THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS (2024)

Project GutenbergAustralia atreasure-trove of literature treasure found hiddenwith no evidence of ownership

BROWSE the site for other works by this author (and our other authors) or get HELP Reading, Downloading and Converting files) or SEARCH the entire site withGoogle Site Search

Henry Adams

PREFACETHE EDUCATIONCHAPTER I. QUINCY (1838-1848)CHAPTER II. BOSTON (1848-1854)CHAPTER III. WASHINGTON (1850-1854)CHAPTER IV. HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)CHAPTER V. BERLIN (1858-1859)CHAPTER VI. ROME (1859-1860)CHAPTER VII. TREASON (1860-1861)CHAPTER VIII. DIPLOMACY (1861)CHAPTER IX. FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)CHAPTER X. POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)CHAPTER XI. THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)CHAPTER XII. ECCENTRICITY (1863)CHAPTER XIII. THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)CHAPTER XIV. DILETTANTISM (1865-1866)CHAPTER XV. DARWINISM (1867-1868)CHAPTER XVI. THE PRESS (1868)CHAPTER XVII. PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)CHAPTER XVIII. FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)CHAPTER XIX. CHAOS (1870)CHAPTER XX. FAILURE (1871)CHAPTER XXI. TWENTY YEARS AFTER (1892)CHAPTER XXII. CHICAGO (1893)CHAPTER XXIII. SILENCE (1894-1898)CHAPTER XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER (1898-1899)CHAPTER XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN (1900)CHAPTER XXVI. TWILIGHT (1901)CHAPTER XXVII. TEUFELSDRÖCKH (1901)CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)CHAPTER XXIX. THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE (1902)CHAPTER XXX. VIS INERTIAE (1903)CHAPTER XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE (1903)CHAPTER XXXII. VIS NOVA (1903-1904)CHAPTER XXXIII. A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY (1904)CHAPTER XXXIV. A LAW OF ACCELERATION (1904)CHAPTER XXXV. NUNC AGE (1905)

EDITOR'S PREFACE

THIS volume, written in 1905 as a sequel to the sameauthor's "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," was privately printed, to the numberof one hundred copies, in 1906, and sent to the persons interested, for theirassent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was thus explainedat the end of Chapter XXIX: —

"Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion froma fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit — the point ofhistory when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unifieduniverse. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use thecentury 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of ThomasAquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time,without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movementmight be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to thetask, he began a volume which he mentally knew as 'Mont-Saint-Michel andChartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity.' From that point he proposed tofix a position for himself, which he could label: 'The Education of HenryAdams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.' With the help of these twopoints of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backwardindefinitely, 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 pleasehimself, and could get no light from readers or friends, was the usual one ofliterary 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 thatSt. 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 unityto multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end.

Probably he was, in fact, trying only to work into it his favorite theory ofhistory, 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 wasstill pondering over the problem in 1910, when he tried to deal with it inanother way which might be more intelligible to students. He printed a smallvolume called "A Letter to American Teachers," which he sent to his associatesin the American Historical Association, hoping to provoke some response. Beforehe could satisfy himself even on this minor point, a severe illness in thespring of 1912 put an end to his literary activity forever.

The matter soon passed beyond his control. In 1913 the Institute ofArchitects published the "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres." Already the"Education" had become almost as well known as the "Chartres," and was freelyquoted by every book whose author requested it. The author could no longerwithdraw either volume; he could no longer rewrite either, and he could notpublish that which he thought unprepared and unfinished, although in hisopinion 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 ofhistory as explained in Chapters XXXIII and XXXIV, the teacher was at besthelpless, and, in the immediate future, silence next to good-temper was themark of sense. After midsummer, 1914, the rule was made absolute.

The Massachusetts Historical Society now publishes the "Education" as it wasprinted in 1907, with only such marginal corrections as the author made, and itdoes this, not in opposition to the author's judgment, but only to put bothvolumes 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 avehement appeal to the Deity: "I have shown myself as I was; contemptible andvile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was so; I have unveiled myinterior such as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Father! Collect about methe innumerable swarm of my fellows; let them hear my confessions; let themgroan at my unworthiness; let them blush at my meannesses! Let each of themdiscover his heart in his turn at the foot of thy throne with the samesincerity; and then let any one of them tell thee if he dares: 'I was a betterman!' "

Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the eighteenthcentury, and has been commonly thought to have had more influence than anyother teacher of his time; but his peculiar method of improving human naturehas not been universally admired. Most educators of the nineteenth century havedeclined to show themselves before their scholars as objects more vile orcontemptible than necessary, and even the humblest teacher hides, if possible,the faults with which nature has generously embellished us all, as it did JeanJacques, thinking, as most religious minds are apt to do, that the EternalFather himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his eyeschiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.

As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent guides toavoid, or to follow. American literature offers scarcely one working model forhigh education. The student must go back, beyond Jean Jacques, to BenjaminFranklin, to find a model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphereof the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in hispersonal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volumeattempts to discuss it.

As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he erected amonument 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, tobecome a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order toshow the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, notthe figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to hispatron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, inuniversities 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 patchworkfitted on their fathers.

At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher onlymastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is acertain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; thetraining is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the directapplication of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrownaway.

The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical figureof three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For thatpurpose 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

CHAPTER I. QUINCY(1838-1848)

UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back onthe house of John Hanco*ck, the little passage called Hanco*ck Avenue runs, orran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount VernonStreet, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below MountVernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by hisuncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of BostonUnitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.

Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcisedin 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 heavilyhandicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes asthe century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, whodoes 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 themat all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years earlier, such safeguardsas his would have secured any young man's success; and although in 1838 theirvalue was not very great compared with what they would have had in 1738, yetthe mere accident of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest ofassociations so colonial, — so troglodytic — as the First Church,the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John Hanco*ck and John Adams, Mount VernonStreet and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was soqueer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after hehad witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himselfrequired to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been consulted, would hehave cared to play the game at all, holding such cards as he held, andsuspecting that the game was to be one of which neither he nor any one elseback to the beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He wasnot consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into theconfidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them to change nothingas far as concerned him. He would have been astounded by his own luck. Probablyno child, born in the year, held better cards than he. Whether life was anhonest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he couldnot refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual plea ofirresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he had been a party toit, and under the same circ*mstances would do it again, the more readily forknowing 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 hedied. Only with that understanding — as a consciously assenting member infull partnership with the society of his age — had his education aninterest to himself or to others.

As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; helost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players; but thisis the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and littleincident. A story of education — seventy years of it — thepractical value remains to the end in doubt, like other values about which menhave disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of theuniverse has never been stated in dollars. Although every one cannot be aGargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame,every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderatelyinterested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three years, whilethe baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a vegetable, the outsideworld working as it never had worked before, to get his new universe ready forhim. Often in old age he puzzled over the question whether, on the doctrine ofchances, he was at liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident. Nosuch accident had ever happened before in human experience. For him, alone, theold universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created. He and hiseighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut apart —separated forever — in act if not in sentiment, by the opening of theBoston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in thebay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washingtonthe 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 onlythe color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a yellow kitchen floorin strong sunlight. He was three years old when he took this earliest step ineducation; a lesson of color. The second followed soon; a lesson of taste. OnDecember 3, 1841, he developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as goodas dead, reviving only under the careful nursing of his family. When he beganto recover strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been strongerthan any other pleasure or pain, for while in after life he retained not thefaintest recollection of his illness, he remembered quite clearly his auntentering the sickroom bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple.

The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be that of colorand taste, although one would rather suppose that the sense of pain would befirst to educate. In fact, the third recollection of the child was that ofdiscomfort. The moment he could be removed, he was bundled up in blankets andcarried from the little house in Hanco*ck Avenue to a larger one which hisparents were to occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring MountVernon Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and he never forgothis acute distress for want of air under his blankets, or the noises of movingfurniture.

As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought tohave a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness ofnatural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, bothphysically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselvesto decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success; but this fever ofHenry Adams took greater and greater importance in his eyes, from the point ofview of education, the longer he lived. At first, the effect was physical. Hefell behind his brothers two or three inches in height, and proportionally inbone and weight. His character and processes of mind seemed to share in thisfining-down process of scale. He was not good in a fight, and his nerves weremore delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses ashe grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and oftotally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard everyquestion as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; theshirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror ofennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society — allthese are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar toindividuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, andHenry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change ofcharacter was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers werethe type; he was the variation.

As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all, and he grewup in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as it was given;accepting its local standards without a dificulty, and enjoying much of it askeenly as any other boy of his age. He seemed to himself quite normal, and hiscompanions seemed always to think him so. Whatever was peculiar about him waseducation, not character, and came to him, directly and indirectly, as theresult 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'sbirth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law ofNew England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct ofresistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the worldchiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, andthey 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, buthatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally findit so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with astingy 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 thesystematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been asharsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrastsand extremes of sensibility — a cold that froze the blood, and a heatthat boiled it — so that the pleasure of hating — one's self if nobetter victim offered — was not its rarest amusem*nt; but the charm was atrue and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients. Theviolence 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 lifeand thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement,school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with six feet of snowin the middle; frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or runners; thawswhen the streets became dangerous to cross; society of uncles, aunts, andcousins who expected children to behave themselves, and who were not alwaysgratified; 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 bynature for nothing, and breathed by boys without knowing it.

Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New Englandboy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felthis nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer wasdrunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest — smell of hot pine-woodsand sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughedearth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns,cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss. Nextto smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw ortouched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the lettersof a spelling-book — the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the boy'stongue 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, andthe atmosphere harshens color. The boy was a full man before he ever knew whatwas meant by atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a NewEngland sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early morning onits petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, fromthe Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds andgreens and purples of colored prints and children's picture-books, as theAmerican colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, werethe cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Bostonwinter. With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a doublenature. Life was a double thing. After a January blizzard, the boy who couldlook with pleasure into the violent snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, withits intense light and shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He couldreach it only by education.

Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separatenatures. 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 thesalt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or nettedminnows in the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granitequarries, or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, ormushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country were always sensualliving, while winter was always compulsory learning. Summer was themultiplicity 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 thedivision between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducibleopposites, with growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliestchildhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winterand summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man whopretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster — that is, a manemployed to tell lies to little boys. Though Quincy was but two hours' walkfrom 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, andsometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken kindly to the town, or beentaken kindly by it. The boy inherited his double nature. He knew as yet nothingabout 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 beengood, and his enemies wicked; but he divined his great-grandfather's characterfrom his own. Never for a moment did he connect the two ideas of Boston andJohn Adams; they were separate and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams wentwith Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old man ofseventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him, but except that heheard his grandfather always called "the President," and his grandmother "theMadam," he had no reason to suppose that his Adams grandfather differed incharacter from his Brooks grandfather who was equally kind and benevolent. Heliked the Adams side best, but for no other reason than that it reminded him ofthe country, the summer, and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also thatQuincy was in a way inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked down onQuincy. The reason was clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy hadno Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner of life andthought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling. The flint-and-steel withwhich his grandfather Adams used to light his own fires in the early morningwas still on the mantelpiece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dressfor 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, afurnace, and gas. The superiority of Boston was evident, but a child liked itno better for that.

The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl Street or SouthStreet has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his country house at Medford maystill remain to show what impressed the mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea ofcity splendor. The President's place at Quincy was the larger and older and farthe more interesting of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority infashion. It showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked of colonialage, but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he neverquite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish breath. He nevercould compel himself to care for nineteenth-century style. He was never able toadopt it, any more than his father or grandfather or great-grandfather haddone. Not that he felt it as particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself tomuch that was worse; but because, for some remote reason, he was born aneighteenth-century child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth century. Whatstyle it had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis Seize chairsand 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, alongwith porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic remnants; and neitherof the two eighteenth-century styles — neither English Queen Anne norFrench Louis Seize — was cofortable for a boy, or for any one else. Thedark 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 thecontrary, most boys, as well as grown-up people, preferred the new, with goodreason, and the child felt himself distinctly at a disadvantage for thetaste.

Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks grandfatherwas as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams grandfather. Both were born in1767, and both died in 1848. Both were kind to children, and both belongedrather to the eighteenth than to the nineteenth centuries. The child knew nodifference between them except that one was associated with winter and theother 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 topass a few days with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, butbecame so violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought backin disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously homesick again.

The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or whollysympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even there the curse ofCain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush achild. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the bestwill, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards aneducation which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running orderthrough chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unitythrough multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task ofeducation, 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, asthe colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has theboy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always beenwar. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and thetask 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 seriouscontact with the President should have been a struggle of will, in which theold man almost necessarily defeated the boy, but instead of leaving, as usualin such defeats, a lifelong sting, left rather an impression of as fairtreatment as could be expected from a natural enemy. The boy met seldom withsuch 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 fora long stay with the President during the summer. What became of the rest ofthe family he quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the housedoor one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going toschool. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is whatmothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his mother atunfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcingobedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and hemet all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. Hewas in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at thebottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the President'slibrary, when the door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on hishat, he took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed byawe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at thisinterference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentlemanclose on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summermorning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it would bestrange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner tododge around, somewhere before reaching the school door. Then and always, theboy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the oldman did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one afteranother, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously thecentre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the Presidentrelease his hand and depart.

The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights of boys, andnullifying the social compact, ought to have made him dislike his grandfatherfor life. He could not recall that it had this effect even for a moment. With acertain maturity of mind, the child must have recognized that the President,though a tool of tyranny, had done his disreputable work with a certainintelligence. He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, andhad made no display of force. Above all, he had held his tongue. During theirlong walk he had said nothing; he had uttered no syllable of revolting cantabout the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law; he hadshown no concern in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy'sexistence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling itselflittle about his grandson's iniquities, and much about the iniquities ofPresident Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age feel the wholesatisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be the vicarious victim ofhis own sins, and he gave his grandfather credit for intelligent silence. Forthis forbearance he felt instinctive respect. He admitted force as a form ofright; he admitted even temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moraleducation 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 anyPuritan land.

Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt rancor, forduring these three or four summers the old President's relations with the boywere friendly and almost intimate. Whether his older brothers and sisters werestill more favored he failed to remember, but he was himself admitted to a sortof familiarity which, when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shockedhim, for it must have sometimes tried the President's patience. He hung aboutthe library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers;searched the old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew thesword-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 mothsor butterflies, but never did. The Madam bore with fortitude the loss of thetumblers which her husband purloined for these hatcheries; but she made protestwhen he carried off her best cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns orpeachstones that he might see the roots grow, but which, she said, he commonlyforgot like the caterpillars.

At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and some fine oldtrees should still remain to witness it, unless they have been improved off theground; but his was a restless mind, and although he took his hobbies seriouslyand would have been annoyed had his grandchild asked whether he was bored likean 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 hisshelves for seed. With the inherited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, thelittle boy Henry conscientiously brought up to him in his study the finestpeaches he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect. Naturally he atemore by way of compensation, but the act showed that he bore no grudge. As forhis grandfather, it is even possible that he may have felt a certainself-reproach for his temporary role of schoolmaster — seeing that hisown career did not offer proof of the worldly advantages of docile obedience— for there still exists somewhere a little volume of critically editedNursery Rhymes with the boy's name in full written in the President's tremblinghand on the fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible, given to each childat 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, orcottage, 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 overBoston. Till his twelfth year, the child passed his summers there, and hispleasures of childhood mostly centred in it. Of education he had as yet littleto complain. Country schools were not very serious. Nothing stuck to the mindexcept home impressions, and the sharpest were those of kindred children; butas influences that warped a mind, none compared with the mere effect of theback of the President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays, in linewith that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years younger, seemed tochildren about the same age. Before railways entered the New England town,every parish church showed half-a-dozen of these leading citizens, with grayhair, who sat on the main aisle in the best pews, and had sat there, or in someequivalent dignity, since the time of St. Augustine, if not since the glacialepoch. It was unusual for boys to sit behind a President grandfather, and toread over his head the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather, whohad "pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" to secure theindependence of his country and so forth; but boys naturally supposed, withoutmuch reasoning, that other boys had the equivalent of President grandfathers,and that churches would always go on, with the bald-headed leading citizens onthe main aisle, and Presidents or their equivalents on the walls. The Irishgardener 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 henever forgot it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; tohim, that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea. Whathad been would continue to be. He doubted neither about Presidents nor aboutChurches, and no one suggested at that time a doubt whether a system of societywhich 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 gardenwith the box walks, and seemed a fragile creature to a boy who sometimesbrought her a note or a message, and took distinct pleasure in looking at herdelicate face under what seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refinedfigure ; her gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there,but to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk withlittle 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 theboy it was her charm. Even at that age, he felt drawn to it. The Madam's lifehad been in truth far from Boston. She was born in London in 1775, daughter ofJoshua Johnson, an American merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson ofMaryland; and Catherine Nuth, of an English family in London. Driven fromEngland by the Revolutionary War, Joshua Johnson took his family to Nantes,where they remained till the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine was nearly tenyears old when brought back to London, and her sense of nationality must havebeen confused; but the influence of the Johnsons and the services of Joshuaobtained for him from President Washington the appointment of Consul in Londonon the organization of the Government in 1790. In 1794 President Washingtonappointed John Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague. He was twenty-seven yearsold when he returned to London, and found the Consul's house a very agreeablehaunt. Louisa was then twenty.

At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more than theMinister's, was the centre of contact for travelling Americans, either officialor other. The Legation was a shifting point, between 1785 and 1815; but theConsulate, 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 aRomney portrait, but among her many charms that of being a New England womanwas not one. The defect was serious. Her future mother-in-law, Abigail, afamous New England woman whose authority over her turbulent husband, the secondPresident, was hardly so great as that which she exercised over her son, thesixth to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be made of stuffstern enough, or brought up in conditions severe enough, to suit a New Englandclimate, or to make an efficient wife for her paragon son, and Abigail wasright on that point, as on most others where sound judgment was involved; butsound judgment is sometimes a source of weakness rather than of force, and JohnQuincy already had reason to think that his mother held sound judgments on thesubject of daughters-in-law which human nature, since the fall of Eve, madeAdams helpless to realize. Being three thousand miles away from his mother, andequally far in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797, and took herto Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation. During three or fourexciting 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, herdescendants did not surely know; but in any case she could by no chance havebecome educated there for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the overthrow ofthe Federalist Party drove her and her husband to America, and she became atlast a member of the Quincy household, but by that time her children needed allher attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in Boston andWashington, till 1809. Her husband was made Senator in 1803, and in 1809 wasappointed Minister to Russia. She went with him to St. Petersburg, taking herbaby, Charles Francis, born in 1807; but broken-hearted at having to leave hertwo older boys behind. The life at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her; theywere 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 withthe boy of seven years old, crossed Europe from St. Petersburg to Paris, in hertravelling-carriage, passing through the armies, and reaching Paris in theCent Jours after Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next went toEngland as Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of the Regent. In1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and she lived for eightyears in F Street, doing her work of entertainer for President Monroe'sadministration. Next she lived four miserable years in the White House. Whenthat chapter was closed in 1829, she had earned the right to be tired anddelicate, but she still had fifteen years to serve as wife of a Member of theHouse, after her husband went back to Congress in 1833. Then it was that thelittle Henry, her grandson, first remembered her, from 1843 to 1848, sitting inher panelled room, at breakfast, with her heavy silver teapot and sugar-bowland cream-jug, which still exist somewhere as an heirloom of the modernsafety-vault. By that time she was seventy years old or more, and thoroughlyweary of being beaten about a stormy world. To the boy she seemed singularlypeaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old President and herQueen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her Sèvres china; an object ofdeference to every one, and of great affection to her son Charles; but hardlymore Bostonian than she had been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in theshadow of the Tower of London.

Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old husband, thePresident, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of the coming century. Shewas 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 ofsevere stress and little pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from hermight come some of those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations, thoserebellions against law and discipline, which marked more than one of herdescendants; but he might even then have felt some vague instinctive suspicionthat he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin, the fall fromgrace, the curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New England stock, but halfexotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true Bostonian, but even as a childof Quincy he inherited a quarter taint of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, halfMarylander by birth, had hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old, when hisparents 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 quiteaccepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted him.

A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with physical strengthinferior 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, inproper self-respect, have rebelled against the standards of the nineteenth. Theatmosphere of his first ten years must have been very like that of hisgrandfather at the same age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle of BunkerHill, and even as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. Thetone of Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt inself-abasem*nt before the majesty of English standards; far from concealing itas a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength. The eighteenth century ruledsociety long after 1850. Perhaps the boy began to shake it off rather earlierthan most of his mates.

Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather abruptly with histenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a certain confusion in thehouse 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 toWashington, had fallen and hurt himself. Then he heard the word paralysis.After that day he came to associate the word with the figure of hisgrandfather, in a tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side of the sparebedroom 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 onFebruary 21, 1848 — and the month of February brought life and death as afamily habit — when the eighteenth century, as an actual and livingcompanion, vanished. If the scene on the floor of the House, when the oldPresident fell, struck the still simple-minded American public with a sensationunusually dramatic, its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fadingaway with the life of his grandfather, could not be slight. One had to pay forRevolutionary 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. Manya boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions of the funeral service inthe 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 austereintellectual type, such as the school of Buckminster and Channing inheritedfrom the old Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined appearance, hisdignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English and hisfine appreciation, gave to the funeral service a character that left anoverwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many great functions— funerals and festival — in after-life, till his only thought wasto see no more, but he never again witnessed anything nearly so impressive tohim as the last services at Quincy over the body of one President and the ashesof another.

The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official ceremony whichafterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the boy was taken to hear hisuncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy. Like all Mr. Everett's orations, itwas an admirable piece of oratory, such as only an admirable orator and scholarcould create; too good for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; butalready the boy knew that the dead President could not be in it, and had evenlearned why he would have been out of place there; for knowledge was beginningto come fast. The shadow of the War of 1812 still hung over State Street; theshadow of the Civil War to come had already begun to darken Faneuil Hall. Norhetoric could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his subject. How couldhe 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 fathera hundred and fifty years before, had been their inherited quarrel with StateStreet, which had again and again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personalfeuds, foreign and civil war, wholesale banishments and confiscations, untilthe history of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston? Howcould 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 CivilWar?

Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing face to facewith 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 heconcluded that it must be Boston. Quincy had always been right, for Quincyrepresented a moral principle — the principle of resistance to Boston.His Adams ancestors must have been right, since they were always hostile toState Street. If State Street was wrong, Quincy must be right! Turn the dilemmaas he pleased, he still came back on the eighteenth century and the law ofResistance; of Truth; of Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest andpolitician. He could under no circ*mstances have guessed what the next fiftyyears 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 andcertain knowledge would have helped him. Supposing he had seen a New Yorkstock-list of 1900, and had studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs,coal, and steel — would he have quitted his eighteenth-century, hisancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and therest, in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street, and ask forthe fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the SuffolkBank?

Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind. Each coursehad its advantages, but the material advantages, looking back, seemed to liewholly in State Street.

CHAPTER II. BOSTON(1848-1854)

PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January1, 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 ofthe First Church; and Abigail Brown, born April 25, 1808, married September 3,1829, to Charles Francis Adams, hardly a year older than herself. Their firstchild, born in 1830, was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnsongrandmother; the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his Presidentgrandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles Francis; while thefourth, being of less account, was in a way given to his mother, who named himHenry 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 ofBrooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and almost wholly of clericalNew England stock. One might have sought long in much larger and oldersocieties for three brothers-in-law more distinguished or more scholarly thanEdward Everett, Dr. Frothingham, and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equallylong for seven brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all bore more or lessthe stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts Bay, but the shades ofdifference amounted to contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly morethan Mr. Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had broken boundsearly in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a seat in Congress wherehe 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, CharlesFrancis, with Mr. Everett's youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreckof parties which marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with manypromising careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but he had risen withthe Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister to England, and had returned toAmerica with the halo of a European reputation, and undisputed rank second onlyto Daniel Webster as the orator and representative figure of Boston. The otherbrother-in-law, Dr. Frothingham, belonged to the same clerical school, thoughin manner rather the less clerical of the two. Neither of them had much incommon with Mr. Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father,and by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personalrelations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable cousinswent regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter, and slept throughtheir uncle's sermons, without once thinking to ask what the sermons weresupposed to mean for them. For two hundred years the First Church had seen thesame little boys, sleeping more or less soundly under the same or similarconditions, and dimly conscious of the same feuds; but the feuds had neverceased, and the boys had always grown up to inherit them. Those of thegeneration of 1812 had mostly disappeared in 1850death had cleared that score;the quarrels of John Adams, and those of John Quincy Adams were no longeracutely personal; the game was considered as drawn; and Charles Francis Adamsmight then have taken his inherited rights of political leadership insuccession to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors. Between him and StateStreet the relation was more natural than between Edward Everett and StateStreet; but instead of doing so, Charles Francis Adams drew himself aloof andrenewed 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 hisonly representative could not make terms with the slave-power, and theslave-power overshadowed all the great Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams hadprinciples of his own, as well as inherited, but even his children, who as yethad no principles, could equally little follow the lead of Mr. Webster or evenof Mr. Seward. They would have lost in consideration more than they would havegained in patronage. They were anti-slavery by birth, as their name was Adamsand their home was Quincy. No matter how much they had wished to enter StateStreet, they felt that State Street never would trust them, or they it. HadState Street been Paradise, they must hunger for it in vain, and it hardlyneeded Daniel Webster to act as archangel with the flaming sword, to order themaway from the door.

Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this among therest, 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; hiseducation was warped beyond recovery in the direction of Puritan politics.Between him and his patriot grandfather at the same age, the conditions hadchanged little. The year 1848 was like enough to the year 1776 to make a fairparallel. The parallel, as concerned bias of education, was complete when, afew months after the death of John Quincy Adams, a convention of anti-slaverydelegates met at Buffalo to organize a new party and named candidates for thegeneral election in November: for President, Martin Van Buren; forVice-President, Charles Francis Adams.

For any American boy the fact that his father was running for office wouldhave dwarfed for the time every other excitement, but even apart from personalbias, the year 1848, for a boy's road through life, was decisive for twentyyears to come. There was never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 wasalmost as indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth or any earliercentury, the stamp mattered less because it was standard, and every one boreit; while men whose lives were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900had, first of all, to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to theirtime. This was their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it waseasy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it gavewas forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standardsbetter than those of his successors. So they were. He could not be convincedthat moral standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian moralitywas good enough for him, as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to theboy Henry a character that, in any previous century, would have led him intothe Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginningof time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politicsto sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of areligious war.

Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was chieflyinheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father alone countedfor much. If he were to worry successfully through life's quicksands, he mustdepend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but, for his father, the channel layclear, while for himself an unknown ocean lay beyond. His father's business inlife was to get past the dangers of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds atleast. 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 liveswasted on battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity. Thegeneration that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well with the old formsof education; that which had its work to do between 1870 and 1900 neededsomething quite new.

His father's character was therefore the larger part of his education, asfar as any single person affected it, and for that reason, if for no other, theson was always a much interested critic of his father's mind and temper. Longafter his death as an old man of eighty, his sons continued to discuss thissubject with a good deal of difference in their points of view. To his sonHenry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures inthe family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed theonly perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a hundredyears, every newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious excuse, deridedor abused the older Adamses for want of judgment. They abused Charles Francisfor his judgment. Naturally they never attempted to assign values to either;that was the children's affair; but the traits were real. Charles Francis Adamswas singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion orself-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming awarethat he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challengednor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, ofjealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. Thisunusual poise of judgment and temper, ripened by age, became the more strikingto his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties themselves,which were in no way exceptional either for depth or range. Charles FrancisAdams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind was not bold like hisgrandfather'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 itwas a model.

The standards of Boston were high, much affected by the old clericalself-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 commandeddistinction in any society; but the Adamses had little or no affinity with thepulpit, and still less with its eccentric offshoots, like Theodore Parker, orBrook Farm, or the philosophy of Concord. Besides its clergy, Boston showed aliterary group, led by Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; butMr. Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian. Even inscience 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 feelingor in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of acute hostility to England hadsomething to do with this family trait; but in his case it went further andbecame indifference to social distinction. Never once in forty years ofintimacy did his son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of theexceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke or duch*ess seemedto be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenientpresence. 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 everypossible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he did not feelthe sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or vilify, or show a sign ofenvy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity or self-conceit. Never a tone ofarrogance! Never a gesture of pride!

The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy Adams, but in himhis associates averred that it was accompanied by mental restlessness and oftenby lamentable want of judgment. No one ever charged Charles Francis Adams withthis fault. The critics charged him with just the opposite defect. They calledhim cold. No doubt, such perfect poise — such intuitive self-adjustment— was not maintained by nature without a sacrifice of the qualities whichwould have upset it. No doubt, too, that even his restless-minded,introspective, self-conscious children who knew him best were much too ignorantof the world and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the modelbefore their eyes. A coarser instrument would have impressed them more. Averagehuman nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. Theworld never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absenceof poise, for it has to be amused. Napoleons and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, butit is not amused by perfect balance. Had Mr. Adams's nature been cold, he wouldhave followed Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Winthrop in thelines of party discipline and self-interest. Had it been less balanced than itwas, he would have gone with Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Mr. EdmundQuincy, and Theodore Parker, into secession. Between the two paths he found anintermediate one, distinctive and characteristic — he set up a party ofhis own.

