper reporter did, but of one's own diplomatic education the
+successive steps had become strides. The scholar was studying, not on
+Hay's account, but on his own. He had seen Hay, in 1898, bring England
+into his combine; he had seen the steady movement which was to bring
+France back into an Atlantic system; and now he saw suddenly the
+dramatic swing of Germany towards the west--the movement of all others
+nearest mathematical certainty. Whether the Kaiser meant it or not, he
+gave the effect of meaning to assert his independence of Russia, and to
+Hay this change of front had enormous value. The least was that it
+seemed to isolate Cassini, and unmask the Russian movement which became
+more threatening every month as the Manchurian scheme had to be
+revealed.
+
+  Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to
+him by the Kaiser's coup d'etat. Carefully as he had tried to follow
+the Kaiser's career, he had never suspected such refinement of policy,
+which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's ability to the highest point,
+and altogether upset the centre of statesmanship. That Germany could be
+so quickly detached from separate objects and brought into an Atlantic
+system seemed a paradox more paradoxical than any that one's education
+had yet offered, though it had offered little but paradox. If Germany
+could be held there, a century of friction would be saved. No price
+would be too great for such an object; although no price could probably
+be wrung out of Congress as equivalent for it. The Kaiser, by one
+personal act of energy, freed Hay's hands so completely that he saw his
+problems simplified to Russia alone.
+
+  Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The
+history of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little but to
+state one or two sides of the Russian problem. One's year of Berlin in
+youth, though it taught no Civil Law, had opened one's eyes to the
+Russian enigma, and both German and French historians had labored over
+its proportions with a sort of fascinated horror. Germany, of all
+countries, was most vitally concerned in it; but even a cave-dweller in
+La Fayette Square, seeking only a measure of motion since the Crusades,
+saw before his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a survey of future order or
+anarchy that would exhaust the power of his telescopes and defy the
+accuracy of his theodolites.
+
+  The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every
+day more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed clear
+signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte were
+reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and students should have
+no sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had private reasons for wishing
+well to the Czar and his people. At much length, in several labored
+chapters of history, he had told how the personal friendliness of the
+Czar Alexander I, in 1810, saved the fortunes of J. Q. Adams, and
+opened to him the brilliant diplomatic career that ended in the White
+House. Even in his own effaced existence he had reasons, not altogether
+trivial, for gratitude to the Czar Alexander II, whose firm neutrality
+had saved him some terribly anxious days and nights in 1862; while he
+had seen enough of Russia to sympathize warmly with Prince Khilkoff's
+railways and de Witte's industries. The last and highest triumph of
+history would, to his mind, be the bringing of Russia into the Atlantic
+combine, and the just and fair allotment of the whole world among the
+regulated activities of the universe. At the rate of unification since
+1840, this end should be possible within another sixty years; and, in
+foresight of that point, Adams could already finish--provisionally--his
+chart of international unity; but, for the moment, the gravest doubts
+and ignorance covered the whole field. No one--Czar or diplomat, Kaiser
+or Mikado--seemed to know anything. Through individual Russians one
+could always see with ease, for their diplomacy never suggested depth;
+and perhaps Hay protected Cassini for the very reason that Cassini
+could not disguise an emotion, and never failed to betray that, in
+setting the enormous bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, he
+regretted infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too. He
+would almost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf. His
+political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in the
+single idea that Russia must fatally roll--must, by her irresistible
+inertia, crush whatever stood in her way.
+
+  For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the
+fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American intensity.
+When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their
+energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor
+peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western
+equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia knocking away the last blocks that
+held back the launch of this huge mass into the China Sea. The vast
+force of inertia known as China was to be united with the huge bulk of
+Russia in a single mass which no amount of new force could henceforward
+deflect. Had the Russian Government, with the sharpest sense of
+enlightenment, employed scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs, and borrowed
+all the resources of Europe, it could not have lifted such a weight;
+and had no idea of trying.
+
+  These were the positions charted on the map of political unity
+by an insect in Washington in the spring of 1903; and they seemed to
+him fixed. Russia held Europe and America in her grasp, and Cassini
+held Hay in his. The Siberian Railway offered checkmate to all possible
+opposition. Japan must make the best terms she could; England must go
+on receding; America and Germany would look on at the avalanche. The
+wall of Russian inertia that barred Europe across the Baltic, would bar
+America across the Pacific; and Hay's policy of the open door would
+infallibly fail.
+
+  Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant
+stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany after it
+by its mere mass. To the humble student, the loss of Hay's game
+affected only Hay; for himself, the game--not the stakes--was the chief
+interest; and though want of habit made him object to read his
+newspapers blackened--since he liked to blacken them himself--he was in
+any case condemned to pass but a short space of time either in Siberia
+or in Paris, and could balance his endless columns of calculation
+equally in either place. The figures, not the facts, concerned his
+chart, and he mused deeply over his next equation. The Atlantic would
+have to deal with a vast continental mass of inert motion, like a
+glacier, which moved, and consciously moved, by mechanical gravitation
+alone. Russia saw herself so, and so must an American see her; he had
+no more to do than measure, if he could, the mass. Was volume or
+intensity the stronger? What and where was the vis nova that could hold
+its own before this prodigious ice-cap of vis inertiae? What was
+movement of inertia, and what its laws?
+
+  Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he
+took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to ask. He
+found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men than he. The
+dictionary said that inertia was a property of matter, by which matter
+tends, when at rest, to remain so, and, when in motion, to move on in a
+straight line. Finding that his mind refused to imagine itself at rest
+or in a straight line, he was forced, as usual, to let it imagine
+something else; and since the question concerned the mind, and not
+matter, he decided from personal experience that his mind was never at
+rest, but moved--when normal--about something it called a motive, and
+never moved without motives to move it. So long as these motives were
+habitual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result might,
+for convenience, be called movement of inertia, to distinguish it from
+movement caused by newer or higher attraction; but the greater the bulk
+to move, the greater must be the force to accelerate or deflect it.
+
+  This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
+deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student and
+the professor had gone on complaining that minds were unequally inert.
+The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class of minds responded
+only to habit; another only to novelty. Race classified thought.
+Class-lists classified mind. No two men thought alike, and no woman
+thought like a man.
+
+  Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
+trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
+whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying the race
+in order to reconstruct it; but surely sex-inertia had never been
+overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia, maternity and
+reproduction are the most typical, and women's property of moving in a
+constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken
+and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go on
+reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital
+condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be
+sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The
+American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history
+mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled
+them as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but
+if the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race
+question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to Americans
+vitally. The task of accelerating or deflecting the movement of the
+American woman had interest infinitely greater than that of any race
+whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or African.
+
+  On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was
+conscious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As he
+grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their interest, but
+that Early Women became a passion. Without understanding movement of
+sex, history seemed to him mere pedantry. So insistent had he become on
+this side of his subject that with women he talked of little else,
+and--because women's thought is mostly subconscious and particularly
+sensitive to suggestion--he tried tricks and devices to disclose it.
+The woman seldom knows her own thought; she is as curious to understand
+herself as the man to understand her, and responds far more quickly
+than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes, at dinner, one might wait
+till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as possible, ask one's liveliest
+neighbor whether she could explain why the American woman was a
+failure. Without an instant's hesitation, she was sure to answer:
+"Because the American man is a failure!" She meant it.
+
+  Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American
+men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex
+who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of view
+of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and,
+in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of affirming that the
+woman was the superior. Apart from truth, he owed her at least that
+compliment. The habit led sometimes to perilous personalities in the
+sudden give-and-take of table-talk. This spring, just before sailing
+for Europe in May, 1903, he had a message from his sister-in-law, Mrs.
+Brooks Adams, to say that she and her sister, Mrs. Lodge, and the
+Senator were coming to dinner by way of farewell; Bay Lodge and his
+lovely young wife sent word to the same effect; Mrs. Roosevelt joined
+the party; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped down to escape the
+solitude of his wife's absence. The party were too intimate for
+reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby with derision which stung
+him to pungent rejoinder: "The American man is a failure! You are all
+failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here more sense than my brother
+Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we all elect Mrs.
+Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a
+chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the
+Embassy, on your way home, and ask which would run it best--Herbert or
+his wife?" The men laughed a little--not much! Each probably made
+allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior woman. Some one
+afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women were not a fair
+average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men were above all possible
+average; he could not lay his hands on another half-dozen their equals.
+
+  Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The
+cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was bitter at
+heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family together, and
+her children ran away like chickens with their first feathers; the
+family was extinct like chivalry. She had failed not only to create a
+new society that satisfied her, but even to hold her own in the old
+society of Church or State; and was left, for the most part, with no
+place but the theatre or streets to decorate. She might glitter with
+historical diamonds and sparkle with wit as brilliant as the gems, in
+rooms as splendid as any in Rome at its best; but she saw no one except
+her own sex who knew enough to be worth dazzling, or was competent to
+pay her intelligent homage. She might have her own way, without
+restraint or limit, but she knew not what to do with herself when free.
+Never had the world known a more capable or devoted mother, but at
+forty her task was over, and she was left with no stage except that of
+her old duties, or of Washington society where she had enjoyed for a
+hundred years every advantage, but had created only a medley where nine
+men out of ten refused her request to be civilized, and the tenth bored
+her.
+
+  On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on
+this, the opinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a State
+Central Committee or a Railway President, is worth less than that of
+any woman on Fifth Avenue. The inferiority of man on this, the most
+important of all social subjects, is manifest. Adams had here no
+occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since no woman in the world
+would have paid the smallest respect to the opinions of all professors
+since the serpent. His own object had little to do with theirs. He was
+studying the laws of motion, and had struck two large questions of
+vital importance to America--inertia of race and inertia of sex. He had
+seen Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the
+value of three thousand million dollars, more or less, upon Russian
+inertia, in the last twenty years, and he needed to get some idea of
+the effects. He had seen artificial energy to the amount of twenty or
+five-and-twenty million steam horse-power created in America since
+1840, and as much more economized, which had been socially turned over
+to the American woman, she being the chief object of social
+expenditure, and the household the only considerable object of American
+extravagance. According to scientific notions of inertia and force,
+what ought to be the result?
+
+  In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown
+itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed. The
+woman had been set free--volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's perfect gas;
+almost brought to the point of explosion, like steam. One had but to
+pass a week in Florida, or on any of a hundred huge ocean steamers, or
+walk through the Place Vendome, or join a party of Cook's tourists to
+Jerusalem, to see that the woman had been set free; but these swarms
+were ephemeral like clouds of butterflies in season, blown away and
+lost, while the reproductive sources lay hidden. At Washington, one saw
+other swarms as grave gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking
+themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all these
+shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true problem
+slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city, town, and
+farmhouse, were myriads of new types--or type-writers--telephone and
+telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands, running into millions of
+millions, and, as classes, unknown to themselves as to historians. Even
+the schoolmistresses were inarticulate. All these new women had been
+created since 1840; all were to show their meaning before 1940.
+
+  Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
+proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
+century of the Church; but this was probably survival, and gave no hint
+of the future. The problem remained--to find out whether movement of
+inertia, inherent in function, could take direction except in lines of
+inertia. This problem needed to be solved in one generation of American
+women, and was the most vital of all problems of force.
+
+The American woman at her best--like most other women--exerted great
+charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive type. She appeared
+as the result of a long series of discards, and her chief interest lay
+in what she had discarded. When closely watched, she seemed making a
+violent effort to follow the man, who had turned his mind and hand to
+mechanics. The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye
+on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average
+speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty,
+or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or
+subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or drugs,
+without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine and a woman
+too; he must leave her; even though his wife, to find her own way, and
+all the world saw her trying to find her way by imitating him.
+
+  The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in
+feminine history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her problem
+had been always one of physical strength and it was as physical
+perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman's
+force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had
+been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all
+history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an Eocene female
+monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force
+were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the
+family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become
+sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to
+carry on the race.
+
+  The story was not new. For thousands of years women had
+rebelled. They had made a fortress of religion--had buried themselves
+in the cloister, in self-sacrifice, in good works--or even in bad.
+One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's studies in the fourth,
+as in Homeric and archaic time, showed her always busy in the illusions
+of heaven or of hell--ambition, intrigue, jealousy, magic--but the
+American woman had no illusions or ambitions or new resources, and
+nothing to rebel against, except her own maternity; yet the rebels
+increased by millions from year to year till they blocked the path of
+rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrower than in the
+twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical
+anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the
+few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she
+saw before her only the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist
+females.
+
+  From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of
+power was blind. The Church had known more about women than science
+will ever know, and the historian who studied the sources of
+Christianity felt sometimes convinced that the Church had been made by
+the woman chiefly as her protest against man. At times, the historian
+would have been almost willing to maintain that the man had overthrown
+the Church chiefly because it was feminine. After the overthrow of the
+Church, the woman had no refuge except such as the man created for
+himself. She was free; she had no illusions; she was sexless; she had
+discarded all that the male disliked; and although she secretly
+regretted the discard, she knew that she could not go backward. She
+must, like the man, marry machinery. Already the American man sometimes
+felt surprise at finding himself regarded as sexless; the American
+woman was oftener surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual.
+
+  No honest historian can take part with--or against--the
+forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race
+should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. No
+doubt every one in society discussed the subject, impelled by President
+Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the surface current of social opinion
+seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent undercurrent of
+social action ran in the other; but the truth lay somewhere unconscious
+in the woman's breast. An elderly man, trying only to learn the law of
+social inertia and the limits of social divergence could not compel the
+Superintendent of the Census to ask every young woman whether she
+wanted children, and how many; he could not even require of an
+octogenarian Senate the passage of a law obliging every woman, married
+or not, to bear one baby--at the expense of the Treasury--before she
+was thirty years old, under penalty of solitary confinement for life;
+yet these were vital statistics in more senses than all that bore the
+name, and tended more directly to the foundation of a serious society
+in the future. He could draw no conclusions whatever except from the
+birth-rate. He could not frankly discuss the matter with the young
+women themselves, although they would have gladly discussed it, because
+Faust was helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing.
+The Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether she were better
+off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would rather be victim
+to a man, a church, or a machine.
+
+  Between these various forms of inevitable inertia--sex and
+race--the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit
+that--ignorance against ignorance--the Russian problem seemed to him
+somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of race and
+bulk would require an immense force to overcome it, but in time it
+might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex could not be
+overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force, doubling
+every few years, was working irresistibly to overcome it. One gazed
+mute before this ocean of darkest ignorance that had already engulfed
+society. Few centres of great energy lived in illusion more complete or
+archaic than Washington with its simple-minded standards of the field
+and farm, its Southern and Western habits of life and manners, its
+assumptions of ethics and history; but even in Washington, society was
+uneasy enough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act
+the part of horseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was
+uniform--that nothing ever changed--and that the woman would swim about
+the ocean of future time, as she had swum in the past, with the
+gar-fish and the shark, unable to change.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)
+
+  OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante, this
+new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity
+promised to be the longest, though as yet it had barely touched two
+familiar regions--race and sex. Even within these narrow seas the
+navigator lost his bearings and followed the winds as they blew. By
+chance it happened that Raphael Pumpelly helped the winds; for, being
+in Washington on his way to Central Asia he fell to talking with Adams
+about these matters, and said that Willard Gibbs thought he got most
+help from a book called the "Grammar of Science," by Karl Pearson. To
+Adams's vision, Willard Gibbs stood on the same plane with the three or
+four greatest minds of his century, and the idea that a man so
+incomparably superior should find help anywhere filled him with wonder.
+He sent for the volume and read it. From the time he sailed for Europe
+and reached his den on the Avenue du Bois until he took his return
+steamer at Cherbourg on December 26, he did little but try to find out
+what Karl Pearson could have taught Willard Gibbs.
+
+  Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance
+in mathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the right to
+judge the product of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the finer values
+of French or German, and often deceived by the intricacies of thought
+hidden in the muddiness of the medium, one could sometimes catch a
+tendency to intelligible meaning even in Kant or Hegel; but one had not
+the right to a suspicion of error where the tool of thought was
+algebra. Adams could see in such parts of the "Grammar" as he could
+understand, little more than an enlargement of Stallo's book already
+twenty years old. He never found out what it could have taught a master
+like Willard Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out of all
+proportion to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before
+taken in the lines of English thought. The progress of science was
+measured by the success of the "Grammar," when, for twenty years past,
+Stallo had been deliberately ignored under the usual conspiracy of
+silence inevitable to all thought which demands new thought-machinery.
+Science needs time to reconstruct its instruments, to follow a
+revolution in space; a certain lag is inevitable; the most active mind
+cannot instantly swerve from its path; but such revolutions are
+portentous, and the fall or rise of half-a-dozen empires interested a
+student of history less than the rise of the "Grammar of Science," the
+more pressingly because, under the silent influence of Langley, he was
+prepared to expect it.
+
+  For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian
+Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of
+nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous address of
+Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by a series of
+papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily driven the scientific
+lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl Pearson was the first to pen
+them up for slaughter in the schools. The phrase is not stronger than
+that with which the "Grammar of Science" challenged the fight:
+"Anything more hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to
+Force and Matter current in elementary textbooks of science, it is
+difficult to imagine," opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author
+of the "elementary textbook," as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin
+himself. Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth
+century had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up
+with a fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that--the
+circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for
+granted--much as the deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle of
+light which he generates. "Order and reason, beauty and benevolence,
+are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated
+with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad truth, left one's mind
+in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty seemed to be
+associated also in the mind of a crystal, if one's senses were to be
+admitted as judge; but the historian had no interest in the universal
+truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or Newton's laws; he sought only their
+relative drift or direction, and Pearson went on to say that these
+conceptions must stop: "Into the chaos beyond sense-impressions we
+cannot scientifically project them." We cannot even infer them: "In the
+chaos behind sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we
+cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed
+by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions"; but we must
+infer chaos: "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of
+the supersensuous." The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of
+ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was
+the dream of man.
+
+  No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,
+for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon and
+Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting that no one
+must try to know the unknowable at the same time that every one went on
+thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as kinetic gas; but with
+the thought a historian had nothing to do. He sought only its
+direction. For himself he knew, that, in spite of all the Englishmen
+that ever lived, he would be forced to enter supersensual chaos if he
+meant to find out what became of British science--or indeed of any
+other science. From Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done
+it, although commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred
+to regard as Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who
+taught that every notion included its own negation, used the negation
+only to reach a "larger synthesis," till he reached the universal which
+thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church alone had constantly
+protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that
+pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity could not be proved as
+a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to agree with the Church, but
+every one else, including Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed
+gaily into the supersensual, calling it:--
+
+  "One God, one Law, one Element,
+   And one far-off, divine event,
+   To which the whole creation moves."
+
+  Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.
+
+  Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as
+it seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
+betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
+watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more interesting
+to history than the thought. When he reflected about it, he recalled
+that the flow of tide had shown itself at least twenty years before;
+that it had become marked as early as 1893; and that the man of science
+must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump from his chair like a
+scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical
+bomb she called radium. There remained no hole to hide in. Even
+metaphysics swept back over science with the green water of the
+deep-sea ocean and no one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable,
+for the unknowable was known.
+
+  The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
+had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant only
+for temporary support to be merged in "larger synthesis," and had
+waited for the larger synthesis in silence and in vain. They had
+refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little interest in Crookes.
+At last their universe had been wrecked by rays, and Karl Pearson
+undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leaving science adrift on
+a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual chaos. The confusion
+seemed, to a mere passenger, worse than that of 1600 when the
+astronomers upset the world; it resembled rather the convulsion of 310
+when the Civitas Dei cut itself loose from the Civitas Romae, and the
+Cross took the place of the legions; but the historian accepted it all
+alike; he knew that his opinion was worthless; only, in this case, he
+found himself on the raft, personally and economically concerned in its
+drift.
+
+  English thought had always been chaos and multiplicity itself,
+in which the new step of Karl Pearson marked only a consistent
+progress; but German thought had affected system, unity, and abstract
+truth, to a point that fretted the most patient foreigner, and to
+Germany the voyager in strange seas of thought alone might resort with
+confident hope of renewing his youth. Turning his back on Karl Pearson
+and England, he plunged into Germany, and had scarcely crossed the
+Rhine when he fell into libraries of new works bearing the names of
+Ostwald, Ernst Mach, Ernst Haeckel, and others less familiar, among
+whom Haeckel was easiest to approach, not only because of being the
+oldest and clearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century
+mechanical convictions, but also because in 1902 he had published a
+vehement renewal of his faith. The volume contained only one paragraph
+that concerned a historian; it was that in which Haeckel sank his voice
+almost to a religious whisper in avowing with evident effort, that the
+"proper essence of substance appeared to him more and more marvellous
+and enigmatic as he penetrated further into the knowledge of its
+attributes--matter and energy--and as he learned to know their
+innumerable phenomena and their evolution." Since Haeckel seemed to
+have begun the voyage into multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to
+Englishmen, he should have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of
+a "proper essence of substance" in its attributes of matter and energy:
+but Ernst Mach seemed to go yet one step further, for he rejected
+matter altogether, and admitted but two processes in nature--change of
+place and interconversion of forms. Matter was Motion--Motion was
+Matter--the thing moved.
+
+  A student of history had no need to understand these scientific
+ideas of very great men; he sought only the relation with the ideas of
+their grandfathers, and their common direction towards the ideas of
+their grandsons. He had long ago reached, with Hegel, the limits of
+contradiction; and Ernst Mach scarcely added a shade of variety to the
+identity of opposites; but both of them seemed to be in agreement with
+Karl Pearson on the facts of the supersensual universe which could be
+known only as unknowable.