This political party became a chief influence in the education of the boyHenry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected his character atthe moment when character is plastic. The group of men with whom Mr. Adamsassociated himself, and whose social centre was the house in Mount VernonStreet, numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, Richard H. Dana, and CharlesSumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his clerical education, wasto a boy often the most agreeable, for his talk was lighter and his range widerthan that of the others; he had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take ofdinner-table exchange. Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to beclergyman, professor, or statesman, while, like every other true Bostonian, heyearned for the ease of the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall or the CombinationRoom at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the opposite; he affected to be stillbefore the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous seaman, and only as one gotto know him better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying withsuccess to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to theburden, as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly hesucceeded, for his mind and will were robust, but he might have said what hislifelong friend William M. Evarts used to say: "I pride myself on my success indoing not the things I like to do, but the things I don't like to do." Dana'sideal of life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on the front benches ofthe 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 andunprofessional annoyances; but he forced himself to take life as it came, andhe suffocated his longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Ofthe four men, Dana was the most marked. Without dogmatism or self-assertion, heseemed always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled awell-defined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked close to itssubject, as a lawyer's should; but disguise and silence it as he liked, it wasaristocratic 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 hisambition led him to rival the career of Edmund Burke. No young Bostonian of histime had made so brilliant a start, but rather in the steps of Edward Everettthan of Daniel Webster. As an orator he had achieved a triumph by his orationagainst war; but Boston admired him chiefly for his social success in Englandand on the Continent; success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it ahalo never acquired by domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest andinstinct, felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated it the moreas he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the passions ofpolitics. He was rarely without a pocket-full of letters from duch*esses ornoblemen in England. Having sacrificed to principle his social position inAmerica, he clung the more closely to his foreign attachments. The Free SoilParty fared ill in Beacon Street. The social arbiters of Boston — GeorgeTicknor and the rest — had to admit, however unwillingly, that the FreeSoil 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 itmattered less, because they had houses and families of their own; while Sumnerhad 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 enterhardly half-a-dozen houses in Boston. Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, andeven 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. Evenwith that, his solitude was glacial, and reacted on his character. He hadnothing but himself to think about. His superiority was, indeed, real andincontestable; he was the classical ornament of the anti-slavery party; theirpride in him was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.

The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any older man as apersonal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation of Mr. Sumner in the householdwas far closer than any relation of blood. None of the uncles approached suchintimacy. Sumner was the boy's ideal of greatness; the highest product ofnature and art. The only fault of such a model was its superiority which defiedimitation. To the twelve-year-old boy, his father, Dr. Palfrey, Mr. Dana, weremen, more or less like what he himself might become; but Mr. Sumner was adifferent order — heroic.

As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father gave him awriting-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library, and there, winterafter winter, Henry worked over his Latin Grammar and listened to these fourgentlemen discussing the course of anti-slavery politics. The discussions werealways serious; the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously; and they werehabitual because Mr. Adams had undertaken to edit a newspaper as the organ ofthese gentlemen, who came to discuss its policy and expression. At the sametime Mr. Adams was editing the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, and madethe boy read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father sometimescomplained that, as a reader of Novanglus and Massachusettensis, Henryhad shown very little consciousness of punctuation; but the boy regarded thispart of school life only as a warning, if he ever grew up to write dulldiscussions in the newspapers, to try to be dull in some different way fromthat of his great-grandfather. Yet the discussions in the Boston Whigwere 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 gotas little education, fitting him for his own time, from the one as from theother, and he got no more from his contact with the gentlemen themselves whowere all types of the past.

Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still directed by theprofessions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants were classes, and actednot as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession werea church. In politics the system required competent expression; it was the oldCiceronian idea of government by the best that produced the long lineof New England statesmen. They chose men to represent them because they wantedto be well represented, and they chose the best they had. Thus Boston choseDaniel Webster, and Webster took, not as pay, but as honorarium, thecheques 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 thesuccession, but not the system. The Adamses had never been, for any length oftime, 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 requiredState support and had commonly received it. The little group of men in MountVernon Street were an offshoot of this system; they were statesmen, notpoliticians; 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 hadalways existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay, was the world which he was tofit. Had he known Europe he would have learned no better. The Paris of LouisPhilippe, Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel,Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same upper-classbourgeoisie that felt instinctive cousinship with the Boston ofTicknor, Prescott, and Motley. Even the typical grumbler Carlyle, who castdoubts on the real capacity of the middle class, and who at times thoughthimself eccentric, found friendship and alliances in Boston — still morein Concord. The system had proved so successful that even Germany wanted to tryit, and Italy yearned for it. England's middle-class government was the idealof human progress.

Even the violent reaction after 1848, and the return of all Europe tomilitary practices, never for a moment shook the true faith. No one, exceptKarl Marx, foresaw radical change. What announced it? The world was producingsixty or seventy million tons of coal, and might be using nearly a millionsteam-horsepower, just beginning to make itself felt. All experience since thecreation of man, all divine revelation or human science, conspired to deceiveand betray a twelve-year-old boy who took for granted that his ideas, whichwere alone respectable, would be alone respected.

Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as simple as it wasclassic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sureguide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good,and three instruments were all she asked — Suffrage, Common Schools, andPress. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and manneeded 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 Unitarianclergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual,the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston, who controlled society andHarvard College, were never excelled. They proclaimed as their merit that theyinsisted on no doctrine, but taught, or tried to teach, the means of leading avirtuous, useful, unselfish life, which they held to be sufficient forsalvation. For them, difficulties might be ignored; doubts were waste ofthought; nothing exacted solution. Boston had solved the universe; or hadoffered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was workedout.

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-upman, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to churchtwice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religiouspoetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through allthe 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 allthrew it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered achurch. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, althoughone made in later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerfulemotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personaldefect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the mostintelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should havesolved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceasedmaking itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itselfthat all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recordedtime, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious socialphenomenon he had to account for in a long life. The faculty of turning awayone's eyes as one approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, underthe lead of Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in politics; but inpolitics a certain number of men did at least protest. In religion andphilosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms more simplethan the silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker, and of the boy's owncousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed his father and scandalized BeaconStreet by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no old problems, and to raisemany new ones. The less aggressive protest of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from anold-world point of view, less serious. It was naïf.

The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with thecertainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worthknowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other countryor time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political.As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the politicalinterests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood theboys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they wereever likely to hear again. The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the mostsparkling creatures her brother met in a long and varied experience of brightwomen. The oldest son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkersin Boston society, and perhaps the most popular man in the State, though apt tobe on the unpopular side. Palfrey and Dana could be entertaining when theypleased, and though Charles Sumner could hardly be called light in hand, he waswilling 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 awitticism till he choked.

By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read much aloud, andwas sure to read political literature, especially when it was satirical, likethe speeches of Horace Mann and the "Epistles" of "Hosea Biglow," with greatdelight to the youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poemsappeared, but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray forthemselves. 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'slibrary was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted intothe mental indolence of history. So too, he read shelves of eighteenth-centurypoetry, but when his father offered his own set of Wordsworth as a gift oncondition of reading it through, he declined. Pope and Gray called for nomental effort; they were easy reading; but the boy was thirty years old beforehis education reached Wordsworth.

This is the story of an education, and the person or persons who figure init are supposed to have values only as educators or educated. The surroundingsconcern it only so far as they affect education. Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, hadvalues of their own, like Hume, Pope, and Wordsworth, which any one may studyin their works; here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy verynearly the average of most boys in physical and mental stature. The influencewas 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 fatherrendered him a great service by trying to teach him French and giving him someidea of a French accent. Otherwise the family was rather an atmosphere than aninfluence. 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 itunsolved much in the same way. They knew no more than he what they wanted orwhat to do for it, but all were conscious that they would like to control powerin some form; and the same thing could be said of an ant or an elephant. Theirform was tied to politics or literature. They amounted to one individual withhalf-a-dozen sides or facets; their temperaments reacted on each other and madeeach child more like the other. This was also education, but in the type, andthe Boston or New England type was well enough known. What no one knew waswhether the individual who thought himself a representative of this type, wasfit to deal with life.

As far as outward bearing went, such a family of turbulent children, givenfree rein by their parents, or indifferent to check, should have come to moreor less grief. Certainly no one was strong enough to control them, least of alltheir mother, the queen-bee of the hive, on whom nine-tenths of the burdenfell, on whose strength they all depended, but whose children were much tooself-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 equallyhelpless. Almost every large family in those days produced at least one blacksheep, and if this generation of Adamses escaped, it was as much a matter ofsurprise to them as to their neighbors. By some happy chance they grew up to bedecent citizens, but Henry Adams, as a brand escaped from the burning, alwayslooked back with astonishment at their luck. The fact seemed to prove that theywere born, like birds, with a certain innate balance. Home influences alonenever saved the New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may havehelped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If schoolhelped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be apositive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method initself. Yet the day-school of that time was respectable, and the boy hadnothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because hewas here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantityof 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 withmachines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not onlyin 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. Schoolmastersnever gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice becamedeeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days, from ten to sixteenyears 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'sexistence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, asafterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French,German, and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any specialbranch 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 intelligentwork of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school. These fourtools were necessary to his success in life, but he never controlled any one ofthem.

Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less complete inthe life awaiting him, but not more so than his companions. Indeed, had hisfather 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 pridedthemselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see whathe needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse thannone. Boston at that time offered few healthy resources for boys or men. Thebar-room and billiard-room were more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boyscould skate and swim and were sent to dancing-school; they played a rudimentarygame of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat; still fewerhad been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray wild duck; one or twomay have learned something of natural history if they came from theneighborhood of Concord; none could ride across country, or knew what shootingwith dogs meant. Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850.For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures, wintersleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none of these amusem*ntscould the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Booksremained 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 ofthe boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap ofCongressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "QuentinDurward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervalsfor peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.

CHAPTER III. WASHINGTON(1850-1854)

EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit ofleaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one learnednext to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be unlearned. Thesurface was ready to take any form that education should cut into it, thoughBoston, with singular foresight, rejected the old designs. What sort ofeducation was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but he escaped theevils of other standards by having no standard at all; and what was true ofschool was true of society. Boston offered none that could help outside. Everyone 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 thesocial slack-water between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belongedto neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor industrial norsocial, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed as English boys andgirls, but had less means of acquiring form as they grew older. Women countedfor little as models. Every boy, from the age of seven, fell in love atfrequent intervals with some girl — always more or less the same littlegirl — who had nothing to teach him, or he to teach her, except ratherfamiliar and provincial manners, until they married and bore children to repeatthe habit. The idea of attaching one's self to a married woman, or of polishingone's manners to suit the standards of women of thirty, could hardly haveentered 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 evencatch the idea that women had more to give. The garden of Eden was hardly moreprimitive.

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 moreinteresting. A successful blackguard must enjoy great physical advantagesbesides a true vocation, and Henry Adams had neither; but no boy escaped somecontact 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 ordecency. One might fear it, but no one honestly despised it. Now and then itasserted itself as education more roughly than school ever did. One of thecommonest 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 werecalled North-Enders and South-Enders. In 1850 the North-Enders still survivedas a legend, but in practice it was a battle of the Latin School against allcomers, and the Latin School, for snowball, included all the boys of the WestEnd. Whenever, on a half-holiday, the weather was soft enough to soften thesnow, the Common was apt to be the scene of a fight, which began in daylightwith 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 anddisappearing. As the Latin School grew weak, the roughs and young blackguardsgrew 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 inthe hands of a boy is as effective as a knife. One afternoon the fight had beenlong and exhausting. The boy Henry, following, as his habit was, his biggerbrother Charles, had taken part in the battle, and had felt his courage muchdepressed by seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson —"Bully Hig," his school name — struck by a stone over the eye, and ledoff the field bleeding in rather a ghastly manner. As night came on, the LatinSchool was steadily forced back to the Beacon Street Mall where they couldretreat no further without disbanding, and by that time only a small band wasleft, headed by two heroes, Savage and Marvin. A dark mass of figures could beseen below, making ready for the last rush, and rumor said that a swarm ofblackguards from the slums, led by a grisly terror called Conky Daniels, with aclub and a hideous reputation, was going to put an end to the Beacon Streetcowards forever. Henry wanted to run away with the others, but his brother wastoo big to run away, so they stood still and waited immolation. The dark massset up a shout, and rushed forward. The Beacon Street boys turned and fled upthe 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-guardto 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 taughtthat blackguards were not so black as they were painted; but the boy Henry hadpassed through as much terror as though he were Turenne or Henri IV, and ten ortwelve years afterwards when these same boys were fighting and falling on allthe battle-fields of Virginia and Maryland, he wondered whether their educationon 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 totheir followers. Most of them suffered from it. Mobs were always possible.Henry never happened to be actually concerned in a mob, but he, like everyother boy, was sure to be on hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever heheard Garrison or Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble. WendellPhillips on a platform was a model dangerous for youth. Theodore Parker in hispulpit was not much safer. Worst of all, the execution of the Fugitive SlaveLaw in Boston — the sight of Court Square packed with bayonets, and hisown friends obliged to line the streets under arms as State militia, in orderto return a negro to slavery — wrought frenzy in the brain of afifteen-year-old, eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted to miss noreasonable chance of mischief.

One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and the BostonMassacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an eighteenth-century politician, andafterwards only a possibility; beyond Boston the first step led only furtherinto politics. After February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all thosethat, since 1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world. The Madam stayedin Washington, after her husband's death, and in her turn was struck byparalysis and bedridden. From time to time her son Charles, whose affection andsympathy for his mother in her many tribulations were always pronounced, wenton to see her, and in May, 1850, he took with him his twelve-year-old son. Thejourney was meant as education, and as education it served the purpose offixing in memory the stage of a boy's thought in 1850. He could not remembertaking special interest in the railroad journey or in New York; with railwaysand cities he was familiar enough. His first impression was the novelty ofcrossing New York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the Camden andAmboy Railroad. This was a new world; a suggestion of corruption in the simplehabits 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 onboard a steamer which took him to Philadelphia where he smelt other varietiesof town life; then again by boat to Chester, and by train to Havre de Grace; byboat to Baltimore and thence by rail to Washington. This was the journey heremembered. The actual journey may have been quite different, but the actualjourney has no interest for education. The memory was all that mattered; andwhat struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his lifetime, was thesudden change that came over the world on entering a slave State. He tookeducation politically. The mere raggedness of outline could not have seemedwholly new, for even Boston had its ragged edges, and the town of Quincy wasfar from being a vision of neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seena finished landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind. The railway,about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled through unfenced fieldsand 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, hadthe Southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care. This wasthe 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 venturingoutside into the air reeking with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he foundhimself on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering fromthe colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble columns and frontsof 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 Syriancity. Here and there low wooden houses were scattered along the streets, as inother Southern villages, but he was chiefly attracted by an unfinished squaremarble shaft, half-a-mile below, and he walked down to inspect it beforebreakfast. His aunt drily remarked that, at this rate, he would soon getthrough all the sights; but she could not guess — having lived always inWashington — how little the sights of Washington had to do with itsinterest.

The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding ofhimself. The more he was educated, the less he understood. Slavery struck himin 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, tofree soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant,vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture hadanother side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; thethickness 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 warmclimate and a negro population hung in the atmosphere heavier than thecatalpas. The impression was not simple, but the boy liked it: distinctly itremained on his mind as an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The wantof barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolentSouthern drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their motherswith bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed hisJohnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the same way, but with him thefeeling caught on to an inheritance. The softness of his gentle old grandmotheras she lay in bed and chatted with him, did not come from Boston. His aunt wasanything rather than Bostonian. He did not wholly come from Boston himself.Though Washington belonged to a different world, and the two worlds could notlive together, he was not sure that he enjoyed the Boston world most. Even attwelve years old he could see his own nature no more clearly than he would attwelve 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, whichthen, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists, was freely open tovisitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled a pleasant political club. Standingbehind the Vice-President's chair, which is now the Chief Justice's, the boywas presented to some of the men whose names were great in their day, and asfamiliar to him as his own. Clay and Webster and Calhoun were there still, butwith them a Free Soil candidate for the Vice-Presidency had little to do; whatstruck 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 ofSenator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate, when in goodtemper, was an agreeable body, numbering only some sixty members, and affectingthe airs of courtesy. Its vice was not so much a vice of manners or temper asof attitude. The statesman of all periods was apt to be pompous, but evenpomposity was less offensive than familiarity — on the platform as in thepulpit — and Southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was genial andsympathetic, almost quaint and childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite adifferent thing from the Websterian or Conklinian pomposity of the North. Theboy felt at ease there, more at home than he had ever felt in Boston StateHouse, though his acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representativeswent back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly to him, andseemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in spite ofslavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years, after he ceased to stand in theway of rivals, had few personal enemies. Decidedly the Senate, pro-slaverythough it were, seemed a friendly world.

This first step in national politics was a little like the walk beforebreakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a fresh and amusingworld, where nothing was finished, but where even the weeds grew rank. Thesecond step was like the first, except that it led to the White House. He wastaken to see President Taylor. Outside, in a paddock in front, "Old Whitey,"the President's charger, was grazing, as they entered; and inside, thePresident was receiving callers as simply as if he were in the paddock too. ThePresident was friendly, and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that he couldever recall. In fact, what strangeness should he feel? The families wereintimate; so intimate that their friendliness outlived generations, civil war,and all sorts of rupture. President Taylor owed his election to Martin VanBuren and the Free Soil Party. To him, the Adamses might still be of use. Asfor the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and, barring theeight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or less at home there eversince it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took for granted thathe 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 inhis own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest andfirst in distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor,might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some veryshady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and suchthings were swarming in every street.

Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not. No sort of gloryhedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole country, one could hardly have metwith an admission of respect for any office or name, unless it were GeorgeWashington. That was — to all appearance sincerely — respected.People made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and made even an effort to buildWashington a monument. The effort had failed, but one still went to MountVernon, although it was no easy trip. Mr. Adams took the boy there in acarriage and pair, over a road that gave him a complete Virginia education foruse ten years afterwards. To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, anda clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Badroads meant bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boyfully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road'sbadness which amounted to social crime — and yet, at the end of the roadand product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.

Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders do, or thisboy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to repeat what he was told— that George Washington stood alone. Otherwise this third step in hisWashington education would have been his last. On that line, the problem ofprogress was not soluble, whatever the optimists and orators might say —or, for that matter, whatever they might think. George Washington could not bereached on Boston lines. George Washington was a primary, or, if Virginiansliked it better, an ultimate relation, like the Pole Star, and amid the endlessrestless motion of every other visible point in space, he alone remainedsteady, in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end. All the other points shiftedtheir bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John Marshall,took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but Mount Vernon always remainedwhere 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 morecharming, but it was the same eighteenth-century, the same old furniture, thesame old patriot, and the same old President.

The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the coons in thetrees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms upstairs and the porchoutside, even Martha Washington herself in memory, were as natural as the tidesand the May sunshine; he had only enlarged his horizon a little; but he neverthought to ask himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem thatdeduced George Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In practice, suchtrifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty ofignoring them makes the practical man; but any attempt to deal with themseriously as education is fatal. Luckily Charles Francis Adams never preachedand was singularly free from cant. He may have had views of his own, but he lethis son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary fact that GeorgeWashington 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 nolonger so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of theseventeenth. Slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism.The boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. TheSlave power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could gono further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the boy graduallyfound his surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an isolated atom in ahostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish, he beganto learn the first and easier lessons of practical politics. Thus far he hadseen nothing but eighteenth-century statesmanship. America and he began, at thesame time, to become aware of a new force under the innocent surface of partymachinery. Even at that early moment, a rather slow boy felt dimly consciousthat he might meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcilesixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship with latenineteenth-century party organization. The first vague sense of feeling anunknown living obstacle in the dark came in 185l.

The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as already said, tothe statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster, had nothing to do withmachinery. Websters or Sewards depended on others for machine work and money— on Peter Harveys and Thurlow Weeds, who spent their lives in it, tookmost of the abuse, and asked no reward. Almost without knowing it, thesubordinates ousted their employers and created a machine which no one butthemselves could run. In 1850 things had not quite reached that point. The menwho ran the small Free Soil machine were still modest, though they becamefamous enough in their own right. Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, AnsonBurlingame, and the other managers, negotiated a bargain with the MassachusettsDemocrats giving the State to the Democrats and a seat in the Senate to theFree Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman friends would havenothing to do, for such a coalition was in their eyes much like jockeys sellinga race. They did not care to take office as pay for votes sold to pro-slaveryDemocrats. Theirs was a correct, not to say noble, position; but, as a matterof fact, they took the benefit of the sale, for the coalition chose CharlesSumner as its candidate for the Senate, while George S. Boutwell was madeGovernor for the Democrats. This was the boy's first lesson in practicalpolitics, and a sharp one; not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, butthat he learned the nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in whichhe was too good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles Sumnerhappened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods, but between hisfriend and his father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him, there wasnone. He entered into no casuistry on the matter. His friend was right becausehis friend, and the boy shared the glory. The question of education did notrise while the conflict lasted. Yet every one saw as clearly then as afterwardsthat a lesson of some sort must be learned and understood, once for all. Theboy might ignore, as a mere historical puzzle, the question how to deduceGeorge Washington from the sum of all wickedness, but he had himself helped todeduce 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 makingthe bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to anti-slavery principles, andthat he did it. Henry Adams could rise to no such moral elevation. He was onlya boy, and his object in supporting the coalition was that of making his frienda Senator. It was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend amillionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral conclusions, exceptby admitting that he and his father and Sumner were wrong, and this he wasnever willing to do, for the consequences of this admission were worse thanthose of the other. Thus, before he was fifteen years old, he had managed toget himself into a state of moral confusion from which he never escaped. As apolitician, he was already corrupt, and he never could see how any practicalpolitician could be less corrupt than himself.

Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice. At the time henever even dreamed that he needed to apologize, though the press shouted it athim from every corner, and though the Mount Vernon Street conclave agreed withthe press; yet he could not plead ignorance, and even in the heat of theconflict, he never cared to defend the coalition. Boy as he was, he knew enoughto know that something was wrong, but his only interest was the election. Dayafter 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 thephrase "one-ideaed abolitionist," which was Mr. Cushing's actual expression, isnot very great, but neither the one nor the other seemed to describe Mr. Sumnerto the boy, who never could have made the error of classing Garrison and Sumnertogether, or mistaking Caleb Cushing's relation to either. Temper ran high atthat moment, while Sumner every day missed his election by only one or twovotes. At last, April 24, 1851, standing among the silent crowd in the gallery,Henry heard the vote announced which gave Sumner the needed number. Slippingunder the arms of the bystanders, he ran home as hard as he could, and burstinto the dining-room where Mr. Sumner was seated at table with the family. Heenjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that he was elected; it was probably theproudest moment in the life of either.

The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers of boys andmen in the streets wearing black crepe on their arm. He knew few Free Soil boysin Boston; his acquaintances were what he called pro-slavery; so he thoughtproper to tie a bit of white silk ribbon round his own arm by way of showingthat his friend Mr. Sumner was not wholly alone. This little piece of bravadopassed unnoticed; no one even cuffed his ears; but in later life he was alittle puzzled to decide which symbol was the more correct. No one then dreamedof four years' war, but every one dreamed of secession. The symbol for eithermight well be matter of doubt.

This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the politicalclimax. The boy, like a million other American boys, was a politician, and whatwas worse, fit as yet to be nothing else. He should have been, like hisgrandfather, a protege of George Washington, a statesman designated by destiny,with nothing to do but look directly ahead, follow orders, and march. On thecontrary, he was not even a Bostonian; he felt himself shut out of Boston asthough he were an exile; he never thought of himself as a Bostonian; he neverlooked about him in Boston, as boys commonly do wherever they are, to selectthe street they like best, the house they want to live in, the profession theymean to practise. Always he felt himself somewhere else; perhaps in Washingtonwith its social ease; perhaps in Europe; and he watched with vague unrest fromthe Quincy hills the smoke of the Cunard steamers stretching in a long line tothe horizon, and disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day mightbe, as though the steamers were offering to take him away, which was preciselywhat they were doing.

Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at hand to correctthem; but the point of the whole story, when Henry Adams came to look back onit, seemed to be that the ideas were more than reasonable; they were thelogical, necessary, mathematical result of conditions old as history and fixedas fate — invariable sequence in man's experience. The only idea whichwould have been quite unreasonable scarcely entered his mind. This was thethought of going westward and growing up with the country. That he was not inthe least fitted for going West made no objection whatever, since he was muchbetter fitted than most of the persons that went. The convincing reason forstaying in the East was that he had there every advantage over the West. Hecould not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enormous tribute to Bostonand New York. One's position in the East was the best in the world for everypurpose that could offer an object for going westward. If ever in history menhad been able to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance, thecitizens of the great Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their railwaysystems were already laid out. Neither to a politician nor to a business-mannor to any of the learned professions did the West promise any certainadvantage, while it offered uncertainties in plenty.

At any other moment in human history, this education, including itspolitical 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 everyreason to be well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had allhe wanted. He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. Hefinished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault with thesum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than his father, or hisgrandfather, or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old. Only onlooking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering onthe needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boyof 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1. He foundhimself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was clouded by theundetermined values of twentieth-century thought, but the story will show hisreasons for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; inhistory, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhapsmathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year1900. The education he had received bore little relation to the education heneeded. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at all. Heknew not even where or how to begin.

CHAPTER IV. HARVARD COLLEGE(1854-1858)

ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last timedown the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and felt no sensationbut one of unqualified joy that this experience was ended. Never before orafterwards in his life did he close a period so long as four years without somesensation of loss — some sentiment of habit — but school was whatin after life he commonly heard his friends denounce as an intolerable bore. Hewas 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 tenyears old. They were fully five years more mature than the English or Europeanboy for whom schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, asafterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible education were wastedin doing imperfectly what might have been done perfectly in one, and in anycase would have had small value. The next regular step was Harvard College. Hewas more than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and Brooksesand Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none ofthem, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself thebetter for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kepteach generation in the track. Any other education would have required a seriouseffort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because theirfriends 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 liberalschool, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to makerespectable 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; excellenttraits, which the College attained with singular success, so that its graduatescould commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarelylent itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not awill. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in anautobiographical 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 ofeducation is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers andtaught. Sometimes in after life, Adams debated whether in fact it had notruined him and most of his companions, but, disappointment apart, HarvardCollege 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 frombias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. Heknew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge.

What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got from hismates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing, a result common enough ineducation. Yet the College Catalogue for the years 1854 to 1861 shows a list ofnames rather distinguished in their time. Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooksled it; H. H. Richardson and O. W. Holmes helped to close it. As a rule themost promising of all die early, and never get their names into a Dictionary ofContemporaries, which seems to be the only popular standard of success. Manydied in the war. Adams knew them all, more or less; he felt as much regard, andquite as much respect for them then, as he did after they won great names andwere objects of a vastly wider respect; but, as help towards education, he gotnothing whatever from them or they from him until long after they had leftcollege. Possibly the fault was his, but one would like to know how many othersshared it. Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage. Lifeoffers perhaps only a score of possible companions, and it is mere chancewhether they meet as early as school or college, but it is more than a chancethat boys brought up together under like conditions have nothing to give eachother. The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typicalcollection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressivelycommonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, andpassions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularlyindifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it whenit amused them; distrustful of themselves, but little disposed to trust any oneelse; with not much humor of their own, but full of readiness to enjoy thehumor of others; negative to a degree that in the long run became positive andtriumphant. 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; freefrom vanity, they were not intolerant of it; but they were objectivenessitself; their attitude was a law of nature; their judgment beyond appeal, notan act either of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort ofgravitation.

This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard College, the Classof 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this band of nearly one hundred youngmen had no keen sense, but they had equally little energy of repulsion. Theywere pleasant to live with, and above the average of students — German,French, English, or what not — but chiefly because each individualappeared satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet to standalone is quite natural when one has no passions; still easier when one has nopains.

Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on enlarging HenryAdams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as little fitted for it asSioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further affinity, these three outsidersfell into relation with the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboybelonged, and in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well howthin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal enmity. One ofthe Virginians was the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the Second UnitedStates Cavalry; the two others who seemed instinctively to form a staff forLee, were town-Virginians from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came fromCincinnati and was half Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, Longworth on the mother'sside. For the first time Adams's education brought him in contact with newtypes and taught him their values. He saw the New England type measure itselfwith another, and he was part of the process.

Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the eighteenthcentury, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of the same age. Roony Lee hadchanged little from the type of his grandfather, Light Horse Harry. Tall,largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all heliked, he had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as hisnatural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New Englanders wantedcommand. For a year, at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young manin his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit ofcommand was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was simple beyondanalysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realizehim. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; howhelpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, theSoutherner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadilylost 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 noteven conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very wellwithout ideas, if one had only the social instinct. Dozens of eminent statesmenwere men of Lee's type, and maintained themselves well enough in thelegislature, but college was a sharper test. The Virginian was weak in viceitself, though the Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits ofneither were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives; but theBostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the Bostonian could takesome care of himself even in his worst stages, while the Virginian becamequarrelsome and dangerous. When a Virginian had brooded a few days over animaginary grief and substantial whiskey, none of his Northern friends could besure that he might not be waiting, round the corner, with a knife or pistol, torevenge insult by the dry light of delirium tremens; and when thingsreached 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 ofthe old school drank almost as much as gentlemen of the new school; but thiswas not his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence of politicalfeeling 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 andprejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken and even warm. At a moment whenthe immediate future posed no problem in education so vital as the relativeenergy and endurance of North and South, this momentary contact with Southerncharacter was a sort of education for its own sake; but this was not all. Nodoubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which tended naturally to self-distrust,was flattered by gaining the slow conviction that the Southerner, with hisslave-owning limitations, was as little fit to succeed in the struggle ofmodern life as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, andhunting the bos primigenius, and that every quality in which he wasstrong, made him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that even in this respectone eighteenth-century type might not differ deeply from another. Roony Lee hadchanged little from the Virginian of a century before; but Adams was himself agood deal nearer the type of his great-grandfather than to that of a railwaysuperintendent. He was little more fit than the Virginians to deal with afuture America which showed no fancy for the past. Already Northern societybetrayed a preference for economists over diplomats or soldiers — onemight even call it a jealousy — against which two eighteenth-centurytypes had little chance to live, and which they had in common to fear.

Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought into closerelations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and Henry Adams, but the chiefdifference between them as collegians consisted only in their difference ofscholarship: Lee was a total failure; Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Leefelt his failure more sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of escapeby accepting a commission offered him by General Winfield Scott in the forcethen being organized against the Mormons. He asked Adams to write his letter ofacceptance, which flattered Adams's vanity more than any Northern complimentcould do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a certainamount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.

If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from hismasters. 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 wasany school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred — one per centof an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his educationhad 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 histurn what no student naturally cared or needed to know, he diverted some drearyhours of faculty-meetings by looking up his record in the class-lists, andfound himself graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed— mathematics — barring the few first scholars, failure was sonearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and whetherhe stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal favorof the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could neverhave been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but heneeded to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he neverreached the alphabet.

Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from the ancientlanguages. Beyond some incoherent theories of free-trade and protection, he gotlittle from Political Economy. He could not afterwards remember to have heardthe name of Karl Marx mentioned, or the title of "Capital." He was equallyignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his time who mostinfluenced its thought. The bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewedwith most curiosity was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number oftheories that befogged his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealedto his imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the GlacialPeriod and Paleontology, which had more influence on his curiosity than therest of the college instruction altogether. The entire work of the four yearscould 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. Slowlyit weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not by putting interestsin its place, but by mental habits which had no bias at all. It would also haveweakened the literary bias, if Adams had been capable of finding otheramusem*nt, but the climate kept him steady to desultory and useless reading,till he had run through libraries of volumes which he forgot even to theirtitle-pages. Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and hisprofessors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitatingapproval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a longstruggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities,at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third ofhis class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of theirscholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion that his instructorswere very nearly right, and when he became a professor in his turn, and mademortifying mistakes in ranking his scholars, he still obstinately insisted thaton the whole, he was not far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted thenegative standard because it was the standard of the school.

He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they thought theygained 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 adirection. The world outside seemed large, but the paths that led into it werenot many and lay mostly through Boston, where he did not want to go. As ithappened, by pure chance, the first door of escape that seemed to offer a hopeled into Germany, and James Russell Lowell opened it.

Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of Belles-Lettres, had dulygone to Germany, and had brought back whatever he found to bring. The literaryworld then agreed that truth survived in Germany alone, and Carlyle, MatthewArnold, Renan, Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the Germanfaith. 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 unfortunatemiddle class with savage ill-temper, much as the middle class had scratched andbitten the Church and Court for a hundred years before. The middle class hadthe power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the satirists andidealists seized the press, and as they were agreed that the Second Empire wasa disgrace to France and a danger to England, they turned to Germany because atthat moment Germany was neither economical nor military, and a hundred yearsbehind western Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought,method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of scholarship. Goethewas raised to the rank of Shakespeare — Kant ranked as a law-giver abovePlato. All serious scholars were obliged to become German, for German thoughtwas revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not veryenthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited his scholars tojoin him. Adams was glad to accept the invitation, rather for the sake ofcultivating Lowell than Germany, but still in perfect good faith. It was thefirst serious attempt he had made to direct his own education, and he was sureof getting some education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, butat least a path.

Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the path proved tobe, but the student could never see what other was open to him. He could havedone no better had he foreseen every stage of his coming life, and he wouldprobably have done worse. The preliminary step was pure gain. James RussellLowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of itsuniversities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in hisstudy. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk agreat deal, for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that ofolder men ought to flatter and please the young even when they altogetherexaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As practicala New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord faith rather than towardsBoston 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 wouldhave entered a Gothic Cathedral, for he well knew that the priests regarded himas only a worm. To the Concord Church all Adamses were minds of dust andemptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or imagination; little higher than thecommon scourings of State Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures ofnarrow scope; and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feeluncertainty about so many matters more important than Adamses that his mindrebelled against no discipline merely personal, and he was ready to admit hisunworthiness if only he might penetrate the shrine. The influence of HarvardCollege was beginning to have its effect. He was slipping away from fixedprinciples; 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 mankindwho accepted a material universe, remained always an insect, or something muchlower — a man. It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed tohim real; perhaps — as Mr. Emerson justly said — it was so; inspite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back intothe heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was himself and not theappearances; it was the poet and not the banker; it was his own thought, notthe thing that moved it. He did not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concordseemed to him, at one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowellwas as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy got norevolutionary thought whatever — objective or subjective as they used tocall it — but he got good-humored encouragement to do what amused him,which consisted in passing two years in Europe after finishing the four yearsof Cambridge

The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was the onlypositive result he could ever trace to the influence of Harvard College, and hehad grave doubts whether Harvard College influenced even that. Negative resultsin plenty he could trace, but he tended towards negation on his own account, asone side of the New England mind had always done, and even there he could neverfeel sure that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In hisopinion the education was not serious, but in truth hardly any Boston studenttook it seriously, and none of them seemed sure that President Walker himself,or President Felton after him, took it more seriously than the students. Forthem all, the college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, ratherthan mental.

Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his only capitalin life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more, but he could be quitecertain that, barring his own faults, his social position would never bequestioned. 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 needof acquaintance to strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly someone to show him how to use the acquaintance he cared to make. He made noacquaintance 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, andcontact of Bostonian with Bostonian was the last education these young menneeded. Cordial and intimate as their college relations were, they all flew offin different directions the moment they took their degrees. Harvard Collegeremained a tie, indeed, but a tie little stronger than Beacon Street and not sostrong as State Street. Strangers might perhaps gain something from the collegeif 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 himto chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friendships at college.Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in after life so muchas Richardson, but still more certainly the college relation had little to dowith the later friendship. Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run closetogether. Adams would have attached himself to Richardson in any case, as heattached himself to John LaFarge or Augustus St. Gaudens or Clarence King orJohn Hay, none of whom were at Harvard College. The valley of life grew moreand more narrow with years, and certain men with common tastes were bound tocome together. Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more equalfooting with them had he been less ignorant, and had he not thrown away tenyears of early life in acquiring what he might have acquired in one.

Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative and in someways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world could not see good in thelower 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 doubthis own veracity, so fantastic it seemed in later life — may have done nogreat or permanent harm; but the habit of looking at life as a social relation— an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weaknesswhich needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or givethe 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 collegestandard permanent through life. The Bostonian educated at Harvard Collegeremained a collegian, if he stuck only to what the college gave him. If parentswent on generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard Collegefor the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an inferior socialtype, quite as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the nextgeneration.

Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President Walker or JamesRussell Lowell still showed it, was admirable, and if it had little practicalvalue or personal influence on the mass of students, at least it preserved thetradition for those who liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American norEuropean, nor even wholly Yankee; his admirers were few, and his many; perhapshis worst weakness was his self-criticism and self-consciousness; but hisambitions, social or intellectual, were necessarily cheap even though theymight be negative. Afraid of such serious risks, and still more afraid ofpersonal ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly alwaysled a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware that he couldnot succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement orneed of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise wouldscarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the lastremnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.

The College Magazine printed his work, and the College Societies listened tohis addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were not; the audiences, too,listened in silence; but this was all the encouragement any Harvard collegianhad a reasonable hope to receive; grave silence was a form of patience thatmeant possible future acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one caredenough to criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching hisown limits. He found that he could not be this — or that — or theother; always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope orforce. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he believedthe judges were right. His work seemed to him thin, commonplace, feeble. Attimes he felt his own weakness so fatally that he could not go on; when he hadnothing to say, he could not say it, and he found that he had very little tosay at best. Much that he then wrote must be still in existence in print ormanuscript, though he never cared to see it again, for he felt no doubt that itwas in reality just what he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling forform; an instinct of exclusion. Nothing shocked—not even itsweakness.

Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition — creates it — and atthat time the ambition of the literary student, which almost took place of theregular prizes of scholarship, was that of being chosen as the representativeof his class — Class Orator — at the close of their course. Thiswas political as well as literary success, and precisely the sort ofeighteenth-century combination that fascinated an eighteenth century boy. Theidea lurked in his mind, at first as a dream, in no way serious or evenpossible, for he stood outside the number of what were known as popular men.Year by year, his position seemed to improve, or perhaps his rivalsdisappeared, until at last, to his own great astonishment, he found himself acandidate. The habits of the college permitted no active candidacy; he and hisrivals had not a word to say for or against themselves, and he was never evenconsulted on the subject; he was not present at any of the proceedings, and howit happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen, that one evening onreturning from Boston he received notice of his election, after a very closecontest, as Class Orator over the head of the first scholar, who wasundoubtedly a better orator and a more popular man. In politics the success ofthe poorer candidate is common enough, and Henry Adams was a fairly trainedpolitician, but he never understood how he managed to defeat not only a morecapable but a more popular rival.

To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mock-modesty; his head wasas clear as ever it was in an indifferent canvass, and he knew his rivals andtheir following as well as he knew himself. What he did not know, even afterfour years of education, was Harvard College. What he could never measure wasthe bewildering impersonality of the men, who, at twenty years old, seemed toset no value either on official or personal standards. Here were nearly ahundred young men who had lived together intimately during four of the mostimpressionable years of life, and who, not only once but again and again, indifferent ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately, chose as theirrepresentatives precisely those of their companions who seemed least torepresent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals had any position at all ina collegiate sense, it was that of indifference to the college. Henry Adamsnever professed the smallest faith in universities of any kind, either as boyor man, nor had he the faintest admiration for the university graduate, eitherin Europe or in America; as a collegian he was only known apart from hisfellows by his habit of standing outside the college; and yet the singular factremained that this commonplace body of young men chose him repeatedly toexpress his and their commonplaces. Secretly, of course, the successfulcandidate flattered himself — and them — with the hope that theymight perhaps not be so commonplace as they thought themselves; but this wasonly another proof that all were identical. They saw in him a representative— the kind of representative they wanted — and he saw in them themost formidable array of judges he could ever meet, like so many mirrors ofhimself, an infinite reflection of his own shortcomings.

All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it actuallyshocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if possible, had he knownthat it was to be the only flattery of the sort he was ever to receive. Thefunction 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 wasthe most conspicuous in the function. Unlike the Orators at regularCommencements, the Class Day Orator stood alone, or had only the Poet forrival. Crowded into the large church, the students, their families, friends,aunts, uncles and chaperones, attended all the girls of sixteen or twenty whowanted to show their summer dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for anhour or two, in a heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to anOrator and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes as their ownexperience and their mild censors permitted them to utter. What Henry Adamssaid in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon forgot to the last word, nor had itthe 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 inenthusiasm. The young man — always in search of education — askedhimself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence of enthusiasm was adefect or a merit, since, in either case, it was all that Harvard Collegetaught, and all that the hundred young men, whom he was trying to represent,expressed. Another comment threw more light on the effect of the collegeeducation. One of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's "perfectself-possession." Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College gave nothing else,it gave calm. For four years each student had been obliged to figure dailybefore dozens of young men who knew each other to the last fibre. One had donelittle but read papers to Societies, or act comedy in the Hasty Pudding, not tospeak of regular exercises, and no audience in future life would ever be sointimately and terribly intelligent as these. Three-fourths of the graduateswould rather have addressed the Council of Trent or the British Parliament thanhave acted Sir Anthony Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala audience of theHasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard College, whichcertainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to itsgraduates than the paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcamethe graduates of European universities. Whether this was, or was not,education, Henry Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up before any audiencein America or Europe, with nerves rather steadier for the excitement, butwhether he should ever have anything to say, remained to be proved. As yet heknew nothing Education had not begun.

CHAPTER V. BERLIN(1858-1859)

A FOURTH child has the strength of his weakness. Being ofno 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 andall the world agreed, unfitted Americans for America. A captious critic mighthave replied that all the success he or his father or his grandfather achievedwas chiefly due to the field that Europe gave them, and it was more than likelythat without the help of Europe they would have all remained local politiciansor lawyers, like their neighbors, to the end. Strictly followed, the rule wouldhave obliged them never to quit Quincy; and, in fact, so much more timid areparents for their children than for themselves, that Mr. and Mrs. Adams wouldhave been content to see their children remain forever in Mount Vernon Street,unexposed to the temptations of Europe, could they have relied on the moralinfluences of Boston itself. Although the parents little knew what took placeunder their eyes, even the mothers saw enough to make them uneasy. Perhapstheir dread of vice, haunting past and present, worried them less than theirdread of daughters-in-law or sons-in-law who might not fit into the somewhatnarrow quarters of home. On all sides were risks. Every year some young personalarmed the parental heart even in Boston, and although the temptations ofEurope were irresistible, removal from the temptations of Boston might beimperative. The boy Henry wanted to go to Europe; he seemed well behaved, whenany one was looking at him; he observed conventions, when he could not escapethem; he was never quarrelsome, towards a superior; his morals were apparentlygood, and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known to be bad. Aboveall, he was timid and showed a certain sense of self-respect, when in publicview. What he was at heart, no one could say; least of all himself; but he wasprobably human, and no worse than some others. Therefore, when he presented toan exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a Germanuniversity the study of the Civil Law — although neither he nor they knewwhat the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying it — the parentsdutifully consented, and walked with him down to the railway-station at Quincyto 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 morethan 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 sailingon the steamer Persia, the pride of Captain Judkins and the Cunard Line; thenewest, largest and fastest steamship afloat. He was not alone. Several of hiscollege 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 thanany university teaching ever did — the meaning of a November gale on themid-Atlantic — which, for mere physical misery, passed endurance. Thesubject offered him material for none but serious treatment; he could never seethe humor of sea-sickness; but it united itself with a great variety of otherimpressions which made the first month of travel altogether the rapidest schoolof education he had yet found. The stride in knowledge seemed gigantic. Onebegan a to see that a great many impressions were needed to make very littleeducation, but how many could be crowded into one day without making anyeducation at all, became the pons asinorum of tourist mathematics. Howmany would turn out to be wrong whether any could turn out right, was ultimatewisdom.

The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James, the mostdistinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in a furious gale in theMersey, to make place for the drearier picture of a Liverpool street as seenfrom the Adelphi coffee-room in November murk, followed instantly by thepassionate delights of Chester and the romance of red-sandstone architecture.Millions of Americans have felt this succession of emotions. Possibly veryyoung and ingenuous tourists feel them still, but in days before tourists, whenthe romance was a reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boyswent out to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens would have feltin the presence of a Duke. The very name of Grosvenor struck a note ofgrandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with their gilded furniture;the portraits; the terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the sense ofsuperiority in the England of the fifties, actually set the rich noblemanapart, above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was theEngland of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every churchyardshadow, 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 verymuch changed since he lost his battle and his head. An eighteenth-centuryAmerican boy fresh from Boston naturally took it all for education, and wasamused at this sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.

Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the BlackDistrict, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plungeinto darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weirdgloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except involcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrabledarkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged —the revelation of an unknown society of the pit — made a boyuncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waitingfor him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to dealwith Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or hisSatanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. The Black District was a practicaleducation, 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 tostudy, 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 wearyway 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 anoutside world, and absolutely self-confident. The boys in the streets made suchfree comments on the American clothes and figures, that the travellers hurriedto put on tall hats and long overcoats to escape criticism. No stranger hadrights even in the Strand. The eighteenth century held its own. Historymuttered down Fleet Street, like Dr. Johnson, in Adams's ear; Vanity Fair wasalive on Piccadilly in yellow chariots with coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths;footmen with canes, on the footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; halfthe great houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments;every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in the world werethe Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In November, 1858, London was stillvast, but it was the London of the eighteenth century that an American felt andhated.

Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess how intenselyintimate this London grime was to become to him as a man, but he could stillless conceive himself returning to it fifty years afterwards, noting at eachturn how the great city grew smaller as it doubled in size; cheaper as itquadrupled its wealth; less imperial as its empire widened; less dignified asit tried to be civil. He liked it best when he hated it. Education began at theend, or perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far it had remained in theeighteenth century, and the next step took it back to the sixteenth. He crossedto Antwerp. As the Baron Osy steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, atravelling band on deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working alongthe fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade and Teniers were asmuch alive as they ever were, and even the Duke of Alva was still at home. Thethirteenth-century cathedral towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiledroofs, ending abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The tasteof the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was mediæval, sothat Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the strongest and fullest flavors thatever touched the young man's palate; but he might as well have drunk out hisexcitement 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. Hemerely 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 lessonhe did learn without suspecting that he must immediately lose it. He felt hismiddle ages and the sixteenth century alive. He was young enough, and the townswere dirty enough — unimproved, unrestored, untouristed — to retainthe sense of reality. As a taste or a smell, it was education, especiallybecause 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. Hewas only too happy to feel himself kneeling at the foot of the Cross; helearned only to loathe the sordid necessity of getting up again, and goingabout his stupid business.

This was one of the foreseen dangers of Europe, but it vanished rapidlyenough to reassure the most anxious of parents. Dropped into Berlin one morningwithout guide or direction, the young man in search of education floundered ina mere mess of misunderstandings. He could never recall what he expected tofind, but whatever he expected, it had no relation with what it turned out tobe. A student at twenty takes easily to anything, even to Berlin, and he wouldhave accepted the thirteenth century pure and simple since his guides assuredhim that this was his right path; but a week's experience left him dazed anddull. Faith held out, but the paths grew dim. Berlin astonished him, but he hadno lack of friends to show him all the amusem*nt it had to offer. Within a dayor two he was running about with the rest to beer-cellars and music-halls anddance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut andsausages as though he knew no better. This was easy. One can always descend thesocial ladder. The trouble came when he asked for the education he waspromised. 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 theInstitutes of Gaius and several German works on the Civil Law in numerousvolumes; and they led him to his first lecture.

His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very quick, and he hadalmost religious respect for his guides and advisers; but he needed no morethan one hour to satisfy him that he had made another failure in education, andthis 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 theshock that upset him was the discovery of the university itself. He had thoughtHarvard College a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared withall that he could see of the University of Berlin. The German students werestrange animals, but their professors were beyond pay. The mental attitude ofthe university was not of an American world. What sort of instruction prevailedin other branches, or in science, Adams had no occasion to ask, but in theCivil Law he found only the lecture system in its deadliest form as itflourished in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments; thestudents made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books ordiscussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but theymust pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted adegree. To an American the result was worthless. He could make no use of theCivil Law without some previous notion of the Common Law; but the student whoknew enough of the Common Law to understand what he wanted, had only to readthe Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America, and be his ownprofessor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the manner could profit anAmerican education.

This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went to thelectures, made notes, and read textbooks, but never pretended to take theirprofessor seriously. They were much more serious in reading Heine. They knew nomore than Heine what good they were getting, beyond the Berlin accent —which was bad; and the beer — which was not to compare with Munich; andthe dancing — which was better at Vienna. They enjoyed the beer andmusic, but they refused to be responsible for the education. Anyway, as theydefended themselves, they were learning the language.

So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at languages, hefound himself falling behind all his friends, which depressed his spirits, themore because the gloom of a Berlin winter and of Berlin architecture seemed tohim a particular sort of gloom never attained elsewhere. One day on the Lindenhe caught sight of Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him. Sumner was thenrecovering from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club, and he waspleased to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian wilderness. Theydined together and went to hear "William Tell" at the Opera. Sumner tried toencourage his friend about his difficulties of language: "I came to Berlin," orRome, or whatever place it was, as he said with his grand air of mastery, "Icame to Berlin, unable to say a word in the language; and three months laterwhen I went away, I talked it to my cabman." Adams felt himself quite unable toattain in so short a time such social advantages, and one day complained of histrials to Mr. Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in Berlinfor the sake of its music. Mr. Apthorp told of his own similar struggle, andhow 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'sdesperate frame of mind. At least it ridded him of the university and the CivilLaw and American associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took the trouble tonegotiate with the head-master of the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasiumfor permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a member of theOber-tertia, a class of boys twelve or thirteen years old, and there Adams wentfor three months as though he had not always avoided high schools with singularantipathy. He never did anything else so foolish but he was given a bit ofeducation which served him some purpose in life.

It was not merely the language, though three months passed in such fashionwould teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and this was all thatforeign students could expect to do, for they never by any chance would come incontact with German society, if German society existed, about which they knewnothing. Adams never learned to talk German well, but the same might be said ofhis English, if he could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself onthis account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He thoughthimself quite Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that heread 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 hiscontact with German education.

He had revolted at the American school and university; he had instantlyrejected the German university; and as his last experience of education hetried the German high school. The experiment was hazardous. In 1858 Berlin wasa poor, keen-witted, provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in mostrespects disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could haveimagined. Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussiawas only beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart fromdiscipline, activity scarcely existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent forhis insane brother King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time lookingat the passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the Linden. Germanmanners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and German thoroughness atschool was apt to be routine. Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin acareer against the inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was ascandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned toreforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school toget educated, at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid ofthe education they were forced to follow. As an episode in the search foreducation, this adventure smacked of Heine.

The school system has doubtless changed, and at all events the schoolmastersare probably long ago dead; the story has no longer a practical value, and hadvery little even at the time; one could at least say in defence of the Germanschool that it was neither very brutal nor very immoral. The head-master wasexcellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse than inother schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American withhorror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strainthat the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boysperformed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memoryseemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, eitheranalytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encouragereasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popularmind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed tobe most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terriblyefficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic. TheFriedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium was an old building in the heart ofBerlin which served the educational needs of the small tradesmen orbourgeoisie of the neighborhood; the children were Berliner-kinder ifever there were such, and of a class suspected of sympathy and concern in thetroubles of 1848. None was noble or connected with good society. Personallythey were rather sympathetic than not, but as the objects of education theywere proofs of nearly all the evils that a bad system could give. ApparentlyAdams, in his rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of aviciously logical education. The boys' physique showed it first, but theirphysique could not be wholly charged to the school. German food was bad atbest, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be good; but itwas not the food alone that made their faces white and their flesh flabby. Theynever breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in all Berlinnot 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 wasfoul beyond all decency; but when the American opened a window in the fiveminutes between hours, he violated the rules and was invariably rebuked. Aslong 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 downstrong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because theirminds were morbid. The German university had seemed a failure, but the Germanhigh school was something very near an indictable nuisance.

Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German education hadreached this point. Nothing was left of it except the ghost of the Civil Lawshut up in the darkest of closets, never to gibber again before any one whocould repeat the story. The derisive Jew laughter of Heine ran through theuniversity and everything else in Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty yearsold, life is bound to be full, if only of Berlin beer, although German studentlife was on the whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, butthough nothing except small fragments remained of the education that had beenso promising — or promised — this is only what most often happensin life, when by-products turn out to be more valuable than staples. The Germanuniversity 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 Germantheatre, 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 ofthe total failure of German education was that the student's only clear gain— his single step to a higher life — came from time wasted; studiesneglected; vices indulged; education reversed; — it came from thedespised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was accidental, unintended,unforeseen.

When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons in the weekat music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and looking at fatGerman women knitting, while an orchestra played dull music, Adams went withthem for the sake of the company, but with no presence of enjoyment; and whenMr. Apthorp gently protested that he exaggerated his indifference, for ofcourse he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams replied simply that he loathed Beethoven;and felt a slight surprise when Mr. Apthorp and the others laughed as thoughthey thought it humor. He saw no humor in it. He supposed that, exceptmusicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one exceptmathematicians thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-table,mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followedthe movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been more astonished had hesuddenly read a new language. Among the marvels of education, this was the mostmarvellous. 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 ithappened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by thecommonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense burst out like a flower in hislife, so superior to the old senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its ownexistence, 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 hadpartly become intelligible to him, but he was the more inclined to think thatBeethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily followed. Thiscould not be called education, for he had never so much as listened to themusic. He had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical repetition ofcertain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind. Beethoven might have thispower, but not Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner later than"Tannhäuser." Near forty years passed before he reached the"Götterdämmerung."

One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense — the mechanicalreaction of a sleeping consciousness — but no other sense awoke. Hissense of line and color remained as dull as ever, and as far as ever below thelevel of an artist. His metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so thathis mind could leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with theidealities of Kant and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith in Germanthought and literature was exalted, he failed to approach German thought, andhe shed never a tear of emotion over the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When hisfather 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 thebest of educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at last, April came,and some genius suggested a tramp in Thüringen, his heart sang like abird; he realized what a nightmare he had suffered, and he made up his mindthat, wherever else he might, in the infinities of space and time, seek foreducation, it should not be again in Berlin.

CHAPTER VI. ROME(1859-1860)

THE tramp in Thüringen lasted four-and-twenty hours.By the end of the first walk, his three companions — John Bancroft, JamesJ. Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard College likehimself — were satisfied with what they had seen, and when they sat downto 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 themso strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to Weimar the same night. Theywere all quite happy and lighthearted in the first fresh breath of leaflessspring, and the beer was better than at Berlin, but they were all equally indoubt why they had come to Germany, and not one of them could say why theystayed. Adams stayed because he did not want to go home, and he had fears thathis father's patience might be exhausted if he asked to waste timeelsewhere.

They could not think that their education required a return to Berlin. A fewdays at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied them that Dresden was a betterspot for general education than Berlin, and equally good for reading Civil Law.They were possibly right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and noeducation to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios were famous;the theatre and opera were sometimes excellent, and the Elbe was prettier thanthe Spree. They could always fall back on the language. So he took a room inthe household of the usual small government clerk with the usual plaindaughters, and continued the study of the language. Possibly one might learnsomething more by accident, as one had learned something of Beethoven. For thenext eighteen months the young man pursued accidental education, since he couldpursue no other; and by great good fortune, Europe and America were too busywith their own affairs to give much attention to his. Accidental education hadevery chance in its favor, especially because nothing came amiss.

Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that he had come ofa*ge, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in his intentions. Even afterBerlin had become a nightmare, he still persuaded himself that his Germaneducation was a success. He loved, or thought he loved the people, but theGermany 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 knewnothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence. What he liked was the simplecharacter; the good-natured sentiment; the musical and metaphysicalabstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for practical affairs. Atthat time everyone looked on Germany as incapable of competing with France,England or America in any sort of organized energy. Germany had no confidencein herself, and no reason to feel it. She had no unity, and no reason to wantit. She never had unity. Her religious and social history, her economicalinterests, her military geography, her political convenience, had always tendedto eccentric rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and railways werecreated, she was mediæval by nature and geography, and this was whatAdams, under the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell, liked.

He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering between worldspassed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing men who stayed too longat the points of contact. Suddenly the Emperor Napoleon declared war on Austriaand raised a confused point of morals in the mind of Europe. France was thenightmare of Germany, and even at Dresden one looked on the return of Napoleonto Leipsic as the most likely thing in the world. One morning the governmentclerk, in whose family Adams was staying, rushed into his room to consult a mapin order that he might measure the distance from Milan to Dresden. The thirdNapoleon had reached Lombardy, and only fifty or sixty years had passed sincethe first Napoleon had begun his military successes from an Italian base.

An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century tastes capped byfragments of a German education and the most excellent intentions, had to makeup his mind about the moral value of these conflicting forces. France was thewicked spirit of moral politics, and whatever helped France must be so farevil. At that time Austria was another evil spirit. Italy was the prize theydisputed, and for at least fifteen hundred years had been the chief object oftheir greed. The question of sympathy had disturbed a number of persons duringthat 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'sneighbors who had found no way of settling this question since the days of thecave-dwellers, but ignorance did better to discard the attempt to be wise, forwisdom had been singularly baffled by the problem. Better take sides first, andreason about it for the rest of life.

Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or wishes. He hadnot been German long enough for befogging his mind to that point, but themoment was decisive for much to come, especially for political morals. Hismorals were the highest, and he clung to them to preserve his self-respect; butsteam and electricity had brought about new political and socialconcentrations, or were making them necessary in the line of his moralprinciples — freedom, education, economic development and so forth— which required association with allies as doubtful as Napoleon III, androbberies with violence on a very extensive scale. As long as he could arguethat his opponents were wicked, he could join in robbing and killing themwithout a qualm; but it might happen that the good were robbed. Educationinsisted on finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin lifein the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless he could satisfyhimself when and why robbery and murder were a virtue and duty. Educationfounded 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 marryingCharles Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy, and, like all good Americansand 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 moralsense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; andtheir will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral. Mrs. Kuhn had a doublesuperiority. She not only adored Italy, but she cordially disliked Germany inall its varieties. She saw no gain in helping her brother to be Germanized, andshe wanted him much to be civilized. She was the first young woman he was everintimate 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 whereshe would. It was his first experiment in giving the reins to a woman, and hewas so much pleased with the results that he never wanted to take them back. Inafter life he made a general law of experience — no woman had ever drivenhim wrong; no man had ever driven him right.

Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war as soon as thearmistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed, nothing was easier. The partycrossed the St. Gothard and reached Milan, picturesque with every sort ofuniform and every sign of war. To young Adams this first plunge into Italypassed Beethoven as a piece of accidental education. Like music, it differedfrom other education in being, not a means of pursuing life, but one of theends 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 offersbarely half-a-dozen such, and the intervals seem long. Exactly what they teachwould puzzle a Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an economic value, sincemost people would decline to part with even their faded memories except at avaluation ridiculously extravagant. They were also what men pay most for; butone's ideas become hopelessly mixed in trying to reduce such forms of educationto a standard of exchangeable value, and, as in political economy, one had bestdisregard altogether what cannot be stated in equivalents. The properequivalent of pleasure is pain, which is also a form of education.

Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the enemy'scountry, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by way of the StelvioPass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove up it, showed war. Garibaldi'sCacciatori were the only visible inhabitants. No one could say whether the passwas open, but in any case no carriage had yet crossed. At the inns the handsomeyoung officers in command of the detachments were delighted to acceptinvitations to dinner and to talk all the evening of their battles to thecharming patriot who sparkled with interest and flattery, but not one of themknew whether their enemies, the abhorred Austrian Jägers, would let thetravellers through their lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the character failingin any party that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after climbing whatwas said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe, the carriage turned the lastshoulder, where the glacier of the Ortler Spitze tumbled its huge mass downupon the road, even Mrs. Kuhn gasped when she was driven directly up to thebarricade and stopped by the double line of sentries stretching on either sideup the mountains, till the flash of the gun barrels was lost in the flash ofthe snow. For accidental education the picture had its value. The earliest ofthese pictures count for most, as first impressions must, and Adams neverafterwards cared much for landscape education, except perhaps in the tropicsfor the sake of the contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, andset aside.

The handsome blond officers of the Jägers were not to be beaten incourtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the Cacciatori. Theeternal woman as usual, when she is young, pretty, and engaging, had her way,and the barricade offered no resistance. In fifteen minutes the carriage wasrolling down to Mals, swarming with German soldiers and German fleas, worsethan the Italian; and German language, thought, and atmosphere, of which youngAdams, thanks to his glimpse of Italy, never again felt quite the old confidentcharm.

Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his cathedrals, hisRhine, and whatever his companions suggested. Faithful to his self-contractedscheme of passing two winters in study of the Civil Law, he went back toDresden with a letter to the Frau Hofräthin von Reichenbach, in whosehouse Lowell and other Americans had pursued studies more or less serious. Inthose days, "The Initials" was a new book. The charm which its clever authorhad laboriously woven over Munich gave also a certain reflected light toDresden. Young Adams had nothing to do but take fencing-lessons, visit thegalleries and go to the theatre; but his social failure in the line of "TheInitials," was humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofräthinherself was sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total discomfiture andhelplessness of the young American in the face of her society. Possibly aneducation 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 enrichingtheir education by a picturesque intimacy with the manners of the Apaches andDigger Indians. All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams admittedhimself unable to guess what use his second winter in Germany was to him, orwhat he expected it to be. Even the doctrine of accidental education brokedown. There were no accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, heclosed and locked the German door with a long breath of relief, and took theroad to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as it pleased him, foreighteen months, and in spite of the infinite variety of new impressions whichhad packed themselves into his mind, he knew no more, for his practicalpurposes, 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 inEurope, and unfitted for any career in America, and he had not naturalintelligence enough to see what a mess he had thus far made of hiseducation.

By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one might perhapsfind some use for accidental and devious knowledge, but this had been no partof 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 hismind when he started in November, 1858, than to become a tourist, but a meretourist, and nothing else, he had become in April, 1860, when he joined hissister in Florence. His father had been in the right. The young man felt alittle sore about it. Supposing his father asked him, on his return, whatequivalent 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 tobetter it by asking his father, in turn, what equivalent his brothers orcousins or friends at home had got out of the same time and money spent inBoston. All they had put into the law was certainly thrown away, but were theyhappier in science? In theory one might say, with some show of proof, that apure, scientific education was alone correct; yet many of his friends who tookit, found reason to complain that it was anything but a pure, scientific worldin which they lived.

Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own, withoutseeking 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 candidatesfor the Presidential election in November. He supported Mr. Seward. TheRepublican Party was an unknown force, and the Democratic Party was torn topieces. No one could see far into the future. Fathers could blunder as well assons, and, in 1860, every one was conscious of being dragged along paths muchless secure than those of the European tourist. For the time, the young man wassafe from interference, and went on his way with a light heart to take whateverchance fragments of education God or the devil was pleased to give him, for heknew no longer the good from the bad.

He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps the most usefulpurpose 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 causedto be printed in the Boston Courier; and the exercise was good forhim. 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. Somethingremains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out everycommonplace in the expression. Young men as a rule saw little in Italy, oranywhere else, and in after life when Adams began to learn what some men couldsee, he shrank into corners of shame at the thought that he should havebetrayed his own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he invited hisneighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the nearest approach he hadyet made to an intelligent act.

For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion naturally centredin Rome. The American parent, curiously enough, while bitterly hostile toParis, seemed rather disposed to accept Rome as legitimate education, thoughabused; but to young men seeking education in a serious spirit, taking forgranted that everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome wasaltogether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome before 1870 wasseductive beyond resistance. The month of May, 1860, was divine. No doubt otheryoung men, and occasionally young women, have passed the month of May in Romesince then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it does— in them — but in 1860 the lights and shadows were stillmediæval, and mediæval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed andglowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of science hadyet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling. The pictureswere uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. MediævalRome was sorcery. Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-centuryyouth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One's emotions in Rome wereone's private affair, like one's glass of absinthe before dinner in the PalaisRoyal; they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense; and theywere surely immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read inthe ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were evidence of thejust judgments of an outraged God against all the doings of man. This moralunfitted young men for every sort of useful activity; it made Rome a gospel ofanarchy and vice; the last place under the sun for educating the young; yet itwas, by common consent, the only spot that the young — of either sex andevery race — passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.

Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can man concludeanything; but the first impulse given to the boy is apt to lead or drive himfor the rest of his life into conclusion after conclusion that he never dreamedof reaching. One looked idly enough at the Forum or at St. Peter's, but onenever forgot the look, and it never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian,fresh from Germany, Rome seemed a pure emotion, quite free from economic oractual values, and he could not in reason or common sense foresee that it wasmechanically piling up conundrum after conundrum in his educational path, whichseemed unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed insoluble buthad got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle to be dissected anddropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway train and thrown out ofthe window after other bad French novels, the morals of which could neverapproach the immorality of Roman history. Rome was actual; it was England; itwas going to be America. Rome could not be fitted into an orderly,middle-class, Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution. No law of progressapplied to it. Not even time-sequences — the last refuge of helplesshistorians — had value for it. The Forum no more led to the Vatican thanthe Vatican to the Forum. Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian mightbe mixed up in any relation of time, along with a thousand more, and never leadto a sequence. The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a newreligion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine for athousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flatcontradiction.

Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this heresy, butwhat they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little importance indeed for1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The problem became only the morefascinating. Probably it was more vital in May, 1860, than it had been inOctober, 1764, when the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city firststarted to the mind of Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing inthe Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singingVespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the Capitol." Murray'sHandbook 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 ofSanta Maria di Ara Cœli, curiously wondering that not an inch had beengained by Gibbon — or all the historians since — towards explainingthe Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm remained intact. Two greatexperiments of Western civilization had left there the chief monuments of theirfailure, and nothing proved that the city might not still survive to expressthe failure of a third.

The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of posing for aGibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist, even to the depths of hissub-consciousness, and it was well for him that he should be nothing else, foreven 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 tosay 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 couldsay very much more than the tourist, who went on repeating to himself theeternal question: — Why! Why!! Why!!! — as his neighbor, the blindbeggar, might do, sitting next him, on the church steps. No one ever hadanswered the question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet every one whohad either head or heart, felt that sooner or later he must make up his mindwhat answer to accept. Substitute the word America for the word Rome, and thequestion became personal.

Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never knew it, and neversought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest men of the age scarcely bore thetest of posing with Rome for a background. Perhaps Garibaldi — possiblyeven Cavour — could have sat "in the close of the evening, among theruins of the Capitol," but one hardly saw Napoleon III there, or Palmerston orTennyson or Longfellow. One morning, Adams happened to be chatting in thestudio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged Englishman came in, evidentlyexcited, and told of the shock he had just received, when riding near theCircus Maximus, at coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminalhad been put to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quiteovercome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time hadblunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new form of grim horror hadfor the moment wiped out the memory of two thousand years of Roman bloodshed,or the consolation, derived from history and statistics, that most citizens ofRome seemed to be the better for guillotining. Only by slow degrees, hegrappled the conviction that the victim of the shock was Robert Browning; and,on the background of the Circus Maximus, the Christian martyrs flaming astorches, and the morning's murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather inplace, as a middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards, inthe light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made part of his backgroundexcept by effacement. Browning might have sat with Gibbon, among the ruins, andfew Romans would have smiled.

Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis; WilliamStory could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and Mommsen hardly said allthat 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 andcheaper politics. Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments,ambitions, energies; without her, the Western world was pointless andfragmentary; she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon might have gone onfor the whole century, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol, and no one wouldhave passed, capable of telling him what it meant. Perhaps it meantnothing.

So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet offered, fadingbehind the present, and probably beyond the past, somewhere into abstract time,grotesquely out of place with the Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adamsexplained to himself that he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put itbetter had he said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spiteof swarming impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he did when heentered it. As a marketable object, his value was less. His next step went farto convince him that accidental education, whatever its economical return mightbe, was prodigiously successful as an object in itself. Everything conspired toruin his sound scheme of life, and to make him a vagrant as well as pauper. Hewent on to Naples, and there, in the hot June, heard rumors that Garibaldi andhis thousand were about to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister,Chandler of Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit, but for hisname, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to send him to the seat of war asbearer of despatches to Captain Palmer of the American sloop of war Iroquois.Young Adams seized the chance, and went to Palermo in a government transportfilled with fleas, commanded by a charming Prince Caracciolo.

He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrativeprobably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier havewholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did notspeak. He himself would have much liked to know whether it had any bearingwhatever, and what was its value as a post-graduate course. Quite apart fromits value as life attained, realized, capitalized, it had also a certain valueas a lesson in something, though Adams could never classify the branch ofstudy. Loosely, the tourist called it knowledge of men, but it was just thereverse; it was knowledge of one's ignorance of men. Captain Palmer of theIroquois, who was a friend of the young man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took himwith the officers of the ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom theyfound in the Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his picturesque andpiratic staff, in the full noise and color of the Palermo revolution. As aspectacle, it belonged to Rossini and the Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumasat the least, but the spectacle was not its educational side. Garibaldi leftthe table, and, sitting down at the window, had a few words of talk withCaptain 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 betweenbanker and anarchist. One or the other, Garibaldi must serve. Himself a typicalanarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarm empires bigger than Naples, hissuccess 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 andmost splendid action. One saw a quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a redflannel shirt; absolutely impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing.Sympathetic it was, and one felt that it was simple; one suspected even that itmight be childlike, but could form no guess of its intelligence. In his owneyes Garibaldi might be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of Cavour hemight become a Condottiere; in the eyes of history he might, like the rest ofthe world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not understand. Thestudent was none the wiser.

This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined Italian historyfrom the beginning, and was no more intelligible to itself than to a youngAmerican who had no experience in double natures. In the end, if the"Autobiography" tells truth, Garibaldi saw and said that he had not understoodhis own acts; that he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposesof the class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself therevolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was unbounded. What should ayoung Bostonian have made of a character like this, internally alive withchildlike fancies, and externally quiet, simple, almost innocent; uttering withapparent conviction the usual commonplaces of popular politics that allpoliticians use as the small change of their intercourse with the public; butnever betraying a thought?

Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of Adams'spractical life, but he could never make anything of it. The lesson ofGaribaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity of extremesimplicity; but one could have learned this from a glow-worm. One did not needthe vivid recollection of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring captain ofGenoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July heat andSicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among the barricaded streets ofinsurgent Palermo, merely in order to remember that simplicity is complex.

Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to stumble overothers, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two or three months onParis. From the first he had avoided Paris, and had wanted no French influencein his education. He disapproved of France in the lump. A certain knowledge ofthe 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 thetrouble of drawing up a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved ofthe whole, once for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France wasnot 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 theFrench and sincerely disapproving them, he felt quite at liberty to enjoy tothe full everything he disapproved. Stated thus crudely, the idea soundsderisive; but, as a matter of fact, several thousand Americans passed much oftheir time there on this understanding. They sought to take share in everyfunction 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 ofserious education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms,without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better inacquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two sauces; forthe Trois Frères Provençaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and theCafé Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Variétés andthe Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Chéri and Gil Perez, andother 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 todisapprove of it; but he studied nothing, entered no society, and made noacquaintance. Accidental education went far in Paris, and one picked up a dealof knowledge that might become useful; perhaps, after all, the three monthspassed there might serve better purpose than the twenty-one months passedelsewhere; but he did not intend it — did not think it — and lookedat it as a momentary and frivolous vacation before going home to fit himselffor life. Therewith, after staying as long as he could and spending all themoney 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 overhis adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether fortune or fatehad ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known antecessors aswhen it led him to begin the study of law and to vote for Abraham Lincoln onthe 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 asa cat plays with mice. The simile is none too strong. Not one man in Americawanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wantedsecession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their occupations in peace.Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened. Possibly a fewSouthern loyalists in despair might dream it as an impossible chance; but noneplanned it.

As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another sort, he plungedat once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite heedless of any education orforethought. His past melted away. The prodigal was welcomed home, but not evenhis father asked a malicious question about the Pandects. At the utmost, hehinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act asprivate secretary during the winter in Washington, as though any young man whocould afford to throw away two winters on the Civil Law could afford to readBlackstone for another winter without a master. The young man was beyondsatire, 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 earliestchildhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does the uncharitable autumnwreak its spite so harshly on the frail wreck of the grasshopper summer; yeteven a Quincy November seemed temperate before the chill of a BostonJanuary.

This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood apart fromother memories as lurid beyond description. Although no one believed in civilwar, the air reeked of it, and the Republicans organized their clubs andparades as Wide-Awakes in a form military in all things except weapons. Henryreached home in time to see the last of these processions, stretching in ranksof torches along the hillside, file down through the November night; to the OldHouse, where Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress, received them, and, let thempretend what they liked, their air was not that of innocence.

Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed his modesttrunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked, and started for Washingtonwith his family. Ten years had passed since his last visit, but very little hadchanged. As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony was camped inthe same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, andsloughs for roads. The Government had an air of social instability andincompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as infact; but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was solittle to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and inDecember, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far asit made itself felt. John Adams was better off in Philadelphia in 1776 than hisgreat-grandson Henry in 1860 in Washington.

Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental Congress, but overthe close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in 1860-61, no halo could be thrown byany one who saw it. Of all the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, youngAdams was surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly thatthe 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 wasgiven to saying after Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!"Oxenstiern talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himselfseeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. TheSouthern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit formedical treatment, like other victims of hallucination — haunted bysuspicion, by idèes fixes, by violent morbid excitement; but thiswas not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, thecotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to adegree rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains ofpower 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 excessof power worked when held by inadequate hands.

This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was paradox. TheSouthern statesmen were regarded as standards of statesmanship, and suchstandards barred education. Charles Sumner's chief offence was his insistenceon Southern ignorance, and he stood a living proof of it. To this school, HenryAdams 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 suchcontradictions among intelligent people, what was a young man to learn?

He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical Southerngentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to teach or to give, exceptwarning. Even as example to be avoided, he was too glaring in his defiance ofreason, to help the education of a reasonable being. No one learned a usefullesson from the Confederate school except to keep away from it. Thus, at onesweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it wasovershadowed by the cotton planters, from whom one could learn nothing but badtemper, bad manners, poker, and treason.

Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and example; firstof all, on his New England surroundings. Republican houses were few inWashington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams aimed to create a social centre for NewEnglanders. They took a house on I Street, looking over Pennsylvania Avenue,well out towards Georgetown — the Markoe house — and there theprivate secretary began to learn his social duties, for the political wereconfined 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'sself. It had nothing to show except one's own features. Setting aside CharlesSumner, who stood quite alone and was the boy's oldest friend, all the NewEnglanders were sane and steady men, well-balanced, educated, and free frommeanness or intrigue — men whom one liked to act with, and who, whethergraduates or not, bore the stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was oneexception, and perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the NewEnglander's strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. Heoffered no more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as herepelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. Thecharacter, 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 ofteachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to Preston King, HenryWinter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few other men born with social faculty. Adamstook most kindly to Henry J. Raymond, who came to view the field for theNew York Times, and who was a man of the world. The averageCongressman was civil enough, but had nothing to ask except offices, andnothing to offer but the views of his district. The average Senator was morereserved, but had not much more to say, being always excepting one or twogenial natures, handicapped by his own importance.

Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival of thePresident-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 hehad 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 tenyears of solitary existence as Senator had most to do with his development. Noman, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator,and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have theeffect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though theymesmerized the subject. Yet even among Senators there were degrees indogmatism, from the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster,Benton, Clay, or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, itbecame Shakespearian and bouffe — as Godkin used to call it— like Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had atleast the merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly thought, asWebster had thought before him, that his great services and sacrifices, hissuperiority in education, his oratorical power, his political experience, hisrepresentative character at the head of the whole New England contingent, and,above all, his knowledge of the world, made him the most important member ofthe Senate; and no Senator had ever saturated himself more thoroughly with thespirit and temper of the body.

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiorityless obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims hisown inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it. Eventhe greatest Senators seemed to inspire little personal affection in eachother, and betrayed none at all. Sumner had a number of rivals who held hisjudgment in no high esteem, and one of these was Senator Seward. The two menwould 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 thefaults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of either. That thepublic service must suffer was certain, but what were the sufferings of thepublic service compared with the risks run by a young mosquito — aprivate secretary — trying to buzz admiration in the ears of each, andunaware that each would impatiently slap at him for belonging to the other?Innocent and unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even in a nursery, theprivate secretary courted both.

Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose business is toserve sources of power. The first news of a professional kind, imparted toprivate secretary Adams on reaching Washington, was that the President-elect,Abraham Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for his Secretary of State, and thatSeward was to be the medium for communicating his wishes to his followers.Every young man naturally accepted the wishes of Mr. Lincoln as orders, themore because he could see that the new President was likely to need all thehelp that several million young men would be able to give, if they counted onhaving any President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for thefirst meeting with the new Secretary of State.

Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed to be adisciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been Senator since 1849,when his responsibilities as leader had separated him from the Free Soilcontingent, for, in the dry light of the first Free Soil faith, the ways of NewYork politics Thurlow Weed had not won favor; but the fierce heat which weldedthe Republican Party in 1856 melted many such barriers, and when Mr. Adams cameto Congress in December, 1859, Governor Seward instantly renewed his attitudeof family friend, became a daily intimate in the household, and lost no chanceof forcing his fresh ally to the front.

A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor, as he wasalways called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the family, and the privatesecretary had the chance he wanted to watch him as carefully as one generallywatches men who dispose of one's future. A slouching, slender figure; a headlike a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes;hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a newtype — of western New York — to fathom; a type in one way simplebecause it was only double — political and personal; but complex becausethe political had become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask andwhich the features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint, orseemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world he threw it off, like apolitician, for effect. In both cases he chose to appear as a free talker, wholoathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but how much was nature and how much wasmask, he was himself too simple a nature to know. Underneath the surface he wasconventional after the conventions of western New York and Albany. Politiciansthought it unconventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adamsthought it charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who, thoughsixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed that Mr. Sewardwas never petty or personal; his talk was large; he generalized; he neverseemed to pose for statesmanship; he did not require an attitude of prayer.What was more unusual — almost singular and quite eccentric — hehad some means, unknown to other Senators, of producing the effect ofunselfishness.

Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts; essentially they weremuch alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be rigid, but the Puritan character in allits forms could be supple enough when it chose; and in Massachusetts all theAdamses had been attacked in succession as no better than politicalmercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in his standard history, went so far as to echo withapproval the charge that treachery was hereditary in the family. Any Adams hadat least to be thick-skinned, hardened to every contradictory epithet thatvirtue could supply, and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; butall must have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to nationalinterests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced to choose. C. F. Adamswas sure to do what his father had done, as his father had followed the stepsof John Adams, and no doubt thereby earned his epithets.

The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery should have hadthe 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 nopretence of guessing; even at that age he preferred to admit his dislike forguessing motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which hestood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always matter of simple-mindedsurprise. 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, andhe never saw quite so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one knowsthe story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and the conclusionmatters now less than though it concerned the merits of Adam and Eve in theGarden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion made the sharpest lesson of life; itwas condensed and concentrated education.

Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in Washingtondecided that, before they could administer the Government, they must make sureof a government to administer, and that this chance depended on the action ofVirginia. The whole ascendancy of the winter wavered between the effort of thecotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the new President to keepVirginia in. Governor Seward representing the Administration in the Senate tookthe lead; Mr. Adams took the lead in the House; and as far as a privatesecretary knew, the party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to theborder States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty, of dividingtheir own party, and they took this risk with open eyes. As Seward himself, inhis 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 historianswho tell their story; their private secretaries had nothing to do with itexcept to follow their orders. On that side a secretary learned nothing and hadnothing to learn. The sudden arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February23, and the language of his inaugural address, were the final term of thewinter's tactics, and closed the private secretary's interest in the matterforever. Perhaps he felt, even then, a good deal more interest in theappearance of another private secretary, of his own age, a young man named JohnHay, who lighted on LaFayette Square at the same moment. Friends are born, notmade, and Henry never mistook a friend except when in power. From the firstslight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay as a friend, andnever lost sight of him at the future crossing of their paths; but, for themoment, his own task ended on March 4 when Hay's began. The winter's anxietieswere shifted upon new shoulders, and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. Hehad tried to make himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed to himportentous, acting in secret as newspaper correspondent, cultivating a largeacquaintance 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 wereas ignorant as himself; none knew what should be done, or how to do it; allwere 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 GeneralWinfield Scott, who happened to be the only military figure that looked equalto the crisis. No one else either looked it, or was it, or could be it, bynature or training. Had young Adams been told that his life was to hang on thecorrectness of his estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He sawMr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Ofcourse he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkwardfigure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidentlyworried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfactionnor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense ofbecoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary;above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit forhis business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed somuch education as the new President but that all the education he could getwould not be enough.

As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one in Washingtonwas fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in March were fitted for theduties in April. The few people who thought they knew something were more inerror than those who knew nothing. Education was matter of life and death, butall the education in the world would have helped nothing. Only one man inAdams's reach seemed to him supremely fitted by knowledge and experience to bean adviser and friend. This was Senator Sumner; and there, in fact, the youngman'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 makeacquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have liked much to know whether hecould have helped it. He had necessarily followed Seward and his father; hetook for granted that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; hesupposed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled all personaldoubts. He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator Sumner privately denouncedthe course, regarded Mr. Adams as betraying the principles of his life, andbroke off relations with his family.

Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long life passedchiefly near politics and politicians, but the profoundest lessons are not thelessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanently warp the mind. Hecared little or nothing about the point in discussion; he was even willing toadmit that Sumner might be right, though in all great emergencies he commonlyfound that every one was more or less wrong; he liked lofty moral principle andcared little for political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumnerhimself; but the shock opened a chasm in life that never closed, and as long aslife lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a politicalinstinct, with out waiting further experiment — as he took for grantedthat arsenic poisoned — the rule that a friend in power is a friendlost.

On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never exchanged a wordwith 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 sortsof unexpected morals in life, and, at this moment, he was looking at hundredsof Southern gentlemen who believed themselves singularly honest, but who seemedto him engaged in the plainest breach of faith and the blackest secretconspiracy, yet they did not disturb his education. History told of littleelse; and not one rebel defection — not even Robert E. Lee's — costyoung 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. Thepicture of Washington in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind ofeducation that led to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described aswandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, helpsnothing. Washington was a dismal school. Even before the traitors had flown,the vultures descended on it in swarms that darkened the ground, and tore thecarrion of political patronage into fragments and gobbets of fat and lean, onthe very steps of the White House. Not a man there knew what his task was tobe, 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 knewless than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by theuprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and tenthousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the countrycould recover its balance and movement. Henry was a helpless victim, and, likeall the rest, he could only wait for he knew not what, to send him he knew notwhere.

With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing to beprivate secretary he knew not what else to do but return with his father andmother to Boston in the middle of March, and, with childlike docility, sit downat a desk in the law-office of Horace Gray in Court Street, to begin again: "MyLords and Gentlemen"; dozing after a two o'clock dinner, or waking to discusspolitics with the future Justice. There, in ordinary times, he would haveremained for life, his attempt at education in treason having, like all therest, disastrously failed.

CHAPTER VIII. DIPLOMACY(1861)

HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced thatPresident Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his Minister toEngland. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf. As FriarBacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before: Time had passed!The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law prolonged its shadowyexistence for a week. The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished inApril, 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 ifthey 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 couldonly shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more intimatedthat he thought himself entitled to the services of one of his sons, and heindicated 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 rôle, he was lessridiculous than his betters. He was at least no public official, like thethousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded their jealousiesand intrigues on the President. He was not a vulture of carrion —patronage. He knew that his father's appointment was the result of GovernorSeward's personal friendship; he did not then know that Senator Sumner hadopposed it, or the reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but hecould have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest andmost decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams had chosen a privatesecretary far more unfit than his chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might wellbe, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of possiblecandidates, except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well as thisexperienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of fitness washis consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an exceedingly unsafe seat inLondon with no better support than Senator Sumner, at the head of the ForeignRelations Committee, was likely to give him. In the family history, its membershad taken many a dangerous risk, but never before had they taken one sodesperate.

The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the unfitness of anyone; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except perhaps Mr. Sumner, knewmore. The President and Secretary of State knew least of all. As Secretary ofLegation the Executive appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who hadapplied for the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known asCharley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping theMinister. The Assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hardworker, 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, buthe 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 notwhere to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by giving him lettersof introduction, but if Sumner wrote letters, it was not with the effect ofsmoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was engaged in smoothing either pathsor people. The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except inbeing called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolledseveral hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wildocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by thewaves of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks beforeBoston 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 orsounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the harbor to see his brotherCharles quartered in Fort Independence before being thrown, with a hundredthousand more, into the furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in afury of fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as thesolitary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamerNiagara at East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher ofeducation had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly broken; andthe young man had got to meet a hostile world without defence — orarms.

The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the world of itshumors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1, 1861, with much the sameoutfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if the Government had sent him toattack 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 therank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff oftrained secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal familyand 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 theparty, having for master only his father who never fretted, never dictated,never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy was that of theeighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered how his grandfather had sailedfrom Mount Wollaston in midwinter, 1778, on the little frigate Boston, takinghis eleven-year-old son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy ofadventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how JohnQuincy, 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 ofan adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought itnatural that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also, with atwenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that he left not a friendbehind him. No doubt he could depend on Seward, but on whom could Sewarddepend? 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 heasked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father andgrandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty view, andfor him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, intime, the young man realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal. Hemodestly thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer, and judged hisfather to be less fit than himself. For the first time America was posing asthe champion of legitimacy and order. Her representatives should know how toplay their rôle; they should wear the costume; but, in the missionattached to Mr. Adams in 1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was theprivate secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Courtand Parliament of Great Britain.

One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of the scholar andto turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they overlooked him, he couldhardly overlook them, since they stood with their whole weight on his body. Byway of teaching him quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in thesame ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M. Clayin the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education profited less than theprivate secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though possiblysome rivals. No young man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, fromsuch lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious that, for thenext 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 init. 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 knewsurprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never labored so hard tolearn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life.The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is nevereffaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already an adept when the partylanded at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a family ofearly Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena of lions, under theglad eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed hispeculiar Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen onlyevident resemblance in the Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged theceremony.

Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his son. What heor Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair of history and theirerrors concern historians. The errors of a private secretary concerned no onebut himself, and were a large part of his education. He thought on May 12 thathe was going to a friendly Government and people, true to the anti-slaveryprinciples which had been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years thechief effort of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England intointelligent coöperation with the objects and interests of America. Hisfather was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of success waspromising. The slave States had been the chief apparent obstacle to goodunderstanding. As for the private secretary himself, he was, like allBostonians, instinctively English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostileEngland. He supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slaveryfamily, to be welcome everywhere in the British Islands.