+
+  With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to
+France. There he felt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and Montaigne
+had ever taught anarchy other than as path to order. Chaos would be
+unity in Paris even if child of the guillotine. To make this assurance
+mathematically sure, the highest scientific authority in France was a
+great mathematician, M. Poincare of the Institut, who published in 1902
+a small volume called "La Science et l'Hypothese," which purported to
+be relatively readable. Trusting to its external appearance, the
+traveller timidly bought it, and greedily devoured it, without
+understanding a single consecutive page, but catching here and there a
+period that startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they
+seemed to show that M. Poincare was troubled by the same historical
+landmarks which guided or deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we are
+led," said M. Poincare, "to act as though a simple law, when other
+things were equal, must be more probable than a complicated law. Half a
+century ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed that nature loves
+simplicity. She has since given us too often the lie. To-day this
+tendency is no longer avowed, and only as much of it is preserved as is
+indispensable so that science shall not become impossible."
+
+  Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion
+with self-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M. Poincare
+shown anarchistic tastes, his evidence would have weighed less heavily;
+but he seemed to be the only authority in science who felt what a
+historian felt so strongly--the need of unity in a universe.
+"Considering everything we have made some approach towards unity. We
+have not gone as fast as we hoped fifty years ago; we have not always
+taken the intended road; but definitely we have gained much ground."
+This was the most clear and convincing evidence of progress yet offered
+to the navigator of ignorance; but suddenly he fell on another view
+which seemed to him quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if
+our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we
+should discover the simple under the complex; then the complex under
+the simple; then anew the simple under the complex; and so on without
+ever being able to foresee the last term."
+
+  A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised
+eternal bliss to the mathematician, but turned the historian green with
+horror. Made miserable by the thought that he knew no mathematics, he
+burned to ask whether M. Poincare knew any history, since he began by
+begging the historical question altogether, and assuming that the past
+showed alternating phases of simple and complex--the precise point that
+Adams, after fifty years of effort, found himself forced to surrender;
+and then going on to assume alternating phases for the future which,
+for the weary Titan of Unity, differed in nothing essential from the
+kinetic theory of a perfect gas.
+
+  Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor
+beast had ever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity,
+Anarchy, Chaos. Always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the
+Contradiction had been certain. Thought started by it. Mathematics
+itself began by counting one--two--three; then imagining their
+continuity, which M. Poincare was still exhausting his wits to explain
+or defend; and this was his explanation: "In short, the mind has the
+faculty of creating symbols, and it is thus that it has constructed
+mathematical continuity which is only a particular system of symbols."
+With the same light touch, more destructive in its artistic measure
+than the heaviest-handed brutality of Englishmen or Germans, he went on
+to upset relative truth itself: "How should I answer the question
+whether Euclidian Geometry is true? It has no sense!... Euclidian
+Geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient."
+
+Chaos was a primary fact even in Paris--especially in Paris--as it was
+in the Book of Genesis; but every thinking being in Paris or out of it
+had exhausted thought in the effort to prove Unity, Continuity,
+Purpose, Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God, after having begun by
+taking it for granted, and discovering, to their profound dismay, that
+some minds denied it. The direction of mind, as a single force of
+nature, had been constant since history began. Its own unity had
+created a universe the essence of which was abstract Truth; the
+Absolute; God! To Thomas Aquinas, the universe was still a person; to
+Spinoza, a substance; to Kant, Truth was the essence of the "I"; an
+innate conviction; a categorical imperative; to Poincare, it was a
+convenience; and to Karl Pearson, a medium of exchange.
+
+  The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew
+nothing about it; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a
+barometer, pedometer, radiometer; and that his whole share in the
+matter was restricted to the measurement of thought-motion as marked by
+the accepted thinkers. He took their facts for granted. He knew no more
+than a firefly about rays--or about race--or sex--or ennui--or a bar of
+music--or a pang of love--or a grain of musk--or of phosphorus--or
+conscience--or duty--or the force of Euclidian geometry--or
+non-Euclidian--or heat--or light--or osmosis--or electrolysis--or the
+magnet--or ether--or vis inertiae--or gravitation--or cohesion--or
+elasticity--or surface tension--or capillary attraction--or Brownian
+motion--or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical
+attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and
+without him; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly
+informed, bore some dozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly
+contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond his intelligence; but
+summed up in the dictum of the last and highest science, that Motion
+seems to be Matter and Matter seems to be Motion, yet "we are probably
+incapable of discovering" what either is. History had no need to ask
+what either might be; all it needed to know was the admission of
+ignorance; the mere fact of multiplicity baffling science. Even as to
+the fact, science disputed, but radium happened to radiate something
+that seemed to explode the scientific magazine, bringing thought, for
+the time, to a standstill; though, in the line of thought-movement in
+history, radium was merely the next position, familiar and inexplicable
+since Zeno and his arrow: continuous from the beginning of time, and
+discontinuous at each successive point. History set it down on the
+record--pricked its position on the chart--and waited to be led, or
+misled, once more.
+
+  The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values
+his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify
+his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or
+thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now and then
+resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear. The motion of
+thought had the same value as the motion of a cannon-ball seen
+approaching the observer on a direct line through the air. One could
+watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first violent acceleration
+in historical times had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next
+swerve of direction occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a
+still newer curve to it, which altered its values; but all these
+changes had never altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity
+snapped.
+
+  Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world sometimes dated
+it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by the Curie's
+radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of British
+science that the human race without exception had lived and died in a
+world of illusion until the last year of the century. The date was
+convenient, and convenience was truth.
+
+  The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world
+which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it,
+and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no
+one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation
+obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against
+which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being
+merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last. He could
+not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had
+been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of
+man by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the
+perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the
+perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal
+to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and
+the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the
+principles of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into principles
+of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the
+despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. The physicists had
+a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that we win is a
+battle--lost in advance--with the irreversible phenomena in the
+background of nature."
+
+  All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw
+his education complete; and was sorry he ever began it. As a matter of
+taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century education when God
+was a father and nature a mother, and all was for the best in a
+scientific universe. He repudiated all share in the world as it was to
+be, and yet he could not detect the point where his responsibility
+began or ended.
+
+  As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
+behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its
+conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that embodied all its
+notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true because he made it, and he
+loved it for the same reason. He sacrificed millions of lives to
+acquire his unity, but he achieved it, and justly thought it a work of
+art. The woman especially did great things, creating her deities on a
+higher level than the male, and, in the end, compelling the man to
+accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in his
+Universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there, and sacrificed
+herself without limit to make it habitable, when man permitted it, as
+sometimes happened for brief intervals of war and famine; but she could
+not provide protection against forces of nature. She did not think of
+her universe as a raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge
+of a supersensual chaos; she conceived herself and her family as the
+centre and flower of an ordered universe which she knew to be unity
+because she had made it after the image of her own fecundity; and this
+creation of hers was surrounded by beauties and perfections which she
+knew to be real because she herself had imagined them.
+
+  Even the masculine philosopher admired and loved and celebrated
+her triumph, and the greatest of them sang it in the noblest of his
+verses:--
+
+  "Alma Venus, coeli subter labentia signa
+   Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferenteis
+   Concelebras ...... .
+   Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas,
+   Nec sine te quidquam dias in luminis oras
+   Exoritur, neque fit laetum neque amabile quidquam;
+   Te sociam studeo!"
+
+  Neither man nor woman ever wanted to quit this Eden of their
+own invention, and could no more have done it of their own accord than
+the pearl oyster could quit its shell; but although the oyster might
+perhaps assimilate or embalm a grain of sand forced into its aperture,
+it could only perish in face of the cyclonic hurricane or the volcanic
+upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual chaos killed her.
+
+  Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on
+the generation born after 1900. For this theory, Adams felt himself in
+no way responsible. Even as historian he had made it his duty always to
+speak with respect of everything that had ever been thought
+respectable--except an occasional statesman; but he had submitted to
+force all his life, and he meant to accept it for the future as for the
+past. All his efforts had been turned only to the search for its
+channel. He never invented his facts; they were furnished him by the
+only authorities he could find. As for himself, according to Helmholz,
+Ernst Mach, and Arthur Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious
+ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite
+lines of rotation or vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at
+Chartres or of M. Poincare in an attic at Paris, a centre of
+supersensual chaos. The discovery did not distress him. A solitary man
+of sixty-five years or more, alone in a Gothic cathedral or a Paris
+apartment, need fret himself little about a few illusions more or less.
+He should have learned his lesson fifty years earlier; the times had
+long passed when a student could stop before chaos or order; he had no
+choice but to march with his world.
+
+  Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered
+by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human mind
+has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which
+caged it; how--appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown
+and unimaginable void; passing half its known life in the mental chaos
+of sleep; victim even when awake, to its own ill-adjustment, to
+disease, to age, to external suggestion, to nature's compulsion;
+doubting its sensations, and, in the last resort, trusting only to
+instruments and averages--after sixty or seventy years of growing
+astonishment, the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the
+void of death. That it should profess itself pleased by this
+performance was all that the highest rules of good breeding could ask;
+but that it should actually be satisfied would prove that it existed
+only as idiocy.
+
+  Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself,
+for even when the mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it
+had never been quite at ease. As far as one ventured to interpret
+actual science, the mind had thus far adjusted itself by an infinite
+series of infinitely delicate adjustments forced on it by the infinite
+motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at one moment into the
+unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back within its
+senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it,
+until at last, in 1900, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on
+it, which required new mental powers to control. If this view was
+correct, the mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must
+merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+VIS NOVA (1903-1904)
+
+PARIS after midsummer is a place where only the industrious poor
+remain, unless they can get away; but Adams knew no spot where history
+would be better off, and the calm of the Champs Elysees was so deep
+that when Mr. de Witte was promoted to a powerless dignity, no one
+whispered that the promotion was disgrace, while one might have
+supposed, from the silence, that the Viceroy Alexeieff had reoccupied
+Manchuria as a fulfilment of treaty-obligation. For once, the
+conspiracy of silence became crime. Never had so modern and so vital a
+riddle been put before Western society, but society shut its eyes.
+Manchuria knew every step into war; Japan had completed every
+preparation; Alexeieff had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur,
+mounting his siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the
+expected attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war
+conditions; but Europe knew nothing. The banks would allow no
+disturbance; the press said not a word, and even the embassies were
+silent. Every anarchist in Europe buzzed excitement and began to
+collect in groups, but the Hotel Ritz was calm, and the Grand Dukes who
+swarmed there professed to know directly from the Winter Palace that
+there would be no war.
+
+  As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed
+statesman, and though the sense was familiar, for once he could see
+that the ignorance was assumed. After nearly fifty years of experience,
+he could not understand how the comedy could be so well acted. Even as
+late as November, diplomats were gravely asking every passer-by for his
+opinion, and avowed none of their own except what was directly
+authorized at St. Petersburg. He could make nothing of it. He found
+himself in face of his new problem--the workings of Russian
+inertia--and he could conceive no way of forming an opinion how much
+was real and how much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace
+himself. At times he doubted whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew,
+but old diplomatic training forbade him to admit such innocence.
+
+  This was the situation at Christmas when he left Paris. On
+January 6, 1904, he reached Washington, where the contrast of
+atmosphere astonished him, for he had never before seen his country
+think as a world-power. No doubt, Japanese diplomacy had much to do
+with this alertness, but the immense superiority of Japanese diplomacy
+should have been more evident in Europe than in America, and in any
+case, could not account for the total disappearance of Russian
+diplomacy. A government by inertia greatly disconcerted study. One was
+led to suspect that Cassini never heard from his Government, and that
+Lamsdorf knew nothing of his own department; yet no such suspicion
+could be admitted. Cassini resorted to transparent blague: "Japan
+seemed infatuated even to the point of war! But what can the Japanese
+do? As usual, sit on their heels and pray to Buddha!" One of the oldest
+and most accomplished diplomatists in the service could never show his
+hand so empty as this if he held a card to play; but he never betrayed
+stronger resource behind. "If any Japanese succeed in entering
+Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive." The inertia of
+Cassini, who was naturally the most energetic of diplomatists, deeply
+interested a student of race-inertia, whose mind had lost itself in the
+attempt to invent scales of force.
+
+  The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of
+the White House, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the
+President. Reticence had no place there. Every one in America saw that,
+whether Russia or Japan were victim, one of the decisive struggles in
+American history was pending, and any pretence of secrecy or
+indifference was absurd. Interest was acute, and curiosity intense, for
+no one knew what the Russian Government meant or wanted, while war had
+become a question of days. To an impartial student who gravely doubted
+whether the Czar himself acted as a conscious force or an inert weight,
+the straight-forward avowals of Roosevelt had singular value as a
+standard of measure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged to
+take the place of his brother Brooks at the Diplomatic Reception
+immediately after his return home, and the part of proxy included his
+supping at the President's table, with Secretary Root on one side, the
+President opposite, and Miss Chamberlain between them. Naturally the
+President talked and the guests listened; which seemed, to one who had
+just escaped from the European conspiracy of silence, like drawing a
+free breath after stifling. Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an
+amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any
+other man of great importance in the world, except the Kaiser Wilhelm
+and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the father of his guest at table; and this
+evening he spared none. With the usual abuse of the quos ego, common to
+vigorous statesmen, he said all that he thought about Russians and
+Japanese, as well as about Boers and British, without restraint, in
+full hearing of twenty people, to the entire satisfaction of his
+listener; and concluded by declaring that war was imminent; that it
+ought to be stopped; that it could be stopped: "I could do it myself; I
+could stop it to-morrow!" and he went on to explain his reasons for
+restraint.
+
+  That he was right, and that, within another generation, his
+successor would do what he would have liked to do, made no shadow of
+doubt in the mind of his hearer, though it would have been folly when
+he last supped at the White House in the dynasty of President Hayes;
+but the listener cared less for the assertion of power, than for the
+vigor of view. The truth was evident enough, ordinary, even commonplace
+if one liked, but it was not a truth of inertia, nor was the method to
+be mistaken for inert.
+
+  Nor could the force of Japan be mistaken for a moment as a
+force of inertia, although its aggressive was taken as methodically--as
+mathematically--as a demonstration of Euclid, and Adams thought that as
+against any but Russians it would have lost its opening. Each day
+counted as a measure of relative energy on the historical scale, and
+the whole story made a Grammar of new Science quite as instructive as
+that of Pearson.
+
+  The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new
+equilibrium which would prove the problem in one sense or another, and
+the war had no personal value for Adams except that it gave Hay his
+last great triumph. He had carried on his long contest with Cassini so
+skillfully that no one knew enough to understand the diplomatic
+perfection of his work, which contained no error; but such success is
+complete only when it is invisible, and his victory at last was victory
+of judgment, not of act. He could do nothing, and the whole country
+would have sprung on him had he tried. Japan and England saved his
+"open door" and fought his battle. All that remained for him was to
+make the peace, and Adams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in
+hand, for Hay's sake as well as for that of Russia. He thought then
+that it could be done in one campaign, for he knew that, in a military
+sense, the fall of Port Arthur must lead to negotiation, and every one
+felt that Hay would inevitably direct it; but the race was close, and
+while the war grew every day in proportions, Hay's strength every day
+declined.
+
+  St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted his
+portrait, two steps essential to immortality which he bore with a
+certain degree of resignation, but he grumbled when the President made
+him go to St. Louis to address some gathering at the Exposition; and
+Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for whatever use he could suppose
+himself to serve. He professed the religion of World's Fairs, without
+which he held education to be a blind impossibility; and obeyed Mrs.
+Hay's bidding the more readily because it united his two educations in
+one; but theory and practice were put to equally severe test at St.
+Louis. Ten years had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and
+he found everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through
+Ohio and Indiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys
+reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with
+scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, formed the setting of every town.
+Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the new American,
+but this matter of discards concerned the measure of force little,
+while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so much that Adams thought
+the Secretary of State should have rushed to the platform at every
+station to ask who were the people; for the American of the prime
+seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee and the buffalo.
+
+  The subject grew quickly delicate. History told little about
+these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their race-names, who
+had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine and the Danube had
+turned their floods into the Ohio. John Hay was as strange to the
+Mississippi River as though he had not been bred on its shores, and the
+city of St. Louis had turned its back on the noblest work of nature,
+leaving it bankrupt between its own banks. The new American showed his
+parentage proudly; he was the child of steam and the brother of the
+dynamo, and already, within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed
+humanities, brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into
+approach to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing
+no distinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American, like
+the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of
+the twelfth century was the servant of the Church, and the features
+would follow the parentage.
+
+  The St. Louis Exposition was its first creation in the
+twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One saw
+here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history,
+education, unity, or art, and with little capital--without even an
+element of natural interest except the river which it studiously
+ignored--but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk
+from attempting. This new social conglomerate, with no tie but its
+steam-power and not much of that, threw away thirty or forty million
+dollars on a pageant as ephemeral as a stage flat. The world had never
+witnessed so marvellous a phantasm by night Arabia's crimson sands had
+never returned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long
+lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands
+of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous
+depths; all in deep silence, profound solitude, listening for a voice
+or a foot-fall or the plash of an oar, as though the Emir Mirza were
+displaying the beauties of this City of Brass, which could show nothing
+half so beautiful as this illumination, with its vast, white,
+monumental solitude, bathed in the pure light of setting suns. One
+enjoyed it with iniquitous rapture, not because of exhibits but rather
+because of their want. Here was a paradox like the stellar universe
+that fitted one's mental faults. Had there been no exhibits at all, and
+no visitors, one would have enjoyed it only the more.
+
+  Here education found new forage. That the power was wasted, the
+art indifferent, the economic failure complete, added just so much to
+the interest. The chaos of education approached a dream. One asked
+one's self whether this extravagance reflected the past or imaged the
+future; whether it was a creation of the old American or a promise of
+the new one. No prophet could be believed, but a pilgrim of power,
+without constituency to flatter, might allow himself to hope. The
+prospect from the Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see almost an
+adequate motive for power; almost a scheme for progress. In another
+half-century, the people of the central valleys should have hundreds of
+millions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they could throw away
+tens; and by that time they might know what they wanted. Possibly they
+might even have learned how to reach it.
+
+  This was an optimist's hope, shared by few except pilgrims of
+World's Fairs, and frankly dropped by the multitude, for, east of the
+Mississippi, the St. Louis Exposition met a deliberate conspiracy of
+silence, discouraging, beyond measure, to an optimistic dream of future
+strength in American expression. The party got back to Washington on
+May 24, and before sailing for Europe, Adams went over, one warm
+evening, to bid good-bye on the garden-porch of the White House. He
+found himself the first person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit the
+Exposition for its beauty, and, as far as he ever knew, the last.
+
+  He left St. Louis May 22, 1904, and on Sunday, June 5, found
+himself again in the town of Coutances, where the people of Normandy
+had built, towards the year 1250, an Exposition which architects still
+admired and tourists visited, for it was thought singularly expressive
+of force as well as of grace in the Virgin. On this Sunday, the Norman
+world was celebrating a pretty church-feast--the Fete Dieu--and the
+streets were filled with altars to the Virgin, covered with flowers and
+foliage; the pavements strewn with paths of leaves and the spring
+handiwork of nature; the cathedral densely thronged at mass. The scene
+was graceful. The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition on Sunday,
+or any other day, even to American senators who had shut the St. Louis
+Exposition to her--or for her; and a historical tramp would gladly have
+offered a candle, or even a candle-stick in her honor, if she would
+have taught him her relation with the deity of the Senators. The power
+of the Virgin had been plainly One, embracing all human activity; while
+the power of the Senate, or its deity, seemed--might one say--to be
+more or less ashamed of man and his work. The matter had no great
+interest as far as it concerned the somewhat obscure mental processes
+of Senators who could probably have given no clearer idea than priests
+of the deity they supposed themselves to honor--if that was indeed
+their purpose; but it interested a student of force, curious to measure
+its manifestations. Apparently the Virgin--or her Son--had no longer
+the force to build expositions that one cared to visit, but had the
+force to close them. The force was still real, serious, and, at St.
+Louis, had been anxiously measured in actual money-value.
+
+  That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate
+Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an
+automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form
+of force which Adams most abominated. He had set aside the summer for
+study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but as a motive power, which
+had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached. The
+automobile alone could unite them in any reasonable sequence, and
+although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial
+traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that
+inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would
+have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she
+controlled the seeker of history. In his mind the problem offered
+itself as to Newton; it was a matter of mutual attraction, and he knew
+it, in his own case, to be a formula as precise as s = gt^2/2, if he
+could but experimentally prove it. Of the attraction he needed no proof
+on his own account; the costs of his automobile were more than
+sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak for others than himself.
+For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led the automobile
+and its owner where she would, to her wonderful palaces and chateaux,
+from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens and Laon, and a score of
+others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, as
+though she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever
+dreamed. He never doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre
+of his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could
+dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the
+formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to her
+charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental and
+physical energy of creation which had built up these World's Fairs of
+thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St. Louis pale.
+
+  "Both were faiths and both are gone," said Matthew Arnold of
+the Greek and Norse divinities; but the business of a student was to
+ask where they had gone. The Virgin had not even altogether gone; her
+fading away had been excessively slow. Her adorer had pursued her too
+long, too far, and into too many manifestations of her power, to admit
+that she had any equivalent either of quantity or kind, in the actual
+world, but he could still less admit her annihilation as energy.
+
+  So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had
+found a mistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers.