On May 13, he met the official announcement that England recognized thebelligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up bythe roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany. He had tolearn — the sooner the better — that his ideas were the reverse oftruth; that in May, 1861, no one in England — literally no one —doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly allwere glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerstonwho, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of adangerous power, but prudently held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slaveryhad disappeared. Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received therebel emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency before thearrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the British Government inadvance. The recognition of independence would then become an understoodpolicy; a matter of time and occasion.

Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this shock uponhis son produced only a dullness of comprehension — a sort of hazyinability to grasp the missile or realize the blow. Yet he realized that to hisfather it was likely to be fatal. The chances were great that the whole familywould turn round and go home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out inendless waves of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the longleisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation had his fatherthen 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 neverentered his mind that his father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet ina subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over severalgenerations, he could not certainly point out another who could have stood sucha shock without showing it. He passed this long day, and tedious journey toLondon, without once thinking of the possibility that his father might make amistake. Whatever the Minister thought, and certainly his thought was not lessactive than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His manner was thesame as ever; his mind and temper were as perfectly balanced; not a wordescaped; not a nerve twitched.

The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden could possiblyrecur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private secretary knew his ownbusiness, which was to imitate his father as closely as possible and hold histongue. Dumped thus into Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in themidst of a London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, hepreferred 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 itbetter, he would only have thought it worse.

Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond retrieving orcontesting. Socially, under the best of circ*mstances, a newcomer in Londonsociety needs years to establish a position, and Minister Adams had not a weekor 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 andSenator Sumner it was so; but for the Minister, on the spot, as he came torealize exactly where he stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams wasalways one of the luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what heescaped. The blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. LordJohn Russell had acted — had probably intended to act — kindly byhim 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 indoubt still — a little ashamed of themselves — and certain to waitthe 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 nottaken too seriously, tended to humor. The father's position in London was notaltogether bad; the son's was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations,Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies; theonly 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 quarrelwith Downing Street; and the British Government, well used to a liberalunpopularity 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 arenone 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 tofear. The son had no such compensations. Brought over in order to help hisfather, he could conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was clearthat 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 ofLondon was doubly desperate because his duties as private secretary requiredhim to know everybody and go with his father and mother everywhere they neededescort. He had no friend, or even enemy, to tell him to be patient. Had any onedone it, he would surely have broken out with the reply that patience was thelast resource of fools as well as of sages; if he was to help his father atall, 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 afootman, clerk, or a companion for the younger children.

He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be useful. As hecame to see the situation closer, he began to doubt whether secretaries weremeant to be useful. Wars were too common in diplomacy to disturb the habits ofthe diplomat. Most secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anythingbut useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son could go onlyas an invited guest, the most instructive conversation he ever heard among theyoung 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 onewanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get information. That was theaffair of their chiefs, who were also slow to assume work not specially orderedfrom their Courts. If the American Minister was in trouble to-day, the RussianAmbassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be in troubleto-morrow. It would all come in the day's work. There was nothing professionalin worry. Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were alwayspicking them up.

This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found rich veins ofjealousy running between every chief and his staff. His social education wasmore barren still, and more trying to his vanity. His little mistakes inetiquette or address made him writhe with torture. He never forgot the firsttwo or three social functions he attended: one an afternoon at Miss BurdettCoutts's in Stratton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure of a windowand hoped that no one noticed him; another was a garden-party given by the oldanti-slavery duch*ess Dowager of Sutherland at Chiswick, where the AmericanMinister and Mrs. Adams were kept in conversation by the old duch*ess till everyone else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to playingleap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty years Henry Adamscontinued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly enough, was always playingleap-frog. Still another nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the oldduch*ess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him andforced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility andgentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This mightseem 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 aprivate acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude when the story ofthe battle of Bull Run appeared in the Times. He felt only the wish tobe more private than ever, for Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than militarydisaster. 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 BullRun on them was almost strengthening. They no longer felt doubt. For the nextyear they went on only from week to week, ready to leave England at once, andnever assuming more than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting tosee 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 ofprivate secretary; and as about to begin, without further experiment, a finaleducation in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac where he would find most ofhis friends enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this ideauppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn, and began thewinter. Any winter in London is a severe trial; one's first winter is the mosttrying; 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 depressionin the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence of the Minister andMrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's telegram announcing the seizure ofMason and Slidell from a British mail-steamer was brought to the office. Allthree secretaries, public and private were there — nervous as wild beastsunder the long strain on their endurance — and all three, though theyknew it to be not merely their order of departure — not merely diplomaticrupture — 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 waswaiting only for its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.

They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with MoncktonMilnes 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. Themoment was for him the crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries itwas merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they were amilitary outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned position. At the moment ofsharpest suspense, the Prince Consort sickened and died. Portland Place atChristmas in a black fog was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the mosthardened Londoner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source ofcomfort denied to them — he should not be private secretary long.

He was mistaken — of course! He had been mistaken at every point ofhis education, and, on this point, he kept up the same mistake for nearly sevenyears longer, always deluded by the notion that the end was near. To him theTrent Affair was nothing but one of many affairs which he had to copy in adelicate round hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal tohim which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these, and to him themost 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 theGovernment, he had kept up his relations with the American press. He hadwritten pretty frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his lettersin the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with the twoor three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News , theStar, the weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give themnews 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 along account of his visit which his brother Charles had published in theBoston Courier. Unfortunately it was printed with his name, andinstantly came back upon him in the most crushing shape possible — thatof a long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily theTimes did not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, ofthe Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he instantlylearned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one of thetraditional busy-bodies of politics, who had haunted London since 1830, andwho, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them all they did notknow about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to tell Adams all he did notwant 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 twomore taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had not evena club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the Timesarticle; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and the world had otherpersons — such as President Lincoln, Secretary Seward, and CommodoreWilkes — for constant and favorite objects of ridicule. Henry Adamsescaped, but he never tried to be useful again. The Trent Affair dwarfedindividual effort. His education at least had reached the point of seeing itsown proportions. "Surtout point de zèle!" Zeal was too hazardous aprofession for a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, amongTrent Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters and meddled with nomore newspapers, but he was still young, and felt unkindly towards the editorof the London Times.

Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he felt little orno hope of repaying these attentions; but the Trent Affair passed like asnowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its surprise, still in place. Although theprivate secretary saw in this delay — which he attributed to Mr. Seward'sgood sense — no reason for changing his opinion about the views of theBritish Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his table, and goon copying papers, filing letters, and reading newspaper accounts of theincapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the brutality of Mr. Seward — or viceversa. The heavy months dragged on and winter slowly turned to springwithout 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. Duringthis tedious winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of sunshinewere 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 oldGeorge Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were strong allies. Joshua Bateswas devoted, and no one could be kinder than Thomas Baring, whose littledinners in Upper Grosvenor Street were certainly the best in London; but noneoffered a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first time, therefuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women towhom an intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams wasnot a very intelligent boy, and he had no knowledge of the world, but he knewenough to understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he mostrequired was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis, a dozen yearsolder than himself, could have good-naturedly trained a school of such, withoutan effort, and with infinite advantage to them. Near her he half forgot theanxieties of Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was inthis social polar winter, the single source of warmth and light.

Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such pressure, life in itcould be nothing but united. All the inmates made common cause, but this was noeducation. One lived, but was merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might beexactly true of the younger members of the household, it was not quite so withthe Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they gainedfoothold. For some reason partly connected with American sources, Britishsociety had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, andall the Republican leaders except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe ofAdamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of theBritish mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, thefourth generation could still not quite persuade itself that this new Britishprejudice was natural. The private secretary suspected that Americans in NewYork and Boston had something to do with it. The Copperhead was at home in PallMall. Naturally the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. HadLincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average Englishman wouldhave liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the unassailablesocial position of Minister Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose toignore him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set theexample. Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politically he wasnegligible; 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 vastdébâcle. All conceived that the Washington Government wouldsoon crumble, and that Minister Adams would vanish with the rest.

This situation made Minister Adams an exception among diplomats. Europeanrulers for the most part fought and treated as members of one family, andrarely had in view the possibility of total extinction; but the Governments andsociety of Europe, for a year at least, regarded the Washington Government asdead, and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better received thanmost nullities because he made no noise. Little by little, in private, societytook the habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomat, but rather as amember 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 andmanners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of getting behind astupidity gave the Minister every possible advantage over a European diplomat.Barriers of race, language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy helddiplomats apart in order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not holdMr. Adams apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society fewLondoners were so widely at home. None had such double personality andcorresponding double weight.

The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of the TrentAffair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes and William E. Forsternever afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes and Forster needed support and weregreatly relieved to be supported. They saw what the private secretary in Mayhad overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the American Ministermade a mistake, and, since his strength was theirs, they lost no time inexpressing to all the world their estimate of the Minister's character. Betweenthem the Minister was almost safe.

One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or Forster were themore valuable ally, since they were influences of different kinds. MoncktonMilnes was a social power in London, possibly greater than Londoners themselvesquite understood, for in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorantmade a large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes. Everybore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the "cool of theevening"; and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challengingridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit inLondon, and a maker of men — of a great many men. A word from him wentfar. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almostFalstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and highintelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses,which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogetherprose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too goodfor the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two orthree men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and hadthe ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social position of hisown that ended in a peerage, and he had a house in Upper Brook Street to whichmost clever people were exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts werefamous, and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerousto show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a strongcritic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of books, butabove all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved the contacts— perhaps the collisions — of society. Not even Henry Broughamdared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes was thegood-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 HenryReeve were quite secondary, but William E. Forster stood in a different class.Forster had nothing whatever to do with May Fair. Except in being aYorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no socialor political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; hewas a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defensewhich the Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear — the exteriorroughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature.Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker ancestry, but hewas 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. Puregold, without a trace of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took upthe Union cause and made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sureto do, partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partlybecause it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a new member, heneeded a field.

Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical sense and hispersonal energy soon established him in leadership, and made him a powerfulchampion, not so much for ornament as for work. With such a manager, thefriends of the Union in England began to take heart. Minister Adams had only tolook on as his true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action, and eventhe private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam of encouragement as hesaw the ring begin to clear for these burly Yorkshiremen to stand up in aprize-fight likely to be as brutal as ever England had known. Milnes andForster were not exactly light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardesthitters in England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle evenLord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.

In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and even inParliament they had no large following. They were classed as enemies of order,— anarchists, — and anarchists they were if hatred of the so-calledestablished 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 themilder and more persuasive; Bright was the more dangerous to approach; but theprivate secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see themtalk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the House.

With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer quitehelpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a little ashamed ofitself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and disposed to wait beforemoving again. Little by little, friends gathered about the Legation who were nofair-weather companions. The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury cliqueturned out to be an annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of Argyll wasone of the most valuable friends the Minister found, both politically andsocially, and the duch*ess was as true as her mother. Even the private secretaryshared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and never forgot diningone night at the Lodge, and finding himself after dinner engaged in instructingJohn Stuart Mill about the peculiar merits of an American protective system. Inspite of all the probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke'sclaret which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he insisted that itwas the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his point ofview. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in that respect theDuke would perhaps have done better; but the secretary had to admit that thoughat other periods of life he was sufficiently and even amply snubbed byEnglishmen, 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; notamong fashionable or socially powerful people, either men or women; althoughnot even this rule was quite exact, for Frederick Cavendish's kindness andintimate relations made Devonshire House almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley'sardent Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of Alderleywhose house was one of the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the futureArgyll, was always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to moreliterary intimacies. Sir Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first towhich young Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never ceasedfor near half a century, and then only when death stopped them. Sir Charles andLady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close alliance. By the timesociety began to reopen its doors after the death of the Prince Consort, eventhe private secretary occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no moreeffort of any kind, but silently waited the end. Whatever might be theadvantages of social relations to his father and mother, to him the wholebusiness 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 ashudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in his short lifehe was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could plainly discern inhistory, that man from the beginning had found his chief amusem*nt inbloodshed; but the ferocious joy of destruction at its best requires that oneshould kill what one hates, and young Adams neither hated nor wanted to killhis friends the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as to wipe England offthe earth. Never could any good come from that besotted race! He was feeblytrying to save his own life. Every day the British Government deliberatelycrowded him one step further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knewit; no one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent Affairshowed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of the rebel cruisersfrom Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes, the sign of hesitation, but theproof of their fixed intention to intervene. Lord Russell's replies to Mr.Adams's notes were discourteous in their indifference, and, to an irritableyoung private secretary of twenty-four, were insolent in their disregard oftruth. Whatever forms of phrase were usual in public to modify the harshness ofinvective, in private no political opponent in England, and few politicalfriends, hesitated to say brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This wasno great reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the intensityof the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief that Russell's form ofdefence covered intent to kill. Not for an instant did the Legation draw a freebreath. 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 dyingunder McClellan in the swamps about Richmond, or his enemies who were exultingin Pall Mall. He bore it as well as he could till midsummer, but, when thestory of the second Bull Run appeared, he could bear it no longer, and after asleepless night, walking up and down his room without reflecting that hisfather was beneath him, he announced at breakfast his intention to go home intothe army. His mother seemed to be less impressed by the announcement than bythe walking over her head, which was so unlike her as to surprise her son. Hisfather, too, received the announcement quietly. No doubt they expected it, andhad taken their measures in advance. In those days, parents got used to allsorts of announcements from their children. Mr. Adams took his son's defectionas quietly as he took Bull Run; but his son never got the chance to go. Hefound obstacles constantly rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brotherCharles, who was himself in the Army of the Potomac, and whose opinion hadalways the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with delaying action; buthe felt, of his own accord, that if he deserted his post in London, and foundthe Capuan comforts he expected in Virginia where he would have only bullets towound him, he would never forgive himself for leaving his father and motheralone to be devoured by the wild beasts of the British amphitheatre. Thisreflection might not have stopped him, but his father's suggestion wasdecisive. The Minister pointed out that it was too late for him to take part inthe actual campaign, and that long before next spring they would all go hometogether.

The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel cruisers to missthe point of this argument, so he sat down again to copy some more. ConsulDudley at Liverpool provided a continuous supply. Properly, the affidavits wereno business of the private secretary, but practically the private secretary dida second secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would save Mr. Sewardthe trouble of sending more secretaries of his own selection to help theMinister. The work was nothing, and no one ever complained of it; not evenMoran, the Secretary of Legation after the departure of Charley Wilson, thoughhe might sit up all night to copy. Not the work, but the play exhausted. Theeffort of facing a hostile society was bad enough, but that of facing friendswas worse. After terrific disasters like the seven days before Richmond and thesecond 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 isexasperated, furious, bitter, and choking with tears over the blunders andincapacity of one's Government. If one shed tears, they must be shed on one'spillow. Least of all, must one throw extra strain on the Minister, who had allhe could carry without being fretted in his family. One must read one'sTimes every morning over one's muffin without reading aloud —"Another disastrous Federal Defeat"; and one might not even indulge in harmlessprofanity. Self-restraint among friends required much more effort than keepinga quiet face before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day theprivate secretary smiled, when standing with the crowd in the throne-room whilethe endless procession made bows to the royal family, at hearing, behind hisshoulder, one Cabinet Minister remark gaily to another: "So the Federals havegot another licking!" The point of the remark was its truth. Even a privatesecretary had learned to control his tones and guard his features and betray nojoy over the "lickings" of an enemy — in the enemy's presence.

London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial; it created anightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Behind this itplaced another demon, if possible more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. Inregard to these two men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless;explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust itself. One's bestfriends were as unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln'sbrutality and Seward's ferocity became a dogma of popular faith. The last timeHenry Adams saw Thackeray, before his sudden death at Christmas in 1863, was inentering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening reception. Thackeray waspulling on his coat downstairs, laughing because, in his usual blind way, hehad stumbled into the wrong house and not found it out till he shook hands withold 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 andpainted as Ethel Newcome. Though he had never quite forgiven her marriage, hiswarmth of feeling revived when he heard that she had died of consumption atColumbia while her parents and sister were refused permission to pass throughthe lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice trembled and hiseyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln and his hirelings wasnotorious. He never doubted that the Federals made a business of harrowing thetenderest feelings of women — particularly of women — in order topunish their opponents. On quite insufficient evidence he burst into violentreproach. Had Adams carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach wasunjust, he would have gained nothing by showing them. At that moment Thackeray,and all London society with him, needed the nervous relief of expressingemotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not what they said he — was what werethey?

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 diatribeswould give his true measure, and this measure would be a low one, for Carlylewas 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 tosadden his followers before it reacts on himself. Demolition of one's idols ispainful, and Carlyle had been an idol. Doubts cast on his stature spread farinto 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 hisscholars and school?

Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to complain thanevery other diplomatist has had, in like conditions, but one's few friends insociety were mere ornament. The Legation could not dream of contesting socialcontrol. The best they could do was to escape mortification, and by this timetheir relations were good enough to save the Minister's family from thatannoyance. Now and then, the fact could not be wholly disguised that some onehad refused to meet — or to receive — the Minister; but never anopen 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 knewhis business fretted at what every diplomat — and none more commonly thanthe English — had to expect; therefore Henry Adams, though not a diplomatand wholly unprotected, went his way peacefully enough, seeing clearly thatsociety cared little to make his acquaintance, but seeing also no reason whysociety should discover charms in him of which he was himself unconscious. Hewent where he was asked; he was always courteously received; he was, on thewhole, better treated than at Washington; and he held his tongue.

For a thousand reasons, the best diplomatic house in London was LordPalmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the worst. Of neither hostcould a private secretary expect to know anything. He might as well haveexpected to know the Grand Lama. Personally Lord Palmerston was the last man inLondon that a cautious private secretary wanted to know. Other Prime Ministersmay perhaps have lived who inspired among diplomatists as much distrust asPalmerston, and yet between Palmerston's word and Russell's word, one hesitatedto decide, and gave years of education to deciding, whether either could betrusted, 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 wordsused by Lord John Russell, and both the Queen and Russell said in substanceonly what Cobden and Bright said in private. Every diplomatist agreed withthem, yet the diplomatic standard of trust seemed to be other than theparliamentarian No professional diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Wordswere with them forms of expression which varied with individuals, but falsehoodwas more or less necessary to all. The worst liars were the candid. Whatdiplomatists wanted to know was the motive that lay beyond the expression. Inthe case of Palmerston they were unanimous in warning new colleagues that theymight expect to be sacrificed by him to any momentary personal object. Everynew Minister or Ambassador at the Court of St. James received this preliminarylesson that he must, if possible, keep out of Palmerston's reach. The rule wasnot secret or merely diplomatic. The Queen herself had emphatically expressedthe same opinion officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain, he would godown 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 equallymischievous — not even the Queen — for, as old Baron Brunnowdescribed him: "C'est une peau de rhinocère!" Having gained his point, helaughed, and his public laughed with him, for the usual British — orAmerican — public likes to be amused, and thought it very amusing to seethese beribboned and bestarred foreigners caught and tossed and gored on thehorns 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 oftraps. Palmerston was believed to lay traps. He was the enfantterrible of the British Government. On the other hand, Lady Palmerston wasbelieved to be good and loyal. All the diplomats and their wives seemed tothink so, and took their troubles to her, believing that she would try to helpthem. For this reason among others, her evenings at home — SaturdayReviews, they were called — had great vogue. An ignorant young Americancould not be expected to explain it. Cambridge House was no better forentertaining than a score of others. Lady Palmerston was no longer young orhandsome, and could hardly at any age have been vivacious. The people one metthere were never smart and seldom young; they were largely diplomatic, anddiplomats are commonly dull; they were largely political, and politiciansrarely decorate or beautify an evening party; they were sprinkled with literarypeople, who are notoriously unfashionable; the women were of course ill-dressedand middle-aged; the men looked mostly bored or out of place; yet, beyond adoubt, Cambridge House was the best, and perhaps the only political house inLondon, and its success was due to Lady Palmerston, who never seemed to make aneffort beyond a friendly recognition. As a lesson in social education,Cambridge House gave much subject for thought. First or last, one was to knowdozens of statesmen more powerful and more agreeable than Lord Palmerston;dozens of ladies more beautiful and more painstaking than Lady Palmerston; butno political house so successful as Cambridge House. The world never explainssuch riddles. The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was "sympathique."

The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or tolerated, without afurther effort to recognize their existence, but they were pleased becauserarely tolerated anywhere else, and there they could at least stand in a cornerand look at a bishop or even a duke. This was the social diversion of youngAdams. No one knew him — not even the lackeys. The last Saturday eveninghe ever attended, he gave his name as usual at the foot of the staircase, andwas rather disturbed to hear it shouted up as "Mr. Handrew Hadams!" He tried tocorrect it, and the footman shouted more loudly: "Mr. Hanthony Hadams!" Withsome 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 LordPalmerston who certainly knew no better.

Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as he stood at thedoor 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 ejacul*tion, and all were in the sametone, as though he meant to say: "Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes!" by way ofassurance. It was a laugh of 1810 and the Congress of Vienna. Adams would havemuch liked to stop a moment and ask whether William Pitt and the Duke ofWellington had laughed so; but young men attached to foreign Ministers asked noquestions at all of Palmerston and their chiefs asked as few as possible. Onemade the usual bow and received the usual glance of civility; then passed on toLady Palmerston, who was always kind in manner, but who wasted no remarks; andso to Lady Jocelyn with her daughter, who commonly had something friendly tosay; then went through the diplomatic corps, Brunnow, Musurus, Azeglio,Apponyi, Van de Weyer, Bille, Tricoupi, and the rest, finally dropping into thehands of some literary accident as strange there as one's self. The routinevaried little. There was no attempt at entertainment. Except for the desperateisolation of these two first seasons, even secretaries would have found theeffort almost as mechanical as a levee at St. James's Palace.

Lord Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary; he was Prime Minister, but heloved foreign affairs and could no more resist scoring a point in diplomacythan in whist. Ministers of foreign powers, knowing his habits, tried to holdhim at arms'-length, and, to do this, were obliged to court the actual ForeignSecretary, Lord John Russell, who, on July 30, 1861, was called up to the Houseof Lords as an earl. By some process of personal affiliation, Minister Adamssucceeded in persuading himself that he could trust Lord Russell more safelythan Lord Palmerston. His son, being young and ill-balanced in temper, thoughtthere was nothing to choose. Englishmen saw little difference between them, andAmericans 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 æons.

Just as Brunnow predicted, Lord Palmerston made his rush at last, asunexpected as always, and more furiously than though still a private secretaryof twenty-four. Only a man who had been young with the battle of Trafalgarcould be fresh and jaunty to that point, but Minister Adams was not in aposition to sympathize with octogenarian youth and found himself in a danger ascritical as that of his numerous predecessors. It was late one after noon inJune, 1862, as the private secretary returned, with the Minister, from somesocial function, that he saw his father pick up a note from his desk and readit in silence. Then he said curtly: "Palmerston wants a quarrel!" This was thepoint of the incident as he felt it. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; he must notbe gratified; he must be stopped. The matter of quarrel was General Butler'sfamous woman-order at New Orleans, but the motive was the belief in PresidentLincoln's brutality that had taken such deep root in the British mind. KnowingPalmerston's habits, the Minister took for granted that he meant to score adiplomatic point by producing this note in the House of Commons. If he did thisat once, the Minister was lost; the quarrel was made; and one new victim toPalmerston's passion for popularity was sacrificed.

The moment was nervous — as far as the private secretary knew, quitethe most critical moment in the records of American diplomacy — but thestory belongs to history, not to education, and can be read there by any onewho cares to read it. As a part of Henry Adams's education it had a valuedistinct from history. That his father succeeded in muzzling Palmerston withouta public scandal, was well enough for the Minister, but was not enough for aprivate secretary who liked going to Cambridge House, and was puzzled toreconcile contradictions. That Palmerston had wanted a quarrel was obvious;why, then, did he submit so tamely to being made the victim of the quarrel? Thecorrespondence that followed his note was conducted feebly on his side, and heallowed the United States Minister to close it by a refusal to receive furthercommunications from him except through Lord Russell. The step was excessivelystrong, for it broke off private relations as well as public, and cost even theprivate secretary his invitations to Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried herbest, but the two ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do withAmerican 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; buthe could conceive no other way of protecting his Government, not to speak ofhimself, than to force Lord Russell to interpose. He believed that Palmerston'ssubmission 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. Palmerstonwanted a quarrel; the motive seemed evident; yet when the quarrel was made, hebacked out of it; for some reason it seemed that he did not want it — atleast, not then. He never showed resentment against Mr. Adams at the time orafterwards. He never began another quarrel. Incredible as it seemed, he behavedlike a well-bred gentleman who felt himself in the wrong. Possibly this changemay have been due to Lord Russell's remonstrances, but the private secretarywould have felt his education in politics more complete had he ever finallymade up his mind whether Palmerston was more angry with General Butler, or moreannoyed at himself, for committing what was in both cases an unpardonablebêtise.

At the time, the question was hardly raised, for no one doubted Palmerston'sattitude or his plans. The season was near its end, and Cambridge House wassoon closed. The Legation had troubles enough without caring to publish more.The tide of English feeling ran so violently against it that one could onlywait to see whether General McClellan would bring it relief. The year 1862 wasa dark spot in Henry Adams's life, and the education it gave was mostly onethat he gladly forgot. As far as he was aware, he made no friends; he couldhardly make enemies; yet towards the close of the year he was flattered by aninvitation from Monckton Milnes to Fryston, and it was one of many acts ofcharity towards the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes made it hisbusiness to be kind. Other people criticised him for his manner of doing it,but never imitated him. Naturally, a dispirited, disheartened private secretarywas exceedingly grateful, and never forgot the kindness, but it was chiefly aseducation that this first country visit had value. Commonly, country visits aremuch alike, but Monckton Milnes was never like anybody, and his country partiesserved his purpose of mixing strange elements. Fryston was one of a class ofhouses that no one sought for its natural beauties, and the winter mists ofYorkshire were rather more evident for the absence of the hostess on account ofthem, so that the singular guests whom Milnes collected to enliven his Decemberhad 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 theremaining four, Milnes was the oldest, and perhaps the sanest in spite of hissuperficial eccentricities, for Yorkshire sanity was true to a standard of itsown, if not to other conventions; yet even Milnes startled a young Americanwhose Boston and Washington mind was still fresh. He would not have beenstartled by the hard-drinking, horse-racing Yorkshireman of whom he had read inbooks; but Milnes required a knowledge of society and literature that onlyhimself possessed, if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had soughtcontact with everybody and everything that Europe could offer. He knew it allfrom 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 Adamsto his room to dress for dinner, he stayed a moment to say a word about thisguest, whom he called Stirling of Keir. His sketch closed with the hint thatStirling was violent only on one point — hatred of Napoleon III. On thatpoint, Adams was himself sensitive, which led him to wonder how bad the Scotchgentleman might be. The third was a man of thirty or thereabouts, whom Adamshad already met at Lady Palmerston's carrying his arm in a sling. His figureand bearing were sympathetic — almost pathetic — with a certaingrave and gentle charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He wasLawrence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in the fanatics'attack on the British Legation. He seemed exceptionally sane and peculiarlysuited for country houses, where every man would enjoy his company, and everywoman would adore him. He had not then published "Piccadilly"; perhaps he waswriting it; while, like all the young men about the Foreign Office, hecontributed to The Owl.

The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year olderthan Adams himself. He resembled in action — and in this trait, wasremotely followed, a generation later, by another famous young man, RobertLouis Stevenson — a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked,quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humor, quite unlike anyEnglish lark or nightingale. One could hardly call him a crimson macaw amongowls, and yet no ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr.Algernon Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always unearthingnew coins and trying to give them currency. He had unearthed Henry Adams whoknew himself to be worthless and not current. When Milnes lingered a moment inAdams's room to add that Swinburne had written some poetry, not yet published,of really extraordinary merit, Adams only wondered what more Milnes woulddiscover, 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 clubmanners of ladyless dinner-tables, easy and formal at the same time.Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his dramatic story simply, and fromhim the talk drifted off into other channels, until Milnes thought it time tobring 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 moreastonished. For once, too, he felt at ease, for the others were no lessastonished than himself, and their astonishment grew apace. For the rest of theevening Swinburne figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue onlyfreer, for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking wasforbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the kitchen; butMonckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his guests smoke in Adams'sbedroom, since Adams was an American-German barbarian ignorant of manners; andthere after dinner all sat — or lay — till far into the night,listening to the rush of Swinburne's talk. In a long experience, before orafter, no one ever approached it; yet one had heard accounts of the besttalking 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-worldbefore him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric,astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more hewas, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memoryand knowledge of literature, classic, mediæval, and modern; his faculty ofreciting 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 whatto 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 wassingular that his most appreciative listener should have been the author onlyof pretty verses like "We wandered by the brook-side," and "She seemed to thosethat saw them meet"; and who never cared to write in any other tone; but Milnestook everything into his sympathies, including Americans like young Adams whosestandards were stiffest of all, while Swinburne, though millions of ages farfrom them, united them by his humor even more than by his poetry. The story ofhis first day as a member of Professor Stubbs's household was professionallyclever farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who could write a Greek ode ora Proven‡al chanson as easily as an English quatrain.

Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir wanted to takewith him to his chamber a copy of "Queen Rosamund," the only volume Swinburnehad then published, which was on the library table, and Adams offered to lighthim down with his solitary bedroom candle. All the way, Stirling wasejacul*ting explosions of wonder, until at length, at the foot of the stairsand at the climax of his imagination, he paused, and burst out: "He's a crossbetween the devil and the Duke of Argyll!"