+Her own age had no time-measure. For years past, incited by John La
+Farge, Adams had devoted his summer schooling to the study of her glass
+at Chartres and elsewhere, and if the automobile had one vitesse more
+useful than another, it was that of a century a minute; that of passing
+from one century to another without break. The centuries dropped like
+autumn leaves in one's road, and one was not fined for running over
+them too fast. When the thirteenth lost breath, the fourteenth caught
+on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for the Virgin's glass
+opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran riot in
+sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded France,
+broke into Shelley's light dissolved in star-showers thrown, which had
+left every remote village strewn with fragments that flashed like
+jewels, and were tossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness.
+One dared not pass a parish church in Champagne or Touraine without
+stopping to look for its window of fragments, where one's glass
+discovered the Christ-child in his manger, nursed by the head of a
+fragmentary donkey, with a Cupid playing into its long ears from the
+balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemish
+leibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all invoked in
+prayer by remnants of the donors and their children that might have
+been drawn by Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors as fresh and living as
+the day they were burned in, and with feeling that still consoled the
+faithful for the paradise they had paid for and lost. France abounds in
+sixteenth-century glass. Paris alone contains acres of it, and the
+neighborhood within fifty miles contains scores of churches where the
+student may still imagine himself three hundred years old, kneeling
+before the Virgin's window in the silent solitude of an empty faith,
+crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historical sins,
+weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education, and still
+desperately hoping to understand.
+
+  He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century
+had a value of its own, as though the ONE had become several, and Unity
+had counted more than Three, though the Multiple still showed modest
+numbers. The glass had gone back to the Roman Empire and forward to the
+American continent; it betrayed sympathy with Montaigne and
+Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still supreme. At Beauvais in the
+Church of St. Stephen was a superb tree of Jesse, famous as the work of
+Engrand le Prince, about 1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the
+fourteen ancestors of the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the
+Kings of France, among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly
+more edifying than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of
+divine purity. Compared with the still more famous Tree of Jesse at
+Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must one declare that
+Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction? Complexity,
+Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it might suggest, but what
+step towards perfection?
+
+  One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was
+wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate
+conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelligent
+seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two men
+looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window. Approaching, he read that
+M. de Plehve had been assassinated at St. Petersburg. The mad mixture
+of Russia and the Crusades, of the Hippodrome and the Renaissance,
+drove him for refuge into the fascinating Church of St. Pantaleon near
+by. Martyrs, murderers, Caesars, saints and assassins--half in glass
+and half in telegram; chaos of time, place, morals, forces and
+motive--gave him vertigo. Had one sat all one's life on the steps of
+Ara Coeli for this? Was assassination forever to be the last word of
+Progress? No one in the street had shown a sign of protest; he himself
+felt none; the charming Church with its delightful windows, in its
+exquisite absence of other tourists, took a keener expression of
+celestial peace than could have been given it by any contrast short of
+explosive murder; the conservative Christian anarchist had come to his
+own, but which was he--the murderer or the murdered?
+
+  The Virgin herself never looked so winning--so One--as in
+this scandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she existed,
+if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she
+was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history. The
+effort for Unity could not be a partial success; even alternating Unity
+resolved itself into meaningless motion at last. To the tired student,
+the idea that he must give it up seemed sheer senility. As long as he
+could whisper, he would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet
+his creator with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing
+except that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle
+might for convenience be taken as equal to something else. Every man
+with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has
+had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula
+of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There,
+whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made,
+could be but verified.
+
+  The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old
+formulas had failed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the
+object was not extravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth.
+One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without
+breaking it. Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit
+which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star
+Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams. As term of a
+nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certain
+definite historical fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem
+if he were given the right to state it in his own terms.
+
+  Therefore, when the fogs and frosts stopped his slaughter of
+the centuries, and shut him up again in his garret, he sat down as
+though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own needs the
+values of a Dynamic Theory of History.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)
+
+  A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging the
+question: it defines Progress as the development and economy of Forces.
+Further, it defines force as anything that does, or helps to do work.
+Man is a force; so is the sun; so is a mathematical point, though
+without dimensions or known existence.
+
+  Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he
+captures the forces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force to
+opposing bodies in proportion to the law of mass, takes for granted
+that the forces of nature capture man. The sum of force attracts; the
+feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he suffers education
+or growth; he is the sum of the forces that attract him; his body and
+his thought are alike their product; the movement of the forces
+controls the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but the
+motions which impinge on his senses, whose sum makes education.
+
+  For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a
+spider in its web, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature dance
+like flies before the net, and the spider pounces on them when it can;
+but it makes many fatal mistakes, though its theory of force is sound.
+The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular
+skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in
+different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no
+power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even
+of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire
+taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water
+probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of
+mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into
+his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens
+or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of
+study. With little or no effort on his part, all these forces formed
+his thought, induced his action, and even shaped his figure.
+
+  Long before history began, his education was complete, for the
+record could not have been started until he had been taught to record.
+The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection
+of his own unity, containing all forces except himself. Either
+separately, or in groups, or as a whole, these forces never ceased to
+act on him, enlarging his mind as they enlarged the surface foliage of
+a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as the forests did,
+to these attractions. Susceptibility to the highest forces is the
+highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their
+mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and still makes,
+grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random
+from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the
+whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day,
+his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer
+give to force a name.
+
+  Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
+forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt
+his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a
+sling, to widen his range of power, as he sought fetish or a planet in
+the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he
+could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have
+possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object
+to teach him its use, or want of use, and the process was slow. He may
+have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for Nature to
+tell him her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has
+taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force were
+capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically selecting types
+of race or sources of variation. The individual that responded or
+reacted to lines of new force then was possibly the same individual
+that reacts on it now, and his conception of the unity seems never to
+have changed in spite of the increasing diversity of forces; but the
+theory of variation is an affair of other science than history, and
+matters nothing to dynamics. The individual or the race would be
+educated on the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur
+Balfour, had not essentially varied down to the year 1900.
+
+  To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine,
+and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word
+which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether in
+detail or mass. Unable to define Force as a unity, man symbolized it
+and pursued it, both in himself, and in the infinite, as philosophy and
+theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of all known forces, and its
+self-introspection necessarily created a science which had the singular
+value of lifting his education, at the start, to the finest, subtlest,
+and broadest training both in analysis and synthesis, so that, if
+language is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early in
+his history; while the mere motive remained as simple an appetite for
+power as the tribal greed which led him to trap an elephant. Hunger,
+whether for food or for the infinite, sets in motion multiplicity and
+infinity of thought, and the sure hope of gaining a share of infinite
+power in eternal life would lift most minds to effort.
+
+  He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and
+added nothing to his stock of known forces for a very long time. The
+mass of nature exercised on him so feeble an attraction that one can
+scarcely account for his apparent motion. Only a historian of very
+exceptional knowledge would venture to say at what date between 3000
+B.C. and 1000 A.D., the momentum of Europe was greatest; but such
+progress as the world made consisted in economies of energy rather than
+in its development; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names
+like Archimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law,
+measured by a number of names which Adams had begun life by failing to
+learn; or in coinage, which was most beautiful near its beginning, and
+most barbarous at its close; or it was shown in roads, or the size of
+ships, or harbors; or by the use of metals, instruments, and writing;
+all of them economies of force, sometimes more forceful than the forces
+they helped; but the roads were still travelled by the horse, the ass,
+the camel, or the slave; the ships were still propelled by sails or
+oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region of
+applied mechanics. Even the metals were old.
+
+  Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural
+forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were little
+changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more apparently
+chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand years had educated
+society to feel the vastness of Nature, and the infinity of her
+resources of power, but even this increase of attraction had not yet
+caused economies in its methods of pursuit.
+
+  There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the
+Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke down on
+the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the scandalous failure of
+civilization at the moment it had achieved complete success. In the
+year 305 the empire had solved the problems of Europe more completely
+than they have ever been solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law,
+and Free Trade should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in
+advance of the point reached by modern society in the four hundred
+years since 1500, when conditions were less simple.
+
+  The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
+incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic theory of
+adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but nations are not
+ruined beyond a certain point by adverse exchanges, and Rome had by no
+means exhausted her resources. On the contrary, the empire developed
+resources and energies quite astounding. No other four hundred years of
+history before A.D. 1800 knew anything like it; and although some of
+these developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and
+harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe
+alone the empire had developed three energies--France, England, and
+Germany--competent to master the world. The trouble seemed rather to be
+that the empire developed too much energy, and too fast.
+
+A dynamic law requires that two masses--nature and man--must go on,
+reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun and a comet react on
+each other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive. The theory
+seems to exact excess, rather than deficiency, of action and reaction
+to account for the dissolution of the Roman Empire, which should, as a
+problem of mechanics, have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the
+student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he must
+assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and
+in this case he has them in plain evidence. With the relentless logic
+that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which had established unity on
+earth, could not help establishing unity in heaven. It was induced by
+its dynamic necessities to economize the gods.
+
+  The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
+Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has pointed
+out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic theory gladly
+admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the force that attracts.
+The Church points out this force in the Cross, and history needs only
+to follow it. The empire loudly asserted its motive. Good taste forbids
+saying that Constantine the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern
+stock-broker on values of which he knew at the utmost only the volume;
+or that he merged all uncertain forces into a single trust, which he
+enormously overcapitalized, and forced on the market; but this is the
+substance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of Milan in the
+year 313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust of State
+Religions. Regarded as an Act of Congress, it runs: "We have resolved
+to grant to Christians as well as all others the liberty to practice
+the religion they prefer, in order that whatever exists of divinity or
+celestial power may help and favor us and all who are under our
+government." The empire pursued power--not merely spiritual but
+physical--in the sense in which Constantine issued his army order the
+year before, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hoc signo vinces!
+using the Cross as a train of artillery, which, to his mind, it was.
+Society accepted it in the same character. Eighty years afterwards,
+Theodosius marched against his rival Eugene with the Cross for physical
+champion; and Eugene raised the image of Hercules to fight for the
+pagans; while society on both sides looked on, as though it were a
+boxing-match, to decide a final test of force between the divine
+powers. The Church was powerless to raise the ideal. What is now known
+as religion affected the mind of old society but little. The laity, the
+people, the million, almost to a man, bet on the gods as they bet on a
+horse.
+
+  No doubt the Church did all it could to purify the process, but
+society was almost wholly pagan in its point of view, and was drawn to
+the Cross because, in its system of physics, the Cross had absorbed all
+the old occult or fetish-power. The symbol represented the sum of
+nature--the Energy of modern science--and society believed it to be as
+real as X-rays; perhaps it was! The emperors used it like gunpowder in
+politics; the physicians used it like rays in medicine; the dying clung
+to it as the quintessence of force, to protect them from the forces of
+evil on their road to the next life.
+
+  Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion
+disturbed economy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected the
+exchanges; but no one could afford to buy or construct a costly and
+complicated machine when he could hire an occult force at trifling
+expense. Fetish-power was cheap and satisfactory, down to a certain
+point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixed this stage of economy as
+a necessary phase of social education, and historians seem now to
+accept it as the only gain yet made towards scientific history. Great
+numbers of educated people--perhaps a majority--cling to the method
+still, and practice it more or less strictly; but, until quite
+recently, no other was known. The only occult power at man's disposal
+was fetish. Against it, no mechanical force could compete except within
+narrow limits.
+
+  Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was
+incredibly poor. It knew but one productive energy resembling a modern
+machine--the slave. No artificial force of serious value was applied to
+production or transportation, and when society developed itself so
+rapidly in political and social lines, it had no other means of keeping
+its economy on the same level than to extend its slave-system and its
+fetish-system to the utmost.
+
+The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as early as
+the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome fell. The
+economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced the empire to
+enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system consumed itself and the
+empire too, leaving society no resource but further enlargement of its
+religious system in order to compensate for the losses and horrors of
+the failure. For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness
+approached perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction
+needed only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.
+
+  At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden,
+agricultural, uncommercial Western Empire--the poorer and less
+Christianized half--went to pieces. Society, though terribly shocked by
+the horrors of Alaric's storm, felt still more deeply the
+disappointment in its new power, the Cross, which had failed to protect
+its Church. The outcry against the Cross became so loud among
+Christians that its literary champion, Bishop Augustine of Hippo--a
+town between Algiers and Tunis--was led to write a famous treatise in
+defence of the Cross, familiar still to every scholar, in which he
+defended feebly the mechanical value of the symbol--arguing only that
+pagan symbols equally failed--but insisted on its spiritual value in
+the Civitas Dei which had taken the place of the Civitas Romae in human
+interest. "Granted that we have lost all we had! Have we lost faith?
+Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the inner man who is
+rich before God? These are the wealth of Christians!" The Civitas Dei,
+in its turn, became the sum of attraction for the Western world, though
+it also showed the same weakness in mechanics that had wrecked the
+Civitas Romae. St. Augustine and his people perished at Hippo towards
+430, leaving society in appearance dull to new attraction.
+
+  Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of
+experimenting on occult force of every kind is such as to absorb all
+the free thought of the human race. The gods did their work; history
+has no quarrel with them; they led, educated, enlarged the mind; taught
+knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulated effort. So little is known
+about the mind--whether social, racial, sexual or heritable; whether
+material or spiritual; whether animal, vegetable or mineral--that
+history is inclined to avoid it altogether; but nothing forbids one to
+admit, for convenience, that it may assimilate food like the body,
+storing new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The
+brain has not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter.
+Never has Nature offered it so violent a stimulant as when she opened
+to it the possibility of sharing infinite power in eternal life, and it
+might well need a thousand years of prolonged and intense experiment to
+prove the value of the motive. During these so-called Middle Ages, the
+Western mind reacted in many forms, on many sides, expressing its
+motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothic architecture, glass
+windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and love, which
+still affect some people as the noblest work of man, so that, even
+to-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far
+countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi,
+Cordova, Chartres, with vague notions about the force that created
+them, but with a certain surprise that a social mind of such singular
+energy and unity should still lurk in their shadows.
+
+  The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
+architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly
+conscious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the
+simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity and
+variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed. The navy
+of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have annihilated in
+half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or Rome ever set afloat.
+The dynamic scheme began by asserting rather recklessly that between
+the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the Cross (A.D. 300), no new force
+affected Western progress, and antiquarians may easily dispute the
+fact; but in any case the motive influence, old or new, which raised
+both Pyramids and Cross was the same attraction of power in a future
+life that raised the dome of Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens,
+however much it was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in space.
+Therefore, no single event has more puzzled historians than the sudden,
+unexplained appearance of at least two new natural forces of the
+highest educational value in mechanics, for the first time within
+record of history. Literally, these two forces seemed to drop from the
+sky at the precise moment when the Cross on one side and the Crescent
+on the other, proclaimed the complete triumph of the Civitas Dei. Had
+the Manichean doctrine of Good and Evil as rival deities been orthodox,
+it would alone have accounted for this simultaneous victory of hostile
+powers.
+
+  Of the compass, as a step towards demonstration of the dynamic
+law, one may confidently say that it proved, better than any other
+force, the widening scope of the mind, since it widened immensely the
+range of contact between nature and thought. The compass educated. This
+must prove itself as needing no proof.
+
+  Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be
+said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction of
+religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the
+doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They were
+chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and still act as the
+most violent educators ever known to man, but they were justly feared
+as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may have risked towards the
+milder teachers of his infancy, he was an abject pupil towards
+explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a record of the energy with
+which the relatively harmless Greek fire educated and enlarged the
+French mind in a single night in the year 1249, when the crusaders were
+trying to advance on Cairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff
+dropped on their knees at every fiery flame that flew by, praying--"God
+have pity on us!" and never had man more reason to call on his gods
+than they, for the battle of religion between Christian and Saracen was
+trifling compared with that of education between gunpowder and the
+Cross.
+
+  The fiction that society educated itself, or aimed at a
+conscious purpose, was upset by the compass and gunpowder which dragged
+and drove Europe at will through frightful bogs of learning. At first,
+the apparent lag for want of volume in the new energies lasted one or
+two centuries, which closed the great epochs of emotion by the Gothic
+cathedrals and scholastic theology. The moment had Greek beauty and
+more than Greek unity, but it was brief; and for another century or
+two, Western society seemed to float in space without apparent motion.
+Yet the attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, and
+education became more rapid than ever before. Society began to resist,
+but the individual showed greater and greater insistence, without
+realizing what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in
+ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenberg and Fust were printing
+their first Bible at Mainz under the impression that they were helping
+the Cross. When Columbus discovered the West Indies in 1492, the Church
+looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset
+Europe half a century later, they were trying, like St. Augustine, to
+substitute the Civitas Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set
+out for New England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas
+Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he
+repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the Church
+reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in
+1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630--as science goes on repeating
+to us every day--it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the
+astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of
+magnifying God through his works; a form of science which did their
+religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor
+Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the
+Great--if so much--doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies
+reached only its personality.
+
+  This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of
+modern history. Except as reflected in himself, man has no reason for
+assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or a
+prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by fatiguing
+the more active--or reactive--minds; and Lord Bacon tried to stop it.
+He urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe from a
+thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe. The mind should
+observe and register forces--take them apart and put them
+together--without assuming unity at all. "Nature, to be commanded, must
+be obeyed." "The imagination must be given not wings but weights." As
+Galileo reversed the action of earth and sun, Bacon reversed the
+relation of thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the
+movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.
+
+  The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as
+mechanical as the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After 1500,
+the speed of progress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to alarm every
+one, as though it were the acceleration of a falling body which the
+dynamic theory takes it to be. Lord Bacon was as much astonished by it
+as the Church was, and with reason. Suddenly society felt itself
+dragged into situations altogether new and anarchic--situations which
+it could not affect, but which painfully affected it. Instinct taught
+it that the universe in its thought must be in danger when its
+reflection lost itself in space. The danger was all the greater because
+men of science covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets called the
+undevout astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it
+rigidly standing on its head; the microscope revealed a universe that
+defied the senses; gunpowder killed whole races that lagged behind; the
+compass coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on the impossible idea
+that the earth was round; the press drenched Europe with anarchism.
+Europe saw itself, violently resisting, wrenched into false positions,
+drawn along new lines as a fish that is caught on a hook; but unable to
+understand by what force it was controlled. The resistance was often
+bloody, sometimes humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the
+eighteenth century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all
+history and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauer
+and Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all, the
+Baconian law held good; thought did not evolve nature, but nature
+evolved thought. Not one considerable man of science dared face the
+stream of thought; and the whole number of those who acted, like
+Franklin, as electric conductors of the new forces from nature to man,
+down to the year 1800, did not exceed a few score, confined to a few
+towns in western Europe. Asia refused to be touched by the stream, and
+America, except for Franklin, stood outside.
+
+  Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and
+mechanical, grew in volume until they acquired sufficient mass to take
+the place of the old religious science, substituting their attraction
+for the attractions of the Civitas Dei, but the process remained the
+same. Nature, not mind, did the work that the sun does on the planets.
+Man depended more and more absolutely on forces other than his own, and
+on instruments which superseded his senses. Bacon foretold it: "Neither
+the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can effect much.
+It is by instruments and helps that the work is done." Once done, the
+mind resumed its illusion, and society forgot its impotence; but no one
+better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his true followers science
+always meant self-restraint, obedience, sensitiveness to impulse from
+without. "Non fingendum aut excogitandum sed inveniendum quid Natura
+faciat aut ferat."
+
+  The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can
+be treated by history only as a miracle of growth, like the sports of
+nature. Evidently a new variety of mind had appeared. Certain men
+merely held out their hands--like Newton, watched an apple; like
+Franklin, flew a kite; like Watt, played with a tea-kettle--and great
+forces of nature stuck to them as though she were playing ball.
+Governments did almost nothing but resist. Even gunpowder and ordnance,
+the great weapon of government, showed little development between 1400
+and 1800. Society was hostile or indifferent, as Priestley and Jenner,
+and even Fulton, with reason complained in the most advanced societies
+in the world, while its resistance became acute wherever the Church
+held control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a long
+series of groups, dragged on by an attractive power in advance, which
+even the leaders obeyed without understanding, as the planets obeyed
+gravity, or the trees obeyed heat and light.
+
+  The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of
+mind on the mass of nature seemed not greater than that of a comet on
+the sun; and had the spontaneous influx of force stopped in Europe,
+society must have stood still, or gone backward, as in Asia or Africa.
+Then only economies of process would have counted as new force, and
+society would have been better pleased; for the idea that new force
+must be in itself a good is only an animal or vegetable instinct. As
+Nature developed her hidden energies, they tended to become
+destructive. Thought itself became tortured, suffering reluctantly,
+impatiently, painfully, the coercion of new method. Easy thought had
+always been movement of inertia, and mostly mere sentiment; but even
+the processes of mathematics measured feebly the needs of force.
+
+  The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the
+appearance of the new class of supersensual forces, before which the
+man of science stood at first as bewildered and helpless as, in the
+fourth century, a priest of Isis before the Cross of Christ.
+
+  This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic formula
+of history. Any schoolboy knows enough to object at once that it is the
+oldest and most universal of all theories. Church and State, theology
+and philosophy, have always preached it, differing only in the
+allotment of energy between nature and man. Whether the attractive
+energy has been called God or Nature, the mechanism has been always the
+same, and history is not obliged to decide whether the Ultimate tends
+to a purpose or not, or whether ultimate energy is one or many. Every
+one admits that the will is a free force, habitually decided by
+motives. No one denies that motives exist adequate to decide the will;
+even though it may not always be conscious of them. Science has proved
+that forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and
+complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without
+stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only in a partial
+degree; but that, from the beginning of organic existence, his
+consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his
+sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power to
+a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to the
+function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is
+nothing unscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt
+by the senses, the universe may be--as it has always been--either a
+supersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and
+is either life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion, philosophy,
+and science seem to go hand in hand. The schools begin their vital
+battle only there. In the earlier stages of progress, the forces to be
+assimilated were simple and easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man
+enlarged its range, it enlarged the field of complexity, and must
+continue to do so, even into chaos, until the reservoirs of sensuous or
+supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until
+he succumbs to their excess.