To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious critic shouldhave known both, and Henry Adams knew only one — at least in person— but he understood that to a Scotchman the likeness meant somethingquite portentous, beyond English experience, supernatural, and what the Frenchcall moyenâgeux, or mediæval with a grotesque turn. ThatStirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatlycomforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imaginethat Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and pork-pies ofLondon, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia. The idea that one hasactually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry atlast.

Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius never was indoubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its uttermost flights, was nevermoyenâgeux. One felt the horror of Longfellow and Emerson, thedoubts of Lowell and the humor of Holmes, at the wild Walpurgis-night ofSwinburne's talk. What could a shy young private secretary do about it?Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friendin Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousingin him even an interest. Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne thanhe 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 therethe limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one hadnothing 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 ofstandards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise for foreigners; itrequires extraordinary knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear toappreciate even the recitation of French verse; but unless a poet has both, helacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he neverlistened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty inFrench verse; but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried toevade Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred deMusset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was unequal; he did notsustain himself on the wing.

Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to sustain himselfon the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo; but his education as well as hisear was at fault, and he succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter SavageLandor. In truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor'sEnglish the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's failure wasequally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo andLandor bored him. Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo norLandor was lost.

The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew hisinferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified by thedullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was no companion forSwinburne; probably he could be only an annoyance; no number of centuries couldever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet heoften wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth thepoet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would havebeen only too happy to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptanceof any one. Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England itbecame absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendors of Hugo and Landor,was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in personal contactwith them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the Geneva Conference, freshfrom Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he had made on Hugo: "I was showninto a large room," he said, "with women and men seated in chairs against thewalls, and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voicesolemnly, and uttered the words: 'Quant à moi, je crois en Dieu!' Silencefollowed. Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: 'Chose sublime! unDieu qui croft en Dieu!"'

With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the actors had notthe instinct of the drama; and yet even a private secretary was not whollywanting in instinct. As soon as he reached town he hurried to Pickering's for acopy 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 mettheir 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 asMilnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the poet. Unfortunatelyit was worthless.

The three young men returned to London, and each went his own way. Adams'sinterest 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 Milnessummoned his whole array of Frystonians to support him in presiding at thedinner 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; allthe world knew and loved him; but he too disappeared in the way that all theworld knows. Stirling of Keir, after one or two efforts, passed also fromAdams's vision into Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. The only record of hiswonderful visit to Fryston may perhaps exist still in the registers of the St.James's Club, for immediately afterwards Milnes proposed Henry Adams formembership, and unless his memory erred, the nomination was seconded byTricoupi and endorsed by Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was alittle singular for variety, but on the whole it suggested that the privatesecretary was getting on.

CHAPTER X. POLITICAL MORALITY(1862)

ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquiredwhether Minister Adams would like the place of Assistant Secretary for his son.It was the first — and last — office ever offered him, if indeed hecould claim what was offered in fact to his father. To them both, the changeseemed useless. Any young man could make some sort of Assistant Secretary; onlyone, just at that moment, could make an Assistant Son. More than half hisduties were domestic; they sometimes required long absences; they alwaysrequired independence of the Government service. His position was abnormal. TheBritish Government by courtesy allowed the son to go to Court as Attaché,though he was never attached, and after five or six years' toleration, thedecision was declared irregular. In the Legation, as private secretary, he wasliable to do Secretary's work. In society, when official, he was attached tothe 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 allexcept that of young man. Gradually he aspired to become a gentleman; just amember of society like the rest. The position was irregular; at that time manypositions were irregular; yet it lent itself to a sort of irregular educationthat 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 agreat change in Secretary Seward's management of foreign affairs. Under thestimulus of danger, he too got education. He felt, at last, that his officialrepresentatives abroad needed support. Officially he could give them nothingbut despatches, which were of no great value to any one; and at best the mereweight of an office had little to do with the public. Governments were made todeal with Governments, not with private individuals or with the opinions offoreign society. In order to affect European opinion, the weight of Americanopinion had to be brought to bear personally, and had to be backed by theweight of American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously to work and sent overevery important American on whom he could lay his hands. All came to theLegation 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 theoutsider, the work seemed wasted and the "influential classes" more induratedwith prejudice than ever. The waste was only apparent; the work all told in theend, and meanwhile it helped education.

Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the Minister and tocoöperate with him. The most interesting of these was Thurlow Weed, whocame 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, andbegan, to the amused astonishment of the secretaries, by making what theLegation had learned to accept as the invariable mistake of every amateurdiplomat; he wrote letters to the London Times. Mistake or not, Mr.Weed soon got into his hands the threads of management, and did quietly andsmoothly all that was to be done. With his work the private secretary had noconnection; it was he that interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete Americaneducation in himself. His mind was naturally strong and beautifully balanced;his temper never seemed ruffled; his manners were carefully perfect in thestyle of benevolent simplicity, the tradition of Benjamin Franklin. He was themodel of political management and patient address; but the trait that excitedenthusiasm in a private secretary was his faculty of irresistibly conqueringconfidence. Of all flowers in the garden of education, confidence was becomingthe rarest; but before Mr. Weed went away, young Adams followed him about notonly 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, althoughAdams never met another such master, or any one who approached him; nor was theconfidence due to any display of professions, either moral or social, by Mr.Weed. The trait that astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparentunselfishness. Never, in any man who wielded such power, did Adams meetanything like it. The effect of power and publicity on all men is theaggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim'ssympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes;one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotismit stimulates; and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a rare immune. Hethought apparently not of himself, but of the person he was talking with. Heheld 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 raresuperiority to the politicians he controlled, a trait that private secretariesnever 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 ofMr. Weed's experience, he found the study still more fascinating. Managementwas an instinct with Mr. Weed; an object to be pursued for its own sake, as oneplays 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 playedthem 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 Albanylobby, the private secretary made bold to ask him outright: "Then, Mr. Weed, doyou 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 thinkingso."

This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral sense, asthough Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions !" As he grew older he ratherthought that Mr. Weed looked on it as a question of how the game should beplayed. Young men most needed experience. They could not play well if theytrusted to a general rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles hadbetter be left aside; values were enough. Adams knew that he could never learnto play politics in so masterly a fashion as this: his education and hisnervous system equally forbade it, although he admired all the more theimpersonal faculty of the political master who could thus efface himself andhis temper in the game. He noticed that most of the greatest politicians inhistory had seemed to regard men as counters. The lesson was the moreinteresting because another famous New Yorker came over at the same time wholiked to discuss the same problem. Secretary Seward sent William M. Evarts toLondon as law counsel, and Henry began an acquaintance with Mr. Evarts thatsoon became intimate. Evarts was as individual as Weed was impersonal; likemost men, he cared little for the game, or how it was played, and much for thestakes, but he played it in a large and liberal way, like Daniel Webster, "agreat advocate employed in politics." Evarts was also an economist of morals,but with him the question was rather how much morality one could afford. "Theworld can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." Onesought education in order to adjust the dose.

The teachings of Weed and Evarts were practical, and the private secretary'slife turned on their value. England's power of absorbing truth was small.Englishmen, such as Palmerston, Russell, Bethell, and the society representedby the Times and Morning Post , as well as the Toriesrepresented by Disraeli, Lord Robert Cecil, and the Standard, offereda study in education that sickened a young student with anxiety. He had begun— contrary to Mr. Weed's advice — by taking their bad faith forgranted. Was he wrong? To settle this point became the main object of thediplomatic education so laboriously pursued, at a cost already stupendous, andpromising to become ruinous. Life changed front, according as one thought one'sself dealing with honest men or with rogues.

Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of dishonesty. Thereasons that satisfied him had not altogether satisfied his father, and ofcourse 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, andthere the private secretary's diplomatic education began. The recognition ofbelligerency, the management of the Declaration of Paris, the Trent Affair, allstrengthened the belief that Lord Russell had started in May, 1861, with theassumption that the Confederacy was established; every step he had taken provedhis persistence in the same idea; he never would consent to put obstacles inthe way of recognition; and he was waiting only for the proper moment tointerpose. All these points seemed so fixed — so self-evident —that no one in the Legation would have doubted or even discussed them exceptthat Lord Russell obstinately denied the whole charge, and persisted inassuring Minister Adams of his honest and impartial neutrality.

With the insolence of youth and zeal, Henry Adams jumped at once to theconclusion that Earl Russell — like other statesmen — lied; and,although the Minister thought differently, he had to act as though Russell werefalse. Month by month the demonstration followed its mathematical stages; oneof the most perfect educational courses in politics and diplomacy that a youngman ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly tutors in the world wereprovided for him at public expense — Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, LordWestbury, 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 professorsemployed by the American Government; but there was only one student to profitby this immense staff of teachers. The private secretary alone soughteducation.

To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught. Never wasdemonstration more tangled. Hegel's metaphysical doctrine of the identity ofopposites was simpler and easier to understand. Yet the stages of demonstrationwere clear. They began in June, 1862, after the escape of one rebel cruiser, bythe remonstrances of the Minister against the escape of "No. 290," which wasimminent. Lord Russell declined to act on the evidence. New evidence was sentin every few days, and with it, on July 24, was included Collier's legalopinion: "It appears difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement ofthe Foreign Enlistment Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion, is littlebetter than a dead letter." Such language implied almost a charge of collusionwith the rebel agents — an intent to aid the Confederacy. In spite of thewarning, 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'sadvice, could one afford to trust human nature in politics ? History said not.Sir Robert Collier seemed to hold that Law agreed with History. For educationthe point was vital. If one could not trust a dozen of the most respectedprivate characters in the world, composing the Queen's Ministry, one couldtrust 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 theblame on the law officers. This was a politician's practice, and the lawyersoverruled it. Then he pleaded guilty to criminal negligence, and said in his"Recollections":— "I assent entirely to the opinion of the Lord ChiefJustice of England that the Alabama ought to have been detained during the fourdays I was waiting for the opinion of the law officers. But I think that thefault was not that of the commissioners of customs, it was my fault asSecretary of State for Foreign Affairs." This concession brought all parties oncommon ground. Of course it was his fault! The true issue lay not in thequestion of his fault, but of his intent. To a young man, getting an educationin politics, there could be no sense in history unless a constant course offaults implied a constant motive.

For his father the question was not so abstruse; it was a practical matterof 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. Hisson 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 thefacts. Minister Adams died without knowing them. Henry Adams was an older manthan his father in 1862, before he learned a part of them. The most curiousfact, even then, was that Russell believed in his own good faith and thatArgyll 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 enjoyedthrowing stones at Lord Palmerston, while the other half delighted in flingingmud at Earl Russell, but every one of every party united in pelting Westburywith every missile at hand. The private secretary had no doubts about him, forhe never professed to be moral. He was the head and heart of the whole rebelcontention, and his opinions on neutrality were as clear as they were onmorality. 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 wenthe affirmed the law that in politics no man should be trusted.

Russell alone insisted on his honesty of intention and persuaded both theDuke and the Minister to believe him. Every one in the Legation accepted hisassurances as the only assertions they could venture to trust. They knew heexpected the rebels to win in the end, but they believed he would not activelyinterpose to decide it. On that — on nothing else — they restedtheir frail hopes of remaining a day longer in England. Minister Adams remainedsix years longer in England; then returned to America to lead a busy life tillhe died in 1886 still holding the same faith in Earl Russell, who had died in1878. In 1889, Spencer Walpole published the official life of Earl Russell, andtold a part of the story which had never been known to the Minister and whichastounded his son, who burned with curiosity to know what his father would havesaid 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 disastersbefore Richmond and at the second Bull Run, August 29-30, followed by Lee'sinvasion of Maryland, September 7, the news of which, arriving in England onSeptember 14, roused the natural idea that the crisis was at hand. The nextnews was expected by the Confederates to announce the fall of Washington orBaltimore. Palmerston instantly, September 14, wrote to Russell: "If thisshould happen, would it not be time for us to consider whether in such a stateof things England and France might not address the contending parties andrecommend an arrangement on the basis of separation?"

This letter, quite in the line of Palmerston's supposed opinions, would havesurprised no one, if it had been communicated to the Legation; and indeed, ifLee had captured Washington, no one could have blamed Palmerston for offeringintervention. Not Palmerston's letter but Russell's reply, merited the painfulattention 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 itis driven back to Washington and has made no progress in subduing the insurgentStates. Such being the case, I agree with you that the time is come foroffering mediation to the United States Government with a view to therecognition of the independence of the Confederates. I agree further that incase of failure, we ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States as anindependent State. For the purpose of taking so important a step, I think wemust have a meeting of the Cabinet. The 23d or 30th would suit me for themeeting.

We ought then, if we agree on such a step, to propose it first toFrance, 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 moretroops there, but by concentrating those we have in a few defensible postsbefore the winter sets in. . . .

Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical difficulty ineducation which a mere student could never overcome; a difficulty not intheory, or knowledge, or even want of experience, but in the sheer chaos ofhuman nature. Lord Russell's course had been consistent from the first, and hadall the look of rigid determination to recognize the Southern Confederacy "witha view" to breaking up the Union. His letter of September 17 hung directly onhis encouragement of the Alabama and his protection of the rebel navy; whilethe 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 forgranted the deliberate dishonesty of three famous men: Palmerston, Russell, andGladstone. This dishonesty, as concerned Russell, was denied by Russellhimself, and disbelieved by Argyll, Forster, and most of America's friends inEngland, as well as by Minister Adams. What the Minister would have thought hadhe 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 thoughtof Palmerston's answer, dated September 23: —

. . . It is evident that a great conflict is taking place to thenorthwest of Washington, and its issue must have a great effect on the state ofaffairs. If the Federals sustain a great defeat, they may be at once ready formediation, and the iron should be struck while it is hot. If, on the otherhand, they should have the best of it, we may wait a while and see what mayfollow. . .

The rôles were reversed. Russell wrote what was expected fromPalmerston, or even more violently; while Palmerston wrote what was expectedfrom Russell, or even more temperately. The private secretary's view had beenaltogether wrong, which would not have much surprised even him, but he wouldhave been greatly astonished to learn that the most confidential associates ofthese men knew little more about their intentions than was known in theLegation. The most trusted member of the Cabinet was Lord Granville, and to himRussell next wrote. Granville replied at once decidedly opposing recognition ofthe Confederacy, and Russell sent the reply to Palmerston, who returned itOctober 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 Stanleyof Alderley, a letter published forty years afterwards in Granville's "Life"(I, 442) to the private secretary altogether the most curious and instructiverelic of the whole lesson in politics: —

. . . I have written to Johnny my reasons for thinking it decidedlypremature. I, however, suspect you will settle to do so. Pam., Johnny, andGladstone would be in favor of it, and probably Newcastle. I do not know aboutthe others. It appears to me a great mistake. . . .

Out of a Cabinet of a dozen members, Granville, the best informed of themall, could pick only three who would favor recognition. Even a privatesecretary thought he knew as much as this, or more. Ignorance was not confinedto 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 orconspiracy. If any existed, it was confined to Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone,and perhaps Newcastle. In truth, the Legation knew, then, all that was to beknown, 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 Virginiahad reached London. The Emancipation Proclamation arrived. Had the privatesecretary known all that Granville or Palmerston knew, he would surely havethought the danger past, at least for a time, and any man of common sense wouldhave told him to stop worrying over phantoms. This healthy lesson would havebeen worth much for practical education, but it was quite upset by the suddenrush 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, thenChancellor of the Exchequer. If, in the domain of the world's politics, onepoint was fixed, one value ascertained, one element serious, it was the BritishExchequer; and if one man lived who could be certainly counted as sane byoverwhelming interest, it was the man who had in charge the finances ofEngland. If education had the smallest value, it should have shown its force inGladstone, who was educated beyond all record of English training. From him, iffrom no one else, the poor student could safely learn.

Here is what he learned! Palmerston notified Gladstone, September 24, of theproposed intervention: "If I am not mistaken, you would be inclined to approvesuch a course." Gladstone replied the next day: "He was glad to learn what thePrime Minister had told him; and for two reasons especially he desired that theproceedings should be prompt: the first was the rapid progress of the Southernarms and the extension of the area of Southern feeling; the second was the riskof violent impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire such as would prejudicethe dignity and disinterestedness of the proffered mediation."

Had the puzzled student seen this letter, he must have concluded from itthat the best educated statesman England ever produced did not know what he wastalking about, an assumption which all the world would think quite inadmissiblefrom a private secretary — but this was a trifle. Gladstone having thusarranged, with Palmerston and Russell, for intervention in the American war,reflected on the subject for a fortnight from September 25 to October 7, whenhe was to speak on the occasion of a great dinner at Newcastle. He decided toannounce the Government's policy with all the force his personal and officialauthority could give it. This decision was no sudden impulse; it was the resultof deep reflection pursued to the last moment. On the morning of October 7, heentered in his diary: "Reflected further on what I should say about Lancashireand America, for both these subjects are critical." That evening at dinner, asthe mature fruit of his long study, he deliberately pronounced the famousphrase: —

. . . We know quite well that the people of the Northern Stateshave not yet drunk of the cup — they are still trying to hold it far fromtheir lips — which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless mustdrink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or againstthe South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of theSouth have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they havemade, what is more than either, they have made a nation. . . .

Looking back, forty years afterwards, on this episode, one asked one's selfpainfully whet sort of a lesson a young man should have drawn, for the purposesof his education, from this world-famous teaching of a very great master. Inthe heat of passion at the moment, one drew some harsh moral conclusions: Werethey incorrect? Posed bluntly as rules of conduct, they led to the worstpossible practices. As morals, one could detect no shade of difference betweenGladstone and Napoleon except to the advantage of Napoleon. The privatesecretary saw none; he accepted the teacher in that sense; he took his lessonof political morality as learned, his notice to quit as duly served, andsupposed his education to be finished.

Every one thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil. Any intelligenteducation ought to end when it is complete. One would then feel fewerhesitations and would handle a surer world. The old-fashioned logical dramarequired unity and sense; the actual drama is a pointless puzzle, without evenan intrigue. When the curtain fell on Gladstone's speech, any student had theright to suppose the drama ended; none could have affirmed that it was about tobegin; that one's painful lesson was thrown away.

Even after forty years, most people would refuse to believe it; they wouldstill insist that Gladstone, Russell, and Palmerston were true villains ofmelodrama. The evidence against Gladstone in special seemed overwhelming. Theword "must" can never be used by a responsible Minister of one Governmenttowards another, as Gladstone used it. No one knew so well as he that he andhis 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 ofthe Exchequer he was the Minister most interested in knowing that Palmerston,Russell, and himself were banded together by mutual pledge to make theConfederacy a nation the next week, and that the Southern leaders had as yet nohope of "making a nation" but in them. Such thoughts occurred to every one atthe moment and time only added to their force. Never in the history ofpolitical turpitude had any brigand of modern civilization offered a worseexample. The proof of it was that it outraged even Palmerston, who immediatelyput 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 ofletting his hand be forced by Gladstone.

Russell did nothing of the kind; if he agreed with Palmerston, he followedGladstone. Although he had just created a new evangel of non-intervention forItaly, and preached it like an apostle, he preached the gospel of interventionin America as though he were a mouthpiece of the Congress of Vienna. On October13, he issued his call for the Cabinet to meet, on October 23, for discussionof the "duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the most friendly andconciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of arms." Meanwhile MinisterAdams, deeply perturbed and profoundly anxious, would betray no sign of alarm,and purposely delayed to ask explanation. The howl of anger against Gladstonebecame louder every day, for every one knew that the Cabinet was called forOctober 23, and then could not fail to decide its policy about the UnitedStates. Lord Lyons put off his departure for America till October 25 expresslyto share in the conclusions to be discussed on October 23. When Minister Adamsat last requested an interview, Russell named October 23 as the day. To thelast moment every act of Russell showed that, in his mind, the intervention wasstill in doubt.

When Minister Adams, at the interview, suggested that an explanation was duehim, he watched Russell with natural interest, and reported thus: —

. . . His lordship took my allusion at once, though not without aslight indication of embarrassment. He said that Mr. Gladstone had beenevidently much misunderstood. I must have seen in the newspapers the letterswhich contained his later explanations. That he had certain opinions in regardto the nature of the struggle in America, as on all public questions, just asother Englishmen had, was natural enough. And it was the fashion here forpublic men to express such as they held in their public addresses. Of course itwas not for him to disavow anything on the part of Mr. Gladstone; but he had noidea that in saying what he had, there was a serious intention to justify anyof the inferences that had been drawn from it of a disposition in theGovernment now to adopt a new policy. . . .

A student trying to learn the processes of politics in a free governmentcould not but ponder long on the moral to be drawn from this "explanation" ofMr. Gladstone by Earl Russell. The point set for study as the first conditionof political life, was whether any politician could be believed or trusted. Thequestion which a private secretary asked himself, in copying this despatch ofOctober 24, 1862, was whether his father believed, or should believe, one wordof 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 interventionand had no sense except to declare the "disposition in the Government now toadopt" that new policy. Earl Russell never disavowed Gladstone, although LordPalmerston and Sir George Cornewall Lewis instantly did so. As far as thecurious student could penetrate the mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed EarlRussell's intent.

As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would decide thelaw of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively honorable; if one could notbelieve them, Truth in politics might be ignored as a delusion. Therefore thestudent felt compelled to reach some sort of idea that should serve to bringthe case within a general law. Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. Hebluntly told Russell that while he was "willing to acquit" Gladstone of "anydeliberate intention to bring on the worst effects," he was bound to say thatGladstone 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 publicdefence of it, Russell replied as well as he could: —

. . . His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that LordPalmerston and other members of the Government regretted the speech, and`Mr.Gladstone himself was not disinclined to correct, as far as he could, themisinterpretation which had been made of it. It was still their intention toadhere to the rule of perfect neutrality in the struggle, and to let it come toits natural end without the smallest interference, direct or otherwise. But hecould not say what circ*mstances might happen from month to month in thefuture. I observed that the policy he mentioned was satisfactory to us, andasked if I was to understand him as saying that no change of it was nowproposed. To which he gave his assent. . . .

Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that Russell could betrusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was the diplomatic tradition,especially held by the Russian diplomats. Possibly it was sound, but it helpedin no way the education of a private secretary. The cat's-paw theory offered nosafer clue, than the frank, old-fashioned, honest theory of villainy. Neitherthe 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. TheMinister was led to believe that the Cabinet meeting was not held, and that itsdecision was informal. Russell's biographer said that, "with this memorandum[of Russell's, dated October 13] the Cabinet assembled from all parts of thecountry on October 23; but . . . members of the Cabinet doubted the policy ofmoving, or moving at that time." The Duke of Newcastle and Sir George Greyjoined Granville in opposition. As far as known, Russell and Gladstone stoodalone. "Considerations such as these prevented the matter being pursued anyfurther."

Still no one has distinctly said that this decision was formal; perhaps theunanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet unnecessary; but it is certainthat, 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 adhereto a strict neutrality and to leave this struggle to settle itself." When Mr.Adams, not satisfied even with this positive assurance, pressed for acategorical answer: "I asked him if I was to understand that policy as not nowto be changed; he said: Yes!"

John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of Gladstone," fortyyears afterwards, would have interested the Minister, as well as his privatesecretary: "If this relation be accurate," said Morley of a relation officiallypublished at the time, and never questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary didnot construe strict neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call goodoffices." For a vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's construction ofneutrality mattered little to the student, who asked only Russell's intent, andcared only to know whether his construction had any other object than todeceive the Minister.

In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and possibly EarlRussell 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 asdays. Earl Russell totally deceived the private secretary, whatever he may havedone 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 byrepresenting, "with moral authority and force, the opinion of the civilizedworld upon the conditions of the case." Nothing had been decided. By somemeans, scarcely accidental, the French Emperor was led to think that hisinfluence 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 todo so. Another Cabinet meeting was called for November 11, and this timeGladstone himself reports the debate: —

Nov. 11. We have had our Cabinet to-day and meet again tomorrow. Iam afraid we shall do little or nothing in the business of America. But I willsend you definite intelligence. Both Lords Palmerston and Russell areright.

Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. LordRussell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting out hisbattle. However, though we decline for the moment, the answer is put upongrounds and in terms which leave the matter very open for thefuture.

Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about Americapublic; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not take it as apositive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act in the matter. Itwill be clear that we concur with them, that the war should cease. Palmerstongave to Russell's proposal a feeble and half-hearted support.

Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who looked on at thisscene, 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 thesituation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, had known none ofthe facts. One would have done better to draw no conclusions at all. One'sdiplomatic education was a long mistake.

These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented themselvesto the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on September 14, under theimpression that the President was about to be driven from Washington and theArmy 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. Palmerstonhesitated; Russell insisted; Granville protested. Meanwhile the rebel army wasdefeated at Antietam, September 17, and driven out of Maryland. Then Gladstone,October 7, tried to force Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as afait accompli. Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir GeorgeCornewall 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 wordsgood. On October 23, Russell assured Adams that no change in policy was nowproposed. On the same day he had proposed it, and was voted down. InstantlyNapoleon III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone with a propositionwhich had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to replace America, frompole to pole, in her old dependence on Europe, and to replace England in herold sovereignty of the seas, if Palmerston would support France in Mexico. Theyoung student of diplomacy, knowing Palmerston, must have taken for grantedthat Palmerston inspired this motion and would support it; knowing Russell andhis Whig antecedents, he would conceive that Russell must oppose it; knowingGladstone and his lofty principles, he would not doubt that Gladstone violentlydenounced the scheme. If education was worth a straw, this was the onlyarrangement of persons that a trained student would imagine possible, and itwas the arrangement actually assumed by nine men out of ten, as history. Intruth, each valuation was false. Palmerston never showed favor to the schemeand gave it only "a feeble and half-hearted support." Russell gave way withoutresolutely fighting out "his battle." The only resolute, vehement,conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson Davis wasGladstone.

Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders, but to him thebest part of life was thrown away if he learned such a lesson wrong. HenryJames had not yet taught the world to read a volume for the pleasure of seeingthe 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 thatcomplexity was the trait that confused the student of Palmerston, Russell, andGladstone. Under a very strong light human nature will always appear complexand full of contradictions, but the British statesman would appear, on thewhole, among the least complex of men.

Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by contrast, becalled complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone deceived only by theirsimplicity. Russell was the most interesting to a young man because his conductseemed most statesmanlike. Every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to November,1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the Union. The only pointin Russell's character about which the student thought no doubt to be possiblewas its want of good faith. It was thoroughly dishonest, but strong. HabituallyRussell said one thing and did another. He seemed unconscious of his owncontradictions even when his opponents pointed them out, as they were much inthe habit of doing, in the strongest language. As the student watched him dealwith the Civil War in America, Russell alone showed persistence, evenobstinacy, in a definite determination, which he supported, as was necessary,by the usual definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of thefalsehoods; 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 abouthis objects and unscrupulous in his methods — dishonest but strong.Russell ardently asserted that he had no objects, and that though he might beweak he was above all else honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personallyand 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. Noone, either in or out of England, ever offered a rational explanation of EarlRussell.

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. MinisterAdams 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 attackon General Butler. He tried to check Russell. He scolded Gladstone. Hediscouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli none of the English statesmen were socautious as he in talking of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made noprofessions; concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The mostmortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that, after forty yearsof confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction of Lord Palmerston, he wasobliged at last to admit himself in error, and to consent in spirit — forby that time he was nearly as dead as any of them — to beg hispardon.

Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's difficultieswere less because they were shared by all the world including Gladstonehimself. 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 youngman could reach in 1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstoneadmitted, avowed, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which brought allreason and all hope of education to a still-stand: —

I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular andpalpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially since it wascommitted 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 anation. . . . Strange to say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be madeby a Minister of the Crown with no authority other than his own, was not due toany feeling of partisanship for the South or hostility to the North. . . . Ireally, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness toall America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end. . . . Thatmy opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the facts was the very leastpart of my fault. I did not perceive the gross impropriety of such an utterancefrom a Cabinet Minister of a power allied in blood and language, and bound toloyal neutrality; the case being further exaggerated by the fact that we werealready, so to speak, under indictment before the world for not (as wasalleged) having strictly enforced the laws of neutrality in the matter of thecruisers. My offence was indeed only a mistake, but one of incrediblegrossness, and with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it, thatmy failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very severe blame. Itillustrates vividly that incapacity which my mind so long retained, and perhapsstill exhibits, an incapacity of viewing subjects all round. . . .

Long and patiently — more than patiently — sympathetically, didthe private secretary, forty years afterwards in the twilight of a life ofstudy, read and re-read and reflect upon this confession. Then, it seemed, hehad seen nothing correctly at the time. His whole theory of conspiracy —of policy — of logic and connection in the affairs of man, resolveditself 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 notalluded to the understanding between Russell, Palmerston, and himself; had evenwholly left out his most "incredible" act, his ardent support of Napoleon'spolicy, a policy which even Palmerston and Russell had supported feebly, withonly 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 tono conspiracy; that he saw none of the results of his acts which were clear toevery one else; granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last toconclude — that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging onsenility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve — what sort of educationshould have been the result of it? How should it have affected one's futureopinions and acts?

Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are rough; itsjudgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not have affected either theMinister or his son in 1862. The sum of the individuals would still haveseemed, 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 friendlyand Palmerston hostile. The individual would still have been identical with themass. The problem would have been the same; the answer equally obscure. Everystudent would, like the private secretary, answer for himself alone.