+
+  For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer
+for a chart of relations, although any serious student would need to
+invent another, to compare or correct its errors; but past history is
+only a value of relation to the future, and this value is wholly one of
+convenience, which can be tested only by experiment. Any law of
+movement must include, to make it a convenience, some mechanical
+formula of acceleration.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904)
+
+  IMAGES are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the
+mind craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest
+experimenters find twenty images better than one, especially if
+contradictory; since the human mind has already learned to deal in
+contradictions.
+
+  The image needed here is that of a new centre, or
+preponderating mass, artificially introduced on earth in the midst of a
+system of attractive forces that previously made their own equilibrium,
+and constantly induced to accelerate its motion till it shall establish
+a new equilibrium. A dynamic theory would begin by assuming that all
+history, terrestrial or cosmic, mechanical or intellectual, would be
+reducible to this formula if we knew the facts.
+
+  For convenience, the most familiar image should come first; and
+this is probably that of the comet, or meteoric streams, like the
+Leonids and Perseids; a complex of minute mechanical agencies, reacting
+within and without, and guided by the sum of forces attracting or
+deflecting it. Nothing forbids one to assume that the man-meteorite
+might grow, as an acorn does, absorbing light, heat, electricity--or
+thought; for, in recent times, such transference of energy has become a
+familiar idea; but the simplest figure, at first, is that of a perfect
+comet--say that of 1843--which drops from space, in a straight line, at
+the regular acceleration of speed, directly into the sun, and after
+wheeling sharply about it, in heat that ought to dissipate any known
+substance, turns back unharmed, in defiance of law, by the path on
+which it came. The mind, by analogy, may figure as such a comet, the
+better because it also defies law.
+
+  Motion is the ultimate object of science, and measures of
+motion are many; but with thought as with matter, the true measure is
+mass in its astronomic sense--the sum or difference of attractive
+forces. Science has quite enough trouble in measuring its material
+motions without volunteering help to the historian, but the historian
+needs not much help to measure some kinds of social movement; and
+especially in the nineteenth century, society by common accord agreed
+in measuring its progress by the coal-output. The ratio of increase in
+the volume of coal-power may serve as dynamometer.
+
+  The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every
+ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power, for the
+ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as in
+1840. Rapid as this rate of acceleration in volume seems, it may be
+tested in a thousand ways without greatly reducing it. Perhaps the
+ocean steamer is nearest unity and easiest to measure, for any one
+might hire, in 1905, for a small sum of money, the use of 30,000
+steam-horse-power to cross the ocean, and by halving this figure every
+ten years, he got back to 234 horse-power for 1835, which was accuracy
+enough for his purposes. In truth, his chief trouble came not from the
+ratio in volume of heat, but from the intensity, since he could get no
+basis for a ratio there. All ages of history have known high
+intensities, like the iron-furnace, the burning-glass, the blow-pipe;
+but no society has ever used high intensities on any large scale till
+now, nor can a mere bystander decide what range of temperature is now
+in common use. Loosely guessing that science controls habitually the
+whole range from absolute zero to 3000 degrees Centigrade, one might
+assume, for convenience, that the ten-year ratio for volume could be
+used temporarily for intensity; and still there remained a ratio to be
+guessed for other forces than heat. Since 1800 scores of new forces had
+been discovered; old forces had been raised to higher powers, as could
+be measured in the navy-gun; great regions of chemistry had been opened
+up, and connected with other regions of physics. Within ten years a new
+universe of force had been revealed in radiation. Complexity had
+extended itself on immense horizons, and arithmetical ratios were
+useless for any attempt at accuracy. The force evolved seemed more like
+explosion than gravitation, and followed closely the curve of steam;
+but, at all events, the ten-year ratio seemed carefully conservative.
+Unless the calculator was prepared to be instantly overwhelmed by
+physical force and mental complexity, he must stop there.
+
+  Thus, taking the year 1900 as the starting point for carrying
+back the series, nothing was easier than to assume a ten-year period of
+retardation as far back as 1820, but beyond that point the statistician
+failed, and only the mathematician could help. Laplace would have found
+it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science
+between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, and himself. Watt could have given
+in pounds the increase of power between Newcomen's engines and his own.
+Volta and Benjamin Franklin would have stated their progress as
+absolute creation of power. Dalton could have measured minutely his
+advance on Boerhaave. Napoleon I must have had a distinct notion of his
+own numerical relation to Louis XIV. No one in 1789 doubted the
+progress of force, least of all those who were to lose their heads by
+it.
+
+  Pending agreement between these authorities, theory may assume
+what it likes--say a fifty, or even a five-and-twenty-year period of
+reduplication for the eighteenth century, for the period matters little
+until the acceleration itself is admitted. The subject is even more
+amusing in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, because
+Galileo and Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Isaac Newton took vast
+pains to fix the laws of acceleration for moving bodies, while Lord
+Bacon and William Harvey were content with showing experimentally the
+fact of acceleration in knowledge; but from their combined results a
+historian might be tempted to maintain a similar rate of movement back
+to 1600, subject to correction from the historians of mathematics.
+
+  The mathematicians might carry their calculations back as far
+as the fourteenth century when algebra seems to have become for the
+first time the standard measure of mechanical progress in western
+Europe; for not only Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even artists like
+Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer worked by mathematical
+processes, and their testimony would probably give results more exact
+than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, to save trouble, one might
+tentatively carry back the same ratio of acceleration, or retardation,
+to the year 1400, with the help of Columbus and Gutenberg, so taking a
+uniform rate during the whole four centuries (1400-1800), and leaving
+to statisticians the task of correcting it.
+
+  Or better, one might, for convenience, use the formula of
+squares to serve for a law of mind. Any other formula would do as well,
+either of chemical explosion, or electrolysis, or vegetable growth, or
+of expansion or contraction in innumerable forms; but this happens to
+be simple and convenient. Its force increases in the direct ratio of
+its squares. As the human meteoroid approached the sun or centre of
+attractive force, the attraction of one century squared itself to give
+the measure of attraction in the next.
+
+  Behind the year 1400, the process certainly went on, but the
+progress became so slight as to be hardly measurable. What was gained
+in the east or elsewhere, cannot be known; but forces, called loosely
+Greek fire and gunpowder, came into use in the west in the thirteenth
+century, as well as instruments like the compass, the blow-pipe, clocks
+and spectacles, and materials like paper; Arabic notation and algebra
+were introduced, while metaphysics and theology acted as violent
+stimulants to mind. An architect might detect a sequence between the
+Church of St. Peter's at Rome, the Amiens Cathedral, the Duomo at Pisa,
+San Marco at Venice, Sancta Sofia at Constantinople and the churches at
+Ravenna. All the historian dares affirm is that a sequence is
+manifestly there, and he has a right to carry back his ratio, to
+represent the fact, without assuming its numerical correctness. On the
+human mind as a moving body, the break in acceleration in the Middle
+Ages is only apparent; the attraction worked through shifting forms of
+force, as the sun works by light or heat, electricity, gravitation, or
+what not, on different organs with different sensibilities, but with
+invariable law.
+
+  The science of prehistoric man has no value except to prove
+that the law went back into indefinite antiquity. A stone arrowhead is
+as convincing as a steam-engine. The values were as clear a hundred
+thousand years ago as now, and extended equally over the whole world.
+The motion at last became infinitely slight, but cannot be proved to
+have stopped. The motion of Newton's comet at aphelion may be equally
+slight. To evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution; to
+historians the single interest is the law of reaction between force and
+force--between mind and nature--the law of progress.
+
+  The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte
+first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of
+progress, for a mere phase interrupts no growth, and nature shows
+innumerable such phases. The development of coal-power in the
+nineteenth century furnished the first means of assigning closer values
+to the elements; and the appearance of supersensual forces towards 1900
+made this calculation a pressing necessity; since the next step became
+infinitely serious.
+
+  A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of
+mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the
+convenience of man. No one is likely to suggest a theory that man's
+convenience had been consulted by Nature at any time, or that Nature
+has consulted the convenience of any of her creations, except perhaps
+the Terebratula. In every age man has bitterly and justly complained
+that Nature hurried and hustled him, for inertia almost invariably has
+ended in tragedy. Resistance is its law, and resistance to superior
+mass is futile and fatal.
+
+  Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of
+acceleration could not last. The world forgets quickly, but even today
+the habit remains of founding statistics on the faith that consumption
+will continue nearly stationary. Two generations, with John Stuart
+Mill, talked of this stationary period, which was to follow the
+explosion of new power. All the men who were elderly in the forties
+died in this faith, and other men grew old nursing the same conviction,
+and happy in it; while science, for fifty years, permitted, or
+encouraged, society to think that force would prove to be limited in
+supply. This mental inertia of science lasted through the eighties
+before showing signs of breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly
+wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that force was
+inexhaustible. Even then the scientific authorities vehemently resisted.
+
+  Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300.
+Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and whirled
+about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from every atom,
+and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running
+to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off.
+Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of
+a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact
+truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in
+Paris, who never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an
+accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the
+neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb.
+So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in
+force and number every ten years.
+
+  Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One's life had
+fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had
+seen four impossibilities made actual--the ocean-steamer, the railway,
+the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he ever learn
+which of the four had most hurried others to come. He had seen the
+coal-output of the United States grow from nothing to three hundred
+million tons or more. What was far more serious, he had seen the number
+of minds, engaged in pursuing force--the truest measure of its
+attraction--increase from a few scores or hundreds, in 1838, to many
+thousands in 1905, trained to sharpness never before reached, and armed
+with instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and
+accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature
+herself had never known it to be, making analyses that contradicted
+being, and syntheses that endangered the elements. No one could say
+that the social mind now failed to respond to new force, even when the
+new force annoyed it horribly. Every day Nature violently revolted,
+causing so-called accidents with enormous destruction of property and
+life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned and
+shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. The
+railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms
+ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous
+relaxation. An immense volume of force had detached itself from the
+unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to
+be infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with more
+compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that ever
+existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb.