CHAPTER XI. THE BATTLE OF THERAMS (1863)

MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he didnot see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by seeingtoo much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom credited hisopponents with greater intelligence than his own. Earl Russell suited him;perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them; and indeed Henry Adams neversaw Russell without being amused by his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams.Apart from this shadowy personal relation, no doubt the Minister wasdiplomatically right; he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making afriend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or falsemattered less, because, in either case, the American Legation could act only asthough he were false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined effort tobetray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely used strongerexpressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been greatly annoyed by SirRobert 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 notefrom the Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, totreat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, forthe nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idéefixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention onNovember 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note fromMinister Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, and asking in veryplain language for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow tounderstand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it; this wasone of the points that greatly interested a student, but young men have apassion for regarding their elders as senile, which was only in part warrantedin this instance by observing that Russell's generation were mostly senile fromyouth. They had never got beyond 1815 Both Palmerston and Russell were in thiscase. Their senility was congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford training and HighChurch illusions, which caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russellcould not conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams fromthe start, and when after November 12 he found himself on the defensive, withMr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere confusion andhelplessness.

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 beendue to criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard to theironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one could be so simple asto believe that two armored ships-of-war could be built publicly, under theeyes of the Government, and go to sea like the Alabama, without active andincessant collusion. The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumedignorance, the more violently in the end, the Minister would have to tear itoff. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl Russell, he must takethe greatest possible diplomatic liberties with him if this crisis were allowedto arrive.

As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself for action. Acampaign more beautiful — better suited for training the mind of a youtheager for training — has not often unrolled itself for study, from thebeginning, 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 ofnew and imperial life. One was twenty-five years old, and quite ready to assertit; some of one's friends were wearing stars on their collars; some had wonstars of a more enduring kind. At moments one's breath came quick. One began todream 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 eyeswere fastened on the armies in the field. Little by little, at first only as ashadowy chance of what might be, if things could be rightly done, one began tofeel 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 havelearned their business — at a cost that ruined — and perhaps toolate. A private secretary knew better than most people how much of the newpower was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the diplomaticcampaign had to wait for the military campaign to lead. The student could onlystudy.

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, onecurled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with incredulous hope. Asthe huge masses struck, one after another, with the precision of machinery, theopposing mass, the world shivered. Such development of power was unknown. Themagnificent resistance and the return shocks heightened the suspense. Duringthe July days Londoners were stupid with unbelief. They were learning from theYankees how to fight.

An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for one's mindwas working with the acceleration of the machine at home; but Englishmen werenot quick to see their blunders. One had ample time to watch the process, andhad even a little time to gloat over the repayment of old scores. News ofVicksburg and Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it happenedthat Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some small reception at thehouse of Monckton Milnes. He went early in order to exchange a word or two ofcongratulation before the rooms should fill, and on arriving he found only theladies in the drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of theTimes came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young Americanfriend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms about his neck andkiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth who knew too little to realize thepassions of 1863 — backed by those of 1813 — and reënforced bythose of 1763 — might conceive that such publicity embarrassed a privatesecretary who came from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening, forthe first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking of himself. He wasthinking 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 heardof young Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in theTimes; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind of theAmerican Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of all minds, asthe files of the Times proved, and the capture of Vicksburg had notyet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed ideas. Even if he had readAdams's thought, he would have felt for it only the usual amused Britishcontempt for all that he had not been taught at school. It needed a wholegeneration for the Times to reach Milnes's standpoint.

Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely have soughtan introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured him that he regarded his ownpersonal 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. Fornearly a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging itself forthe collision between the Legation and Delane who stood behind the PalmerstonMinistry. Mr. Adams had been steadily strengthened and reënforced fromWashington in view of the final struggle. The situation had changed since theTrent Affair. The work was efficiently done; the organization was fairlycomplete. No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had aspoor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal. Congress was alwaysjealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chairman of the Committee of ForeignRelations was not likely to press assistance on the Minister to England. Forthe Legation not an additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, theAssistant Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that theMinister did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week would have done the work aswell or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk; without expressauthority he could admit no one into the Legation; he strained a point alreadyby admitting his son. Congress and its committees were the proper judges ofwhat was best for the public service, and if the arrangement seemed good tothem, it was satisfactory to a private secretary who profited by it more thanthey did. A great staff would have suppressed him. The whole Legation was asort of improvised, volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. Hewas 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 madeany remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that none wouldhave received a moment's attention.

If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied with SecretarySeward. Without appropriations for the regular service, he had done greatthings for its support. If the Minister had no secretaries, he had a staff ofactive consuls; he had a well-organized press; efficient legal support; and aswarm of social allies permeating all classes. All he needed was a victory inthe field, and Secretary Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy. Vicksburgand Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at the end of July, 1863, Minister Adamswas 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 Ministerhad been compelled to begin his attack; but this was history, and had nothingto do with education. The private secretary copied the notes into his privatebooks, and that was all the share he had in the matter, except to talk inprivate.

No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in a manner sentto the rear; the movement was too serious for skirmishing. All that a secretarycould hope to gain from the affair was experience and knowledge of politics. Hehad 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. Whateverthe reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his efforts for intervention inSeptember, 1862, been known to the Legation in September, 1863 the Ministermust surely have admitted that Russell had, from the first, meant to force hisplan of intervention on his colleagues. Every separate step since April, 1861,led to this final coercion. Although Russell's hostile activity of 1862 wasstill secret — and remained secret for some five-and-twenty years —his animu s seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal to stop therebel armaments. Little by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of hopecame the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every ragof defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded with connivance in therebel armaments, and ended by the famous sentence: "It would be superfluous inme to point out to your lordship that this is war!"

What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the privatesecretary understood by it, was a part of his education. Had his father orderedhim to draft an explanatory paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, hewould have continued thus:—

"It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only knows italready, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it is the only logicaland necessary consequence of his unvarying action. 3d. Because Mr. Adams is notpointing out to him that 'this is war,' but is pointing it out to theworld, to complete the record."

This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the private secretarycopied into his books the matter-of-fact statement with which, without passionor excitement, the Minister announced that a state of war existed. To hiscopying eye, as clerk, the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomaticpropriety, merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric. The facthad to be stated in order to make clear the issue. The war was Russell'swar—Adams only accepted it.

Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the Legation onSeptember 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries that "instructionshave been issued which will prevent the departure of the two ironclad vesselsfrom Liverpool." The members of the modest Legation in Portland Place acceptedit as Grant had accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretaryconceived that, as Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed by superior weightthe rebel left on the Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushedthe rebel right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of thebattle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he were ninety, hewould never fight another campaign of life and death like this; and though theprivate secretary should covet and attain every office in the gift of Presidentor people, he would never again find education to compare with thelife-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half struggle in London, asit had racked and thumb-screwed him in its shifting phases; but its practicalvalue as education turned on his correctness of judgment in measuring the menand their forces. He felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because theyrepresented traditional England and an English policy, respectable enough initself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had fought and exploitedas the chief source of his political fortunes. As he understood it, Russell hadfollowed this policy steadily, ably, even vigorously, and had brought it to themoment of execution. Then he had met wills stronger than his own, and, afterpersevering to the last possible instant, had been beaten. Lord North andGeorge Canning had a like experience.

This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it was alsothe idea of his Government. For once, the volunteer secretary was satisfiedwith his Government. Commonly the self-respect of a secretary, private orpublic, depends on, and is proportional to, the severity of his criticism, butin this case the English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the StateDepartment as the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more decisive.It was well planned, well prepared, and well executed. He could never discovera mistake in it. Possibly he was biassed by personal interest, but his chiefreason for trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself to be one ofonly half a dozen persons who knew something about it. When others criticisedMr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their opinions because he thought theyhardly knew what they were talking about, and could not be taught withoutliving over again the London life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemedimmensely strong and steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russellor Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power, patience and steadinessof purpose. They had persisted for two years and a half in their plan forbreaking up the Union, and had yielded at last only in the jaws of war. After along and desperate struggle, the American Minister had trumped their best cardand won the game.

Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to see whetherhe could detect error on either side. He found none. At every stage the stepswere both probable and proved. All the more he was disconcerted that Russellshould indignantly and with growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resentthe axiom of Adams's whole contention, that from the first he meant to break upthe Union. Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort; that he hadmeant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that he did not know what hemeant. Driven from one defence after another, he pleaded at last, likeGladstone, that he had no defence. Concealing all he could conceal —burying in profound secrecy his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of1862 — he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith. What was worsefor the private secretary, to the total derision and despair of the lifelongeffort for education, as the final result of combined practice, experience, andtheory — he proved it.

Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell to admit anyplea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this admission really favoredhim. Not until long after Earl Russell's death was the question reopened.Russell had quitted office in 1866; he died in 1878; the biography waspublished in 1889. During the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in1872, his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and he hadbeen compelled to see England pay more than £3,000,000 penalty for hiserrors. On the other hand, he brought forward — or his biographer for him— evidence tending to prove that he was not consciously dishonest, andthat 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 hisnature. 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 todrop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone's; but this was not enough for thestudent of diplomacy who had made a certain theory his law of life, and wantedto hold Russell up against himself; to show that he had foresight andpersistence of which he was unaware. The effort became hopeless when thebiography in 1889 published papers which upset all that Henry Adams had takenfor 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 linesmarked 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 inpursuance of the same effort, that it was "the most singular and palpableerror," "the least excusable," "a mistake of incredible grossness," whichpassed defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of the publicfor 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 itscause — the policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed . . . Ireally, 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 soobviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napoleon delude himself withphilanthropy. 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 thematter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in 1863, as far as is known, toLord Russell alone, who wrote on September 1 that he could not interfere in anyway with those vessels, and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams's declarationof war on September 5. A student held that, in this refusal, he was merelyfollowing his policy of September, 1862, and of every step he had taken since1861.

The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble, timid,mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is convincing. The Lairds hadbuilt these ships in reliance on the known opinion of the law-officers that thestatute did not apply, and a jury would not convict. Minister Adams repliedthat, in this case, the statute should be amended, or the ships stopped byexercise of the political power. Bethell rejoined that this would be aviolation of neutrality; one must preserve the status quo. TacitlyRussell connived with Laird, and, had he meant to interfere, he was bound towarn Laird that the defect of the statute would no longer protect him, but heallowed the builders to go on till the ships were ready for sea. Then, onSeptember 3, two days before Mr. Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to LordPalmerston begging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen who have contractedfor the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious," — he began,and this he actually wrote in good faith and deep confidence to LordPalmerston, his chief, calling "the conduct" of the rebel agents "suspicious"when no one else in Europe or America felt any suspicion about it, because thewhole question turned not on the rams, but on the technical scope of theForeign Enlistment Act, — "that I have thought it necessary to directthat they should be detained," not, of course, under the statute, but on theground urged by the American Minister, of international obligation above thestatute. "The Solicitor General has been consulted and concurs in the measureas one of policy though not of strict law. We shall thus test the law, and, ifwe have to pay damages, we have satisfied the opinion which prevails here aswell as in America that that kind of neutral hostility should not be allowed togo on without some attempt to stop it."

For naïveté that would be unusual in an unpaid attaché ofLegation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after twoyears and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused Palmerston to inhumanscorn, but instead of derision, well earned by Russell's old attacks onhimself, Palmerston met the appeal with wonderful loyalty. "On consulting thelaw officers he found that there was no lawful ground for meddling with theironclads," or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust neither his lawofficers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he suggested buying the ships forthe British Navy. As proof of "criminal negligence" in the past, thissuggestion seemed decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in othertroubles of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the American Minister.He should have done so at once, on September 3. Instead he waited tillSeptember 4, and then merely said that the matter was under "serious andanxious consideration." This note did not reach the Legation till three o'clockon the afternoon of September 5 — after the "superfluous" declaration ofwar had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the Lairds: had cost hisMinistry the price of two ironclads, besides the Alabama Claims — say, inround numbers, twenty million dollars — and had put himself in theposition of appearing to yield only to a threat of war. Finally he wrote to theAdmiralty a letter which, from the American point of view, would have soundedyouthful from an Eton schoolboy: —

September 14, 1863.

MY DEAR DUKE: —

It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironcladsbuilding at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the blockade. Theybelong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris. If you will offer to buy them on the partof the Admiralty you will get money's worth if he accepts your offer; and if hedoes not, it will be presumptive proof that they are already bought by theConfederates. I should state that we have suggested to the Turkish Governmentto buy them; but you can easily settle that matter with the Turks. . ..

The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have been loud hadthey seen this letter and realized the muddle of difficulties into which EarlRussell had at last thrown himself under the impulse of the American Minister;but, nevertheless, these letters upset from top to bottom the results of theprivate secretary's diplomatic education forty years after he had supposed itcomplete. They made a picture different from anything he had conceived andrendered worthless his whole painful diplomatic experience.

To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any practicalpurpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use in attacking it as onlytheoretical. He no longer cared whether he understood human nature or not; heunderstood quite as much of it as he wanted; but he found in the "Life ofGladstone" (II, 464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter forcurious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "thatpoliticians 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 thusunderstood, 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 typewas more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient result of his diplomaticeducation; it seemed to be the whole.

CHAPTER XII. ECCENTRICITY(1863)

KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end ofpolitical education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood ofWestminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature hadlittle or no value outside of England. In Paris, such a habit stood in one'sway; in America, it roused all the instincts of native jealousy. The Englishmind was one-sided, eccentric, systematically unsystematic, and logicallyillogical. The less one knew of it, the better.

This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to penetrate a Bostonmind — it would, indeed, have been shut out by instinct as a ratherfoolish exaggeration — rested on an experience which Henry Adams gravelythought he had a right to think conclusive — for him. That it should beconclusive for any one else never occurred to him, since he had no thought ofeducating anybody else. For him — alone — the less Englisheducation he got, the better!

For several years, under the keenest incitement to watchfulness, he observedthe English mind in contact with itself and other minds. Especially with theAmerican the contact was interesting because the limits and defects of theAmerican mind were one of the favorite topics of the European. From theold-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an economicthinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line. The American mindexasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest. TheEnglish mind disliked the French mind because it was antagonistic,unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. TheAmerican 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 eithereconomical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck an American wasits enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their wholeenergy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric bylaw and for sake of the eccentricity itself.

The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or dinner-table was thatSo-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence to So-and-So; it hardlydistinguished him from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, likeGladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was sogeneral as to become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of Englishsociety as well as its chief terror.

The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but Thackeray quitejustly maintained that he was not a satirist at all, and that his pictures ofEnglish society were exact and good-natured. The American, who could notbelieve it, fell back on Dickens, who, at all events, had the vice ofexaggeration to extravagance, but Dickens's English audience thought theexaggeration rather in manner or style, than in types. Mr. Gladstone himselfwent to see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed till his face was distorted— not because Dundreary was exaggerated, but because he was ridiculouslylike the types that Gladstone had seen — or might have seen — inany club in Pall Mall. Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; itcontained little else.

Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps it wasactual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston thought so. TheBostonian called it national character — native vigor — robustness— honesty — courage. He respected and feared it. Britishself-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it was, seemed to him a better andnobler 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 applyingit, triumphantly, wherever he travels. Whatever others thought, the cleverestEnglishmen held that the national eccentricity needed correction, and werebeginning to correct it. The savage satires of Dickens and the gentler ridiculeof Matthew Arnold against the British middle class were but a part of therebellion, for the middle class were no worse than their neighbors in the eyesof an American in 1863; they were even a very little better in the sense thatone could appeal to their interests, while a university man, like Gladstone,stood outside of argument. From none of them could a young American afford toborrow ideas.

The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by regardingBritish 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 showitself certainly not the weaker; certainly sometimes the stronger. Biassedthough he were, he could hardly be biassed to such a degree as to mistake theeffects of force on others, and while — labor as he might — EarlRussell and his state papers seemed weak to a secretary, he could not see thatthey seemed strong to Russell's own followers. Russell might be dishonest or hemight be merely obtuse — the English type might be brutal or might beonly stupid — but strong, in either case, it was not, nor did it seemstrong to Englishmen.

Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply interested indeciding whether it was always a weakness. Evidently, on the hustings or inParliament, among eccentricities, eccentricity was at home; but in privatesociety the question was not easy to answer. That English society wasinfinitely more amusing because of its eccentricities, no one denied. Barringthe atrocious insolence and brutality which Englishmen and especiallyEnglishwomen showed to each other — very rarely, indeed, to foreigners— English society was much more easy and tolerant than American. One mustexpect to be treated with exquisite courtesy this week and be totally forgottenthe next, but this was the way of the world, and education consisted inlearning to turn one's back on others with the same unconscious indifferencethat others showed among themselves. The smart of wounded vanity lasted no longtime with a young man about town who had little vanity to smart, and who, inhis own country, would have found himself in no better position. He had nothingto complain of. No one was ever brutal to him. On the contrary, he was muchbetter treated than ever he was likely to be in Boston — let alone NewYork or Washington — and if his reception varied inconceivably betweenextreme courtesy and extreme neglect, it merely proved that he had become, orwas becoming, at home. Not from a sense of personal griefs or disappointmentsdid he labor over this part of the social problem, but only because hiseducation was becoming English, and the further it went, the less itpromised.

By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized withpolitical eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to rebellion —when foreign — and it felt particular confidence in the SouthernConfederacy because of its combined attributes — foreign rebellion ofEnglish blood — which came nearer ideal eccentricity than could bereached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the English eccentricsrushed into the ranks of rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balancedminds to attach themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the Englishleaders on the Northern side were marked eccentrics. William E. Forster was apractical, hard-headed Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in politics took shapeas working arrangements on an economical base. Cobden, considering theone-sided conditions of his life, was remarkably well balanced. John Bright wasstronger in his expressions than either of them, but with all hisself-assertion he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He did not,like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously earnest," as MoncktonMilnes said, "on both sides of every question"; he was rather, on the whole, aconsistent conservative of the old Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defendinconsistencies. Monckton Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chieflyby those who did not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only ideas alittle in advance of the time; his manner was eccentric, but not his mind, asany 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 atall, by indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions among its Englishfriends. Their work was largely judicious, practical, well considered, andalmost 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 appearat a July 4th reception at the Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his oldcredit as "Attorney General to Mr. Madison." The Church was rebel, but thedissenters were mostly with the Union. The universities were rebel, but theuniversity men who enjoyed most public confidence — like Lord Granville,Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey — took infinitepains to be neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers, aswell as to the Times, the Morning Post, and theStandard, a vast majority of the English people seemed to follow theprofessional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took thatdirection; Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and Gladstone, threwtheir sympathies on the side which they should naturally have opposed, and didso for no reason except their eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots andYorkshiremen were cautious.

This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was themismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first cause of this troublelay in the Richmond Government itself. No one understood why Jefferson Davischose Mr. Mason as his agent for London at the same time that he made so good achoice as Mr. Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent men tosend to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason. Possibly Mason had acertain amount of common sense, but he seemed to have nothing else, and inLondon society he counted merely as one eccentric more. He enjoyed a greatopportunity; he might even have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with allsociety at his feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and made thesocial path of the American Minister almost impassable; but Mr. Adams had hisusual luck in enemies, who were always his most valuable allies if his friendsonly let them alone. Mason was his greatest diplomatic triumph. He had hiscollision with Palmerston; he drove Russell off the field; he swept the boardbefore co*ckburn; he overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a finger againstMason, who became his bulwark of defence.

Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in common whichmight have led them into this serious mistake. Neither could have had muchknowledge of the world, and both must have been unconscious of humor. Yet atthe 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 theeducation he never found, Adams became closely intimate at Washington withLamar, 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 quiteunusual in social charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southernfire-eaters, but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above allhis Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps this was areason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others, on a futile mission toSt. Petersburg. He would have done better in London, in place of Mason. Londonsociety would have delighted in him; his stories would have won success; hismanners would have made him loved; his oratory would have swept every audience;even Monckton Milnes could never have resisted the temptation of having him tobreakfast between Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop of Oxford.

Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he never spoke ofMason. He never alluded to Confederate management or criticised JeffersonDavis's administration. The subject that amused him was his English allies. Atthat moment — the early summer of 1863 — the rebel party in Englandwere full of confidence, and felt strong enough to challenge the AmericanLegation to a show of power. They knew better than the Legation what they coulddepend upon: that the law officers and commissioners of customs at Liverpooldared not prosecute the ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstonewere ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon would offerthem every inducement to do it. In a manner they owned Liverpool and especiallythe firm of Laird who were building their ships. The political member of theLaird firm was Lindsay, about whom the whole web of rebel interests clung— rams, cruisers, munitions, and Confederate loan; social introductionsand parliamentary tactics. The firm of Laird, with a certain dignity, claimedto 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 havehad 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; atype of 1820; a sort of Brougham of Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment andworse temper. Mr. Roebuck had been a tribune of the people, and, like tribunesof most other peoples, in growing old, had grown fatuous. He was regarded bythe friends of the Union as rather a comical personage — a favoritesubject for Punch to laugh at — with a bitter tongue and a mindenfeebled even more than common by the political epidemic of egotism. In allEngland they could have found no opponent better fitted to give away his owncase. No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet. theLairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let Roebuck represent themand take charge of their interests.

With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern except that theMinister sent him down to the House of Commons on June 30, 1863, to report theresult of Roebuck's motion to recognize the Southern Confederacy. The Legationfelt no anxiety, having Vicksburg already in its pocket, and Bright and Forsterto say so; but the private secretary went down and was admitted under thegallery on the left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, withastonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakesa wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The privatesecretary felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, byway of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knewhow it was done. The manner counted for more than the words. The scene wasinteresting, but the result was not in doubt.

All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in Washington, byhearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which, little by little, becamedramatic, recalling the scene in the House of Commons. The story, as well asone remembered, began with Lamar's failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, andhis consequent detention in Paris waiting instructions. The motion to recognizethe 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 agentsinto relations with Roebuck. Lamar was sent for, and came. After muchconversation of a general sort, such as is the usual object or resource of theEnglish Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by way of showinginterest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked Roebuck whether heexpected Bright to take part in the debate: "No, sir!" said Roebucksententiously; "Bright and I have met before. It was the old story — thestory of the sword-fish and the whale! NO, sir! Mr. Bright will not crossswords with me again!"

Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the House on theappointed evening, and was placed under the gallery, on the right, where helistened to Roebuck and followed the debate with such enjoyment as anexperienced debater feels in these contests, until, as he said, he became awarethat a man, with a singularly rich voice and imposing manner, had taken thefloor, and was giving Roebuck the most deliberate and tremendous pounding heever witnessed, "until at last," concluded Lamar, "it dawned on my mind thatthe sword-fish was getting the worst of it."

Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself rather thanagainst Roebuck; but such jokes must have been unpleasantly common in theexperience of the rebel agents. They were surrounded by cranks of the worstEnglish species, who distorted their natural eccentricities and perverted theirjudgment. Roebuck may have been an extreme case, since he was actually in hisdotage, yet this did not prevent the Lairds from accepting his lead, or theHouse from taking him seriously. Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England,to extreme confidence; sometimes it seemed a recommendation; and unless itcaused financial loss, it rather helped popularity.

The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength weighed heavilyin the balance of education. That Roebuck should mislead the rebel agents on sostrange a point as that of Bright's courage was doubly characteristic becausethe Southern people themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributingwant of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such ignorance ofthe world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational as that of the rebelsthemselves. Every one knew that he had the courage of a prize-fighter. Hestruck, in succession, pretty nearly every man in England that could be reachedby a blow, and when he could not reach the individual he struck the class, orwhen the class was too small for him, the whole people of England. At times hehad the whole country on his back. He could not act on the defensive; his mindrequired attack. Even among friends at the dinner-table he talked as though hewere denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his phrases,built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded his opponents, real orimagined. 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 privatesecretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St. James's Hall, which was theresult of Professor Beesly's patient efforts to unite Bright and theTrades-Unions on an American platform. The secretary went to the meeting andmade a report which reposes somewhere on file in the State Department to thisday, as harmless as such reports should be; but it contained no mention of whatinterested young Adams most — Bright's psychology. With singular skilland 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 consecutiveheads. The rhetorical effect was tremendous:—

"Privilege thinks it has a great interest in the American contest," he beganin his massive, deliberate tones; "and every morning with blatant voice, itcomes into our streets and curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheldan afflicting spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty million ofmen happy and prosperous, without emperors — without king(cheers) — without the surroundings of a court (renewedcheers)—without nobles, except such as are made by eminence inintellect and virtue — without State bishops and State priests, thosevendors of the love that works salvation (cheers) — withoutgreat armies and great navies — without a great debt and great taxes— and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if thisgreat experiment should succeed."

An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed, in the samenumber of lines, to offend more Englishmen than Bright struck in this sentence;but he must have betrayed artifice and hurt his oratory. The audience cheeredfuriously, and the private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind, forhe knew how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw Bright talk republicanprinciples before Trades-Unions; but, while he did not, like Roebuck, seereason to doubt the courage of a man who, after quarrelling with theTrades-Unions, quarreled with all the world outside the Trades-Unions, he didfeel a doubt whether to class Bright as eccentric or conventional. Every onecalled Bright "un-English," from Lord Palmerston to William E. Forster; but toan American he seemed more English than any of his critics. He was a liberalhater, and what he hated he reviled after the manner of Milton, but he wasafraid 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 orthe pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He loathed the wholefabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham aristocracy, and sham socialism. Hehad 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 racialeccentricity, 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 aseason, when James Russell Lowell was transferred there as Minister; and asAdams'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 inthe Cabinet, and no longer the most radical member even there, but he was stilla rare figure in society. He came to dinner, along with Sir Francis Doyle andSir Robert Cunliffe, and as usual did most of the talking. As usual also, hetalked of the things most on his mind. Apparently it must have been some reformof the criminal law which the Judges opposed, that excited him, for at the endof dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the table in his old way, andended with a superb denunciation of the Bench, spoken in his massive manner, asthough every word were a hammer, smashing what it struck:—

"For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the Bench, condemningto the penalty of death every man, woman, and child who stole property to thevalue of five shillings; and, during all that time, not one Judge everremonstrated against the law. We English are a nation of brutes, and ought tobe exterminated to the last man."

As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room, Adams said toLowell that Bright was very fine. "Yes!" replied Lowell, " but too violent!"

Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew his Englishmenbetter than Lowell did — better than England did. He knew what amount ofviolence in language was necessary to drive an idea into a Lancashire orYorkshire head. He knew that no violence was enough to affect a Somersetshireor Wiltshire peasant. Bright kept his own head cool and clear. He was notexcited; he never betrayed excitement. As for his denunciation of the EnglishBench, it was a very old story, not original with him. That the English were anation of brutes was a commonplace generally admitted by Englishmen anduniversally accepted by foreigners; while the matter of their exterminationcould be treated only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they wereprobably not very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright said that theFrench, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a nation of brutes and ought to beexterminated, no one would have found fault; the whole human race, according tothe highest authority, has been exterminated once already for the same reason,and only the rainbow protects them from a repetition of it. What shocked Lowellwas 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 hewas curious — even anxious — as a point of education, to decide forhimself whether Bright's language was violent for its purpose. He thought not.Perhaps Cobden did better by persuasion, but that was another matter. Ofcourse, even Englishmen sometimes complained of being so constantly told thatthey were brutes and hypocrites, although they were told little else by theircensors, and bore it, on the whole, meekly; but the fact that it was true inthe main troubled the ten-pound voter much less than it troubled Newman,Gladstone, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally dislikedby 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, andhe never advanced an opinion in practical matters which did not prove to bepractical.

The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual opposites ofBright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest and most eccentric of all.These were the trimmers, the political economists, the anti-slavery anddoctrinaire class, the followers of de Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. Asa class, they were timid — with good reason — and timidity, whichis high wisdom in philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action.Numbers of these men haunted London society, all tending to free-thinking, butnever venturing much freedom of thought. Like the anti-slavery doctrinaires ofthe forties and fifties, they became mute and useless when slavery struck themin the face. For type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosenHenry Reeve, at least to the extent of biography. He was a bulky figure insociety, always friendly, good-natured, obliging, and useful; almost asuniversal as Milnes and more busy. As editor of the Edinburgh Reviewhe had authority and even power, although the Review and the wholeWhig doctrinaire school had begun — as the French say — to date;and of course the literary and artistic sharpshooters of 1867 — likeFrank Palgrave — frothed and foamed at the mere mention of Reeve's name.Three-fourths of their fury was due only to his ponderous manner. Londonsociety abused its rights of personal criticism by fixing on every tooconspicuous figure some word or phrase that stuck to it. Every one had heard ofMrs. Grote as "the origin of the word grotesque." Every one had laughed at thestory of Reeve approaching Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat florid manner,asking in his literary dialect how her husband the historian was: "And how isthe learned Grotius?" "Pretty well, thank you, Puffendorf! " One winced at theword, as though it were a drawing of Forain.

No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been charged with wantof moral courage. He proved his courage afterwards by publishing the "GrevilleMemoirs," braving the displeasure of the Queen. Yet the EdinburghReview and its editor avoided taking sides except where sides were alreadyfixed. Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal EdinburghReview; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and Reeve wasa Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of oscillating reserve seemedmore eccentric than the reckless hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and moremischievous, for he never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it mightencourage.