+
+  In 1850, science would have smiled at such a romance as this,
+but, in 1900, as far as history could learn, few men of science thought
+it a laughing matter. If a perplexed but laborious follower could
+venture to guess their drift, it seemed in their minds a toss-up
+between anarchy and order. Unless they should be more honest with
+themselves in the future than ever they were in the past, they would be
+more astonished than their followers when they reached the end. If Karl
+Pearson's notions of the universe were sound, men like Galileo,
+Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton should have stopped the progress of
+science before 1700, supposing them to have been honest in the
+religious convictions they expressed. In 1900 they were plainly forced
+back; on faith in a unity unproved and an order they had themselves
+disproved. They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to
+themselves. They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe of
+motions, with an acceleration, in their own case of vertiginous
+violence. With the correctness of their science, history had no right
+to meddle, since their science now lay in a plane where scarcely one or
+two hundred minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes;
+but bombs educate vigorously, and even wireless telegraphy or airships
+might require the reconstruction of society. If any analogy whatever
+existed between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on
+the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so
+violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibrium,
+like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation altogether, like
+meteoroids in the earth's atmosphere. If it behaved like an explosive,
+it must rapidly recover equilibrium; if it behaved like a vegetable, it
+must reach its limits of growth; and even if it acted like the earlier
+creations of energy--the saurians and sharks--it must have nearly
+reached the limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling
+or quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would
+soon succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could
+no longer understand the problem in 1900.
+
+  Fortunately, a student of history had no responsibility for the
+problem; he took it as science gave it, and waited only to be taught.
+With science or with society, he had no quarrel and claimed no share of
+authority. He had never been able to acquire knowledge, still less to
+impart it; and if he had, at times, felt serious differences with the
+American of the nineteenth century, he felt none with the American of
+the twentieth. For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian
+asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a
+pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden under
+foot; for he could see that the new American--the child of incalculable
+coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as
+well as of new forces yet undetermined--must be a sort of God compared
+with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800,
+every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control
+unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an
+earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range
+of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the
+same plane with the fourth--equally childlike--and he would only wonder
+how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have
+done so much. Perhaps even he might go back, in 1964, to sit with
+Gibbon on the steps of Ara Coeli.
+
+  Meanwhile he was getting education. With that, a teacher who
+had failed to educate even the generation of 1870, dared not interfere.
+The new forces would educate. History saw few lessons in the past that
+would be useful in the future; but one, at least, it did see. The
+attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900 had not
+often been surpassed for folly; and since 1800 the forces and their
+complications had increased a thousand times or more. The attempt of
+the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000, must be even
+blinder than that of the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he had
+learned his ignorance. During a million or two of years, every
+generation in turn had toiled with endless agony to attain and apply
+power, all the while betraying the deepest alarm and horror at the
+power they created. The teacher of 1900, if foolhardy, might stimulate;
+if foolish, might resist; if intelligent, might balance, as wise and
+foolish have often tried to do from the beginning; but the forces would
+continue to educate, and the mind would continue to react. All the
+teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.
+
+  Even there his difficulty was extreme. The most elementary
+books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought.
+Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in
+older literature: "The cause of this phenomenon is not understood";
+"science no longer ventures to explain causes"; "the first step towards
+a causal explanation still remains to be taken"; "opinions are very
+much divided"; "in spite of the contradictions involved"; "science gets
+on only by adopting different theories, sometimes contradictory."
+Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and
+instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know
+no law that could not be proved by its anti-law.
+
+  To educate--one's self to begin with--had been the effort
+of one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had
+gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of waiting
+another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of complexities,
+allured one's imagination but slightly. The law of acceleration was
+definite, and did not require ten years more study except to show
+whether it held good. No scheme could be suggested to the new American,
+and no fault needed to be found, or complaint made; but the next great
+influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education
+promised to be violently coercive. The movement from unity into
+multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and
+rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would
+require a new social mind. As though thought were common salt in
+indefinite solution it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus
+far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully
+reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react--but it
+would need to jump.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+NUNC AGE (1905)
+
+  NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary
+landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they
+saw American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the
+plains. As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man
+than either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more
+striking than ever--wonderful--unlike anything man had ever seen--and
+like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the city
+became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning.
+Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its
+freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone
+and steam against the sky. The city had the air and movement of
+hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and
+alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.
+Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed
+never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable,
+nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding
+new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were
+demanding a new type of man--a man with ten times the endurance,
+energy, will and mind of the old type--for whom they were ready to pay
+millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements or read the last
+week's newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old one
+had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his failure had become
+catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal election shrieked
+chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club
+window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under
+Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager
+for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to
+come or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years failure of
+Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great
+was in sight.
+
+  Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington
+to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and battling
+Trusts. With the Battle of Trusts, a student of mechanics felt entire
+sympathy, not merely as a matter of politics or society, but also as a
+measure of motion. The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger
+part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were
+obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were
+revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the
+screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore
+society to pieces and trampled it under foot. As one of their earliest
+victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had learned submission and
+silence, for he knew that, under the laws of mechanics, any change,
+within the range of the forces, must make his situation only worse; but
+he was beyond measure curious to see whether the conflict of forces
+would produce the new man, since no other energies seemed left on earth
+to breed. The new man could be only a child born of contact between the
+new and the old energies.
+
+  Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown,
+and neither had warped the umpire's judgment by its favors. If ever
+judge had reason to be impartial, it was he. The sole object of his
+interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one watched, the
+less could be seen of him. Of the forces behind the Trusts, one could
+see something; they owned a complete organization, with schools,
+training, wealth and purpose; but of the forces behind Roosevelt one
+knew little; their cohesion was slight; their training irregular; their
+objects vague. The public had no idea what practical system it could
+aim at, or what sort of men could manage it. The single problem before
+it was not so much to control the Trusts as to create the society that
+could manage the Trusts. The new American must be either the child of
+the new forces or a chance sport of nature. The attraction of
+mechanical power had already wrenched the American mind into a
+crab-like process which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts to restore
+to even action, and he had every right to active support and sympathy
+from all the world, especially from the Trusts themselves so far as
+they were human; but the doubt persisted whether the force that
+educated was really man or nature--mind or motion. The mechanical
+theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to require that the law of
+mass should rule. In that case, progress would continue as before.
+
+  In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was
+as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had been to
+the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for holding his
+tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no more than for the
+kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an approach to measurement of
+motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years. At the
+calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very soon
+pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was futile,
+and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If the
+acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces, were
+to continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should be
+able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as accurately
+as that of the November meteoroids.
+
+  Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as
+the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators. Above
+all, it was profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage effort. On the
+other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and to economize waste of
+mind. If it was not itself education, it pointed out the economies
+necessary for the education of the new American. There, the duty
+stopped.
+
+  There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a
+singular sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly five
+thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses of seals,
+where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in peace. "Unless
+we had actually found these remains, it would have been past believing
+that a dying seal could have transported itself over fifty miles of
+rough, steep, glacier-surface," but "the seal seems often to crawl to
+the shore or the ice to die, probably from its instinctive dread of its
+marine enemies." In India, Purun Dass, at the end of statesmanship,
+sought solitude, and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys,
+rather than remain with man. Even in America, the Indian Summer of life
+should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and
+infinite in wealth and depth of tone--but never hustled. For that
+reason, one's own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer nature than
+John Hay's exposure. To the normal animal the instinct of sport is
+innate, and historians themselves were not exempt from the passion of
+baiting their bears; but in its turn even the seal dislikes to be
+worried to death in age by creatures that have not the strength or the
+teeth to kill him outright.
+
+  On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a
+glance that Hay must have rest. Already Mrs. Hay had bade him prepare
+to help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the Session should
+be over, and although Hay protested that the idea could not even be
+discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that he could not effectually
+discuss it, and ended by yielding without struggle. He would equally
+have resigned office and retired, like Purun Dass, had not the
+President and the press protested; but he often debated the subject,
+and his friends could throw no light on it. Adams himself, who had set
+his heart on seeing Hay close his career by making peace in the East,
+could only urge that vanity for vanity, the crown of peacemaker was
+worth the cross of martyrdom; but the cross was full in sight, while
+the crown was still uncertain. Adams found his formula for Russian
+inertia exasperatingly correct. He thought that Russia should have
+negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur, January 1, 1905; he
+found that she had not the energy, but meant to wait till her navy
+should be destroyed. The delay measured precisely the time that Hay had
+to spare.
+
+  The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the
+strength to crawl on board ship, March 18, and before his steamer had
+reached half her course, he had revived, almost as gay as when he first
+lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four years earlier. The
+clouds that gather round the setting sun do not always take a sober
+coloring from eyes that have kept watch on mortality; or, at least, the
+sobriety is sometimes scarcely sad. One walks with one's friends
+squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye with a smile. One
+has done it so often! Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourished no
+illusions; he was convinced that he should never return to his work,
+and he talked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day
+expect, but he threw off the coloring of office and mortality together,
+and the malaria of power left its only trace in the sense of tasks
+incomplete.
+
+  One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his
+dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in a
+butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly
+completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly every old
+problem of American statesmanship, and had left little or nothing to
+annoy his successor. He had brought the great Atlantic powers into a
+working system, and even Russia seemed about to be dragged into a
+combine of intelligent equilibrium based on an intelligent allotment of
+activities. For the first time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman
+pax was in sight, and would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him.
+Except for making peace in Manchuria, he could do no more; and if the
+worst should happen, setting continent against continent in arms--the
+only apparent alternative to his scheme--he need not repine at missing
+the catastrophe.
+
+  This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting
+statesman feels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to get out
+one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on either side.
+Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy? The Kaiser supplied
+him with these figures, just as the Cretic approached Morocco. Every
+one was doing it, and seemed in a panic about it. The chaos waited only
+for his landing.
+
+  Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at
+Nervi, and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and
+heard no call for action. Then they all went on to Nanheim without
+relapse. There, after a few days, Adams left him for the regular
+treatment, and came up to Paris. The medical reports promised well, and
+Hay's letters were as humorous and light-handed as ever. To the last he
+wrote cheerfully of his progress, and amusingly with his usual light
+scepticism, of his various doctors; but when the treatment ended, three
+weeks later, and he came on to Paris, he showed, at the first glance,
+that he had lost strength, and the return to affairs and interviews
+wore him rapidly out. He was conscious of it, and in his last talk
+before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his
+activity for granted. "You must hold out for the peace negotiations,"
+was the remonstrance. "I've not time!" he replied. "You'll need little
+time!" was the rejoinder. Each was correct.
+
+  There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than the
+commonplace to express what is incapable of expression. "The rest is
+silence!" The few familiar words, among the simplest in the language,
+conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry, served Shakespeare, and, as
+yet, no one has said more. A few weeks afterwards, one warm evening in
+early July, as Adams was strolling down to dine under the trees at
+Armenonville, he learned that Hay was dead. He expected it; on Hay's
+account, he was even satisfied to have his friend die, as we would all
+die if we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universally
+regretted, and wielding his power to the last. One had seen scores of
+emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when alive; and now,
+at least, one had not that to fear for one's friend. It was not even
+the suddenness of the shock, or the sense of void, that threw Adams
+into the depths of Hamlet's Shakespearean silence in the full flare of
+Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its
+most futile climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to
+follow--the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends
+had begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive--no
+attraction--to carry it on after the others had gone. Education had
+ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter horizon could its
+values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day--say 1938, their
+centenary--they might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to
+see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the
+mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time
+since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a
+world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
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