The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that eccentricitywas weakness. The young American who should adopt English thought was lost.From the facts, the conclusion was correct, yet, as usual, the conclusion waswrong. The years of Palmerston's last Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedlyyears of truce — of arrested development. The British system like theFrench, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the British mindshown itself so décousu — so unravelled, at sea,floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities had a freefield. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church. England devoted thirty yearsof arduous labor to clearing away only a part of the débris. Ayoung American in 1863 could see little or nothing of the future. He mightdream, 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 theparti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though he were theancient mariner, and they saurians of the prime.

CHAPTER XIII. THE PERFECTION OFHUMAN SOCIETY (1864)

MINISTER ADAMS'S success in stopping the rebel rams fixedhis position once for all in English society. From that moment he could affordto drop the character of diplomatist, and assume what, for an American Ministerin London, was an exclusive diplomatic advantage, the character of a kind ofAmerican Peer of the Realm. The British never did things by halves. Once theyrecognized a man's right to social privileges, they accepted him as one ofthemselves. Much as Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli were accepted as leaders of HerMajesty's domestic Opposition, Minister Adams had a rank of his own as a kindof leader of Her Majesty's American Opposition. Even the Timesconceded it. The years of struggle were over, and Minister Adams rapidly gaineda position which would have caused his father or grandfather to stare withincredulous envy.

This Anglo-American form of diplomacy was chiefly undiplomatic, and had thepeculiar effect of teaching a habit of diplomacy useless or mischievouseverywhere but in London. Nowhere else in the world could one expect to figurein a rôle so unprofessional. The young man knew no longer what characterhe bore. Private secretary in the morning, son in the afternoon, young manabout town in the evening, the only character he never bore was that ofdiplomatist, except when he wanted a card to some great function. Hisdiplomatic education was at an end; he seldom met a diplomat, and never hadbusiness with one; he could be of no use to them, or they to him; but hedrifted inevitably into society, and, do what he might, his next education mustbe one of English social life. Tossed between the horns of successive dilemmas,he reached his twenty-sixth birthday without the power of earning five dollarsin any occupation. His friends in the army were almost as badly off, but evenarmy life ruined a young man less fatally than London society. Had he beenrich, this form of ruin would have mattered nothing; but the young men of 1865were none of them rich; all had to earn a living; yet they had reached highpositions of responsibility and power in camps and Courts, without a dollar oftheir own and with no tenure of office.

Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he should at leasthave acquired social experience. Curiously enough, he failed here also. Fromthe European or English point of view, he had no social experience, and nevergot it. Minister Adams happened on a political interregnum owing to LordPalmerston's personal influence from 1860 to 1865; but this politicalinterregnum 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 wasstill a boy. In its best days, Victorian society had never been "smart." Duringthe forties, under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to besimple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste of LouisPhilippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of Queen Victoria.Style lingered in the background with the powdered footman behind the yellowchariot, but speaking socially the Queen had no style save what she inherited.Balmoral was a startling revelation of royal taste. Nothing could be worse thanthe toilettes at Court unless it were the way they were worn. One's eyes mightbe dazzled by jewels, but they were heirlooms, and if any lady appeared welldressed, she was either a foreigner or "fast." Fashion was not fashionable inLondon until the Americans and the Jews were let loose. The style of Londontoilette universal in 1864 was grotesque, like Monckton Milnes on horseback inRotten Row.

Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for editingShakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the society of 1870, andnone with that of 1900. Owing to other causes, young Adams never got the fulltraining of such style as still existed. The embarrassments of his first fewseasons socially ruined him. His own want of experience prevented his askingintroductions to the ladies who ruled society; his want of friends preventedhis knowing who these ladies were; and he had every reason to expect snubbingif he put himself in evidence. This sensitiveness was thrown away on Englishsociety, where men and women treated each others' advances much more brutallythan those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private secretary too; hecould not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman. He was not alone. Every youngdiplomat, and most of the old ones, felt awkward in an English house from acertainty that they were not precisely wanted there, and a possibility thatthey might be told so.

If there was in those days a country house in England which had a right tocall 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 aswell as charming, it was Lady Margaret Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfastthere, sitting by her side — not for his own merits — Henry Adamsheard her say to herself in her languid and liberal way, with her rich voiceand musing manner, looking into her tea-cup: "I don't think I care forforeigners!" Horror-stricken, not so much on his own account as on hers, theyoung 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 wasevident, that she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm madethe slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew that, exceptfor his momentary personal introduction, he was in fact a foreigner, and therewas 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 herindifference needed a reason to excuse itself in her own eyes, and she showedthe subconscious sympathy of the Irish nature which never feels itselfperfectly at home even in England. She, too, was some shadowy shadeun-English.

Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the private secretaryhid himself among the herd of foreigners till he found his relations fixed andunchangeable. He never felt himself in society, and he never knew definitelywhat was meant as society by those who were in it. He saw far enough to note ascore of societies which seemed quite independent of each other. The smartestwas the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange. The largest was thesporting world, also unknown to him except through the talk of hisacquaintances. Between or beyond these lay groups of nebulous societies. Hislawyer friends, like Evarts, frequented legal circles where one still sat overthe wine and told anecdotes of the bench and bar; but he himself never set eyeson a judge except when his father took him to call on old Lord Lyndhurst, wherethey found old Lord Campbell, both abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church andthe Bishops formed several societies which no secretary ever saw except as aninterloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical and surgicalprofessions; City people; artists; county families; the Scotch, and indefiniteother subdivisions of society existed, which were as strange to each other asthey were to Adams. At the end of eight or ten seasons in London society heprofessed to know less about it, or how to enter it, than he did when he madehis first appearance at Miss Burdett Coutts's in May, 1861.

Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle, and frequentedthe few houses that were willing to harbor him. An American who neither huntednor raced, neither shot nor fished nor gambled, and was not marriageable, hadno need to think of society at large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred wereuseless to him, a greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the question ofgetting into — or getting out of — society which troubled youngforeigners greatly, settled itself after three or four years of painfulspeculation. Society had no unity; one wandered about in it like a maggot incheese; 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 knewwhether 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 reignedin the seventies, he inclined to think that he knew very little about it.Certain great houses and certain great functions of course he attended, likeevery one else who could get cards, but even of these the number was small thatkept an interest or helped education. In seven years he could remember only twothat seemed to have any meaning for him, and he never knew what that meaningwas. Neither of the two was official; neither was English in interest; and bothwere scandals to the philosopher while they scarcely enlightened men of theworld.

One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated evening reception.Naturally every one went to Devonshire House if asked, and the rooms that nightwere fairly full of the usual people. The private secretary was standing amongthe rest, when Mme. de Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the SecondEmpire. 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 andaristocratic society in the world, instantly formed a lane, and stood in ranksto stare at her, while those behind mounted on chairs to look over theirneighbors' heads; so that the lady walked through this polite mob, staredcompletely out of countenance, and fled the house at once. This was all!

The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13, 1864, when, ina palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's pictures of Christ in hisscenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his gray capote over his red shirt, receivedall London, and three duch*esses literally worshipped at his feet. Here, at allevents, a private secretary had surely caught the last and highest touch ofsocial experience; but what it meant — what social, moral, or mentaldevelopment it pointed out to the searcher of truth — was not a matter tobe treated fully by a leader in the Morning Post or even by a sermonin Westminster Abbey. Mme. de Castiglione and Garibaldi covered, between them,too much space for simple measurement; their curves were too complex for merearithmetic. The task of bringing the two into any common relation with anordered social system tending to orderly development — in London orelsewhere — was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or Victor Hugo, butwas beyond any process yet reached by the education of Henry Adams, who wouldprobably, even then, have rejected, as superficial or supernatural, all theviews taken by any of the company who looked on with him at these twointeresting and perplexing sights.

From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got nothing atall, or next to nothing, that could help him on his road through life. Royaltywas in abeyance. One was tempted to think in these years, 1860-65, that thenicest distinction between the very best society and the second-best, was theirattitude 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 mighthave been said of fully half the peerage. Adams never knew even the names ofhalf the rest; he never exchanged ten words with any member of the royalfamily; he never knew any one in those years who showed interest in any memberof the royal family, or who would have given five shillings for the opinion ofany 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 havebeen necessary in other countries where no rank existed. No doubt, as one of aswarm, young Adams slightly knew various gilded youth who frequented balls andled 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 orBarnes 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 shadowything which seemed to vary with every street corner; a thing which had shiftingstandards, and which no one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders andbeauties of his time, with great names and of the utmost fashion, made some ofthe poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.

Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to loathe thesight of his Court dress; to groan at every announcement of a Court ball; andto dread every invitation to a formal dinner. The greatest social event gavenot half the pleasure that one could buy for ten shillings at the opera whenPatti sang Cherubino or Gretchen, and not a fourth of the education. Yet thiswas not the opinion of the best judges. Lothrop Motley, who stood among thevery best, said to him early in his apprenticeship that the London dinner andthe English country house were the perfection of human society. The young manmeditated over it, uncertain of its meaning. Motley could not have thought thedinner itself perfect, since there was not then — outside of a fewbankers or foreigners — a good cook or a good table in London, and nineout of ten of the dinners that Motley ate came from Gunter's, and all werealike. Every one, especially in young society, complained bitterly thatEnglishmen did not know a good dinner when they ate it, and could not order oneif they were given carte blanche. Henry Adams was not a judge, andknew no more than they, but he heard the complaints, and he could not thinkthat 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 theappearance 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 waythe jewels were worn. If there was a well-dressed lady at table, she was eitheran American or "fast." She attracted as much notice as though she were on thestage. No one could possibly admire an English dinner-table.

Least of all did Motley mean that the taste or the manners were perfect. Themanners of English society were notorious, and the taste was worse. Withoutexception every American woman rose in rebellion against English manners. Infact, the charm of London which made most impression on Americans was theviolence of its contrasts; the extreme badness of the worst, making backgroundfor the distinction, refinement, or wit of a few, just as the extreme beauty ofa few superb women was more effective against the plainness of the crowd. Theresult was mediæval, and amusing; sometimes coarse to a degree that mighthave startled a roustabout, and sometimes courteous and considerate to a degreethat suggested King Arthur's Round Table; but this artistic contrast was surelynot 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 talkwas good, and the standard of scholarship was high. Even there he would havebeen forced to qualify his adjectives. No German would have admitted thatEnglish scholarship was high, or that it was scholarship at all, or that anywish for scholarship existed in England. Nothing that seemed to smell of theshop or of the lecture-room was wanted. One might as well have talked ofRenan's Christ at the table of the Bishop of London, as talk of Germanphilology at the table of an Oxford don. Society, if a small literary classcould be called society, wanted to be amused in its old way. Sydney Smith, whohad amused, was dead; so was Macaulay, who instructed if he did not amuse;Thackeray died at Christmas, 1863; Dickens never felt at home, and seldomappeared, in society; Bulwer Lytton was not sprightly; Tennyson detestedstrangers; Carlyle was mostly detested by them; Darwin never came to town; themen of whom Motley must have been thinking were such as he might meet at LordHoughton's breakfasts: Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, MatthewArnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward; or perhapsGladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. A relatively small class, commonlyisolated, suppressed, and lost at the usual London dinner, such society as thiswas fairly familiar even to a private secretary, but to the literary Americanit might well seem perfection since he could find nothing of the sort inAmerica. Within the narrow limits of this class, the American Legation wasfairly at home; possibly a score of houses, all liberal, and all literary, butperfect only in the eyes of a Harvard College historian. They could teachlittle worth learning, for their tastes were antiquated and their knowledge wasignorance to the next generation. What was altogether fatal for futurepurposes, 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 privatesecretary, was that he should not only seem, but should actually be, at home.He studied carefully, and practised painfully, what seemed to be the favoriteaccomplishments of society. Perhaps his nervousness deceived him; perhaps hetook for an ideal of others what was only his reflected image; but he conceivedthat the perfection of human society required that a man should enter adrawing-room where he was a total stranger, and place himself on thehearth-rug, his back to the fire, with an air of expectant benevolence, withoutcuriosity, much as though he had dropped in at a charity concert, kindlydisposed to applaud the performers and to overlook mistakes. This ideal rarelysucceeded in youth, and towards thirty it took a form of modified insolence andoffensive patronage; but about sixty it mellowed into courtesy, kindliness, andeven deference to the young which had extraordinary charm both in women and inmen. Unfortunately Adams could not wait till sixty for education; he had hisliving to earn; and the English air of patronage would earn no income for himanywhere else.

After five or six years of constant practice, any one can acquire the habitof going from one strange company to another without thinking much of one'sself or of them, as though silently reflecting that "in a world where we areall insects, no insect is alien; perhaps they are human in parts"; but thedreamy habit of mind which comes from solitude in crowds is not fitness forsocial success except in London. Everywhere else it is injury. England was asocial kingdom whose social coinage had no currency elsewhere.

Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give nothing untilthey approached forty years old. Then they become very interesting — verycharming — to the man of fifty. The young American was not worth theyoung Englishwoman's notice, and never received it. Neither understood theother. Only in the domestic relation, in the country — never in societyat large — a young American might accidentally make friends with anEnglishwoman of his own age, but it never happened to Henry Adams. Hissusceptible nature was left to the mercy of American girls, which wasprofessional 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 thirdseason in London society saw the end of his diplomatic education, and began forhim the social life of a young man who felt at home in England — more athome there than anywhere else. With this feeling, the mere habit of going togarden-parties, dinners, receptions, and balls had nothing to do. One might goto scores without a sensation of home. One might stay in no end of countryhouses without forgetting that one was a total stranger and could never beanything else. One might bow to half the dukes and duch*esses in England, andfeel only the more strange. Hundreds of persons might pass with a nod and nevercome nearer. Close relation in a place like London is a personal mystery asprofound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and one separates himself fromthe mass to attach himself to another, and so make, little by little, agroup.

One morning, April 27, 1863, he was asked to breakfast with Sir HenryHolland, the old Court physician who had been acquainted with every AmericanMinister since Edward Everett, and was a valuable social ally, who had thecourage to try to be of use to everybody, and who, while asking the privatesecretary to breakfast one day, was too discreet to betray what he might havelearned about rebel doings at his breakfast-table the day before. He had beenfriendly with the Legation, in the teeth of society, and was still bearing upagainst the weight of opinion, so that young Adams could not decline hisinvitations, although they obliged him to breakfast in Brook Street at nineo'clock in the morning, alternately with Mr. James M. Mason. Old Dr. Hollandwas himself as hale as a hawk, driving all day bare-headed about London, andeating Welsh rarebit every night before bed; he thought that any young manshould be pleased to take his early muffin in Brook Street, and supply a fewcrumbs of war news for the daily peckings of eminent patients. Meekly, whensummoned, the private secretary went, and on reaching the front door, thisparticular morning, he found there another young man in the act of rapping theknocker. They entered the breakfastroom together, where they were introduced toeach other, and Adams learned that the other guest was a Cambridgeundergraduate, Charles Milnes Gaskell, son of James Milnes Gaskell, the Memberfor Wenlock; another of the Yorkshire Milneses, from Thornes near Wakefield.Fate had fixed Adams to Yorkshire. By another chance it happened that youngMilnes Gaskell was intimate at Cambridge with William Everett who was alsoabout to take his degree. A third chance inspired Mr. Evarts with a fancy forvisiting 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 fora few days, when William Everett did the honors as host with a kindness andattention that made his cousin sorely conscious of his own social shortcomings.Cambridge was pretty, and the dons were kind. Mr. Evarts enjoyed his visit butthis was merely a part of the private secretary's day's work. What affected hiswhole life was the intimacy then begun with Milnes Gaskell and his circle ofundergraduate friends, just about to enter the world.

Intimates are predestined. Adams met in England a thousand people, great andsmall; jostled against every one, from royal princes to gin-shop loafers;attended endless official functions and private parties; visited every part ofthe United Kingdom and was not quite a stranger at the Legations in Paris andRome; he knew the societies of certain country houses, and acquired habits ofSunday-afternoon calls; but all this gave him nothing to do, and was lifewasted. For him nothing whatever could be gained by escorting American ladiesto drawing-rooms or American gentlemen to levees at St. James's Palace, orbowing solemnly to people with great titles, at Court balls, or even byawkwardly jostling royalty at garden-parties; all this was done for theGovernment, and neither President Lincoln nor Secretary Seward would ever knowenough of their business to thank him for doing what they did not know how toget properly done by their own servants; but for Henry Adams — notprivate secretary — all the time taken up by such duties was wasted. Onthe other hand, his few personal intimacies concerned him alone, and the chancethat made him almost a Yorkshireman was one that must have started under theHeptarchy.

More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a sort of socialindependence of London. Scotland itself was hardly more distinct. The Yorkshiretype had always been the strongest of the British strains; the Norwegian andthe Dane were a different race from the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the massand the cultivation of the West Riding. London could never quite absorbYorkshire, which, in its turn had no great love for London and freely showedit. To a certain degree, evident enough to Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was notEnglish — or was all England, as they might choose to express it. Thismust have been the reason why young Adams was drawn there rather thanelsewhere. Monckton Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him, and possiblyMilnes was the only man in England with whom Henry Adams, at that moment, had achance of calling out such an un-English effort. Neither Oxford nor Cambridgenor any region south of the Humber contained a considerable house where a youngAmerican would have been sought as a friend. Eccentricity alone did not accountfor it. Monckton Milnes was a singular type, but his distant cousin, JamesMilnes Gaskell, was another, quite as marked, in an opposite sense. Milnesnever seemed willing to rest; Milnes Gaskell never seemed willing to move. Inhis youth one of a very famous group — Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Manning,Gladstone, Francis Doyle — and regarded as one of the most promising; anadorer of George Canning; in Parliament since coming of age; married into thepowerful connection of the Wynns of Wynstay; rich according to Yorkshirestandards; intimate with his political leaders; he was one of the numerousEnglishmen who refuse office rather than make the effort of carrying it, andwant power only to make it a source of indolence. He was a voracious reader andan admirable critic; he had forty years of parliamentary tradition on hismemory; he liked to talk and to listen; he liked his dinner and, in spite ofGeorge Canning, his dry champagne; he liked wit and anecdote; but he belongedto the generation of 1830, a generation which could not survive the telegraphand railway, and which even Yorkshire could hardly produce again. To anAmerican he was a character even more unusual and more fascinating than hisdistant cousin Lord Houghton.

Mr. Milnes Gaskell was kind to the young American whom his son brought tothe house, and Mrs. Milnes Gaskell was kinder, for she thought the Americanperhaps a less dangerous friend than some Englishman might be, for her son, andshe was probably right. The American had the sense to see that she was herselfone of the most intelligent and sympathetic women in England; her sister, MissCharlotte Wynn, was another; and both were of an age and a position in societythat made their friendship a complirnent as well as a pleasure. Their consentand approval settled the matter. In England, the family is a serious fact; onceadmitted to it, one is there for life. London might utterly vanish from one'shorizon, 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 inParliament 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, acharming specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, had been long left todecay as a farmhouse. She put it in order, and went there to spend a part ofthe autumn of 1864. Young Adams was one of her first guests, and drove aboutWenlock Edge and the Wrekin with her, learning the loveliness of this exquisitecountry, and its stores of curious antiquity. It was a new and charmingexistence; an experience greatly to be envied — ideal repose and ruralShakespearian peace — but a few years of it were likely to complete hiseducation, and fit him to act a fairly useful part in life as an Englishman, anecclesiastic, and a contemporary of Chaucer.

CHAPTER XIV. DILETTANTISM(1865-1866)

THE campaign of 1864 and the reëlection of Mr. Lincolnin November set the American Minister on so firm a footing that he could safelyregard his own anxieties as over, and the anxieties of Earl Russell and theEmperor Napoleon as begun. With a few months more his own term of four yearswould come to an end, and even though the questions still under discussion withEngland should somewhat prolong his stay, he might look forward with someconfidence to his return home in 1865. His son no longer fretted. The time forgoing into the army had passed. If he were to be useful at all, it must be as ason, and as a son he was treated with the widest indulgence and trust. He knewthat he was doing himself no good by staying in London, but thus far in life hehad done himself no good anywhere, and reached his twenty-seventh birthdaywithout having advanced a step, that he could see, beyond his twenty-first. Forthe most part, his friends were worse off than he. The war was about to end andthey 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 weresuddenly dropped out of his life in England. The London climate had told onsome of the family; the physicians prescribed a winter in Italy. Of course theprivate secretary was detached as their escort, since this was one of hisprofessional functions; and he passed six months, gaining an education asItalian courier, while the Civil War came to its end. As far as other educationwent, he got none, but he was amused. Travelling in all possible luxury, atsome one else's expense, with diplomatic privileges and position, was a form oftravel hitherto untried. The Cornice in vettura was delightful;Sorrento in winter offered hills to climb and grottoes to explore, and Naplesnear by to visit; Rome at Easter was an experience necessary for the educationof every properly trained private secretary; the journey north byvettura through Perugia and Sienna was a dream; the Splügen Pass,if not equal to the Stelvio, was worth seeing; Paris had always something toshow. 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 BadenBaden in these later days of its brilliancy offered some chances ofinstruction, if it were only the sight of fashionable Europe and America on therace-course watching the Duke of Hamilton, in the middle, improving his socialadvantages by the conversation of Cora Pearl.

The assassination of President Lincoln fell on the party while they were atRome, where it seemed singularly fitting to that nursery of murderers andmurdered, as though America were also getting educated. Again one went tomeditate on the steps of the Santa Maria in Ara Cœli, but the lessonseemed as shallow as before. Nothing happened. The travellers changed no planor movement. The Minister did not recall them to London. The season was overbefore they returned; and when the private secretary sat down again at his deskin Portland Place before a mass of copy in arrears, he saw before him a worldso changed as to be beyond connection with the past. His identity, if one couldcall a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain; but hislife was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a spider and had to spina new web in some new place with a new attachment.

All his American friends and contemporaries who were still alive lookedsingularly commonplace without uniforms, and hastened to get married and retireinto 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 atloggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things unchanged. Afterthe usual manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office andlost the faculty of will, the members of the Legation in London continued thedaily routine of English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened tobecome a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the young Englishmenof his time, he would have been lost; but the custom of pounding up and downRotten Row every day, on a hack, was not a taste, and yet was all the sport heshared. Evidently he must set to work; he must get a new education he mustbegin a career of his own.

Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two careers to beclosed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him; for diplomacy he already knewtoo much. Any one who had held, during the four most difficult years ofAmerican diplomacy, a position at the centre of action, with his hands actuallytouching the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna orMadrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the next President shoulddo him the honor to turn him out. For once all his advisers agreed thatdiplomacy was not possible.

In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve in the StateDepartment, but, between the President and the Senate, service of any sortbecame a delusion. The choice of career was more difficult than the educationwhich had proved impracticable. Adams saw no road; in fact there was none. Allhis friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way that he couldhave taken. John Hay passed through London in order to bury himself insecond-rate Legations for years, before he drifted home again to join WhitelawReid and George Smalley on the Tribune. Frank Barlow and FrankBartlett carried Major-Generals' commissions into small law business. Milesstayed in the army. Henry Higginson, after a desperate struggle, was forcedinto State Street; Charles Adams wandered about, with brevet-brigadier rank,trying to find employment. Scores of others tried experiments more or lessunsuccessful. Henry Adams could see easy ways of making a hundred blunders; hecould see no likely way of making a legitimate success. Such as it was, hisso-called education was wanted nowhere.

One profession alone seemed possible — the press. In 1860 he wouldhave said that he was born to be an editor, like at least a thousand otheryoung graduates from American colleges who entered the world every yearenjoying the same conviction; but in 1866 the situation was altered; thepossession of money had become doubly needful for success, and double energywas essential to get money. America had more than doubled her scale. Yet thepress was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artistsand would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write aneditorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated inten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, indiluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaperoffice. The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheapboarding-school but it was still the nearest approach to a career for theliterary survivor of a wrecked education. For the press, then, Henry Adamsdecided to fit himself, and since he could not go home to get practicaltraining, he set to work to do what he could in London.

He knew, as well as any reporter on the New York Herald, that thiswas not an American way of beginning, and he knew a certain number of otherdrawbacks which the reporter could not see so clearly. Do what he might, hedrew breath only in the atmosphere of English methods and thoughts; he couldbreathe 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 tolook and dress like an Englishwoman, no matter how she struggled. Henry Adamsfelt himself catching an English tone of mind and processes of thought, thoughat heart more hostile to them than ever. As though to make him more helplessand wholly distort his life, England grew more and more agreeable and amusing.Minister Adams became, in 1866, almost a historical monument in London; he helda position altogether his own. His old opponents disappeared. Lord Palmerstondied in October, 1865; Lord Russell tottered on six months longer, but thenvanished from power; and in July, 1866, the conservatives came into office.Traditionally the Tories were easier to deal with than the Whigs, and MinisterAdams had no reason to regret the change. His personal relations were excellentand his personal weight increased year by year. On that score the privatesecretary had no cares, and not much copy. His own position was modest, but itwas 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 dailylife he had only to reckon so many breakfasts; so many dinners; so manyreceptions, balls, theatres, and country-parties; so many cards to be left; somany Americans to be escorted — the usual routine of every young Americanin a Legation; all counting for nothing in sum, because, even if it had beenhis official duty — which it was not — it was mere routine, asingle, continuous, unbroken act, which led to nothing and nowhere exceptPortland Place and the grave.

The path that led somewhere was the English habit of mind which deepened itsruts every day. The English mind was like the London drawing-room, acomfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and fragments of incoherentfurnitures, which were never meant to go together, and could be arranged in anyrelation without making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy mightdispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innatetastes no one, except perhaps a collie dog, has the right to doubt; least ofall, the Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them asunconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers, and, in England, everyone must drift with him. Most young Englishmen drifted to the race-course orthe moors or the hunting-field; a few towards books; one or two followed someform of science; and a number took to what, for want of a better name, theycalled Art. Young Adams inherited a certain taste for the same pursuit from hisfather who insisted that he had it not, because he could not see what his sonthought he saw in Turner. The Minister, on the other hand, carried a sort ofæsthetic rag-bag of his own, which he regarded as amusem*nt, and nevercalled art. So he would wander off on a Sunday to attend service successivelyin all the city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren; or he would disappearfrom the Legation day after day to attend coin sales at Sotheby's, where hisson attended alternate sales of drawings, engravings, or water-colors. Neitherknew enough to talk much about the other's tastes, but the only differencebetween them was a slight difference of direction. The Minister's mind like hiswritings showed a correctness of form and line that his son would have beenwell pleased had he inherited.

Of all supposed English tastes, that of art was the most alluring andtreacherous. Once drawn into it, one had small chance of escape, for it had nocentre or circumference, no beginning, middle, or end, no origin, no object,and no conceivable result as education. In London one met no corrective. Theonly American who came by, capable of teaching, was William Hunt, who stoppedto paint the portrait of the Minister which now completes the family series atHarvard College. Hunt talked constantly, and was, or afterwards became, afamous teacher, but Henry Adams did not know enough to learn. Perhaps, too, hehad inherited or acquired a stock of tastes, as young men must, which he wasslow to outgrow. Hunt had no time to sweep out the rubbish of Adams's mind. Theportrait finished, he went.

As often as he could, Adams ran over to Paris, for sunshine, and therealways sought out Richardson in his attic in the Rue du Bac, or wherever helived, and they went off to dine at the Palais Royal, and talk of whateverinterested 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 hismind, and the less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad except therestaurants, while the continuous life in England made French art seem worst ofall. This did not prove that English art, in 1866, was good; far from it; butit helped to make bric-à-brac of all art, after the manner of England.

Not in the Legation, or in London, but in Yorkshire at Thornes, Adams metthe man that pushed him furthest in this English garden of innate disordercalled taste. The older daughter of the Milnes Gaskells had married FrancisTurner Palgrave. Few Americans will ever ask whether any one has described thePalgraves, but the family was one of the most describable in all England atthat day. Old Sir Francis, the father, had been much the greatest of all thehistorians of early England, the only one who was un-English; and the reason ofhis superiority lay in his name, which was Cohen, and his mind which was Cohenalso, or at least not English. He changed his name to Palgrave in order toplease his wife. They had a band of remarkable sons: Francis Turner, Gifford,Reginald, Inglis; all of whom made their mark. Gifford was perhaps the mosteccentric, but his "Travels" in Arabia were famous, even among the famoustravels of that generation. Francis Turner — or, as he was commonlycalled, Frank Palgrave — unable to work off his restlessness in travellike Gifford, and stifled in the atmosphere of the Board of Education, became acritic. His art criticisms helped to make the Saturday Review a terrorto the British artist. His literary taste, condensed into the "GoldenTreasury," helped Adams to more literary education than he ever got from anytaste of his own. Palgrave himself held rank as one of the minor poets; hishymns had vogue. As an art-critic he was too ferocious to be liked; even HolmanHunt found his temper humorous; among many rivals, he may perhaps have had aright to claim the much-disputed rank of being the most unpopular man inLondon; but he liked to teach, and asked only for a docile pupil. Adams wasdocile enough, for he knew nothing and liked to listen. Indeed, he had tolisten, whether he liked or not, for Palgrave's voice was strident, and nothingcould stop him. Literature, painting, sculpture, architecture were open fieldsfor his attacks, which were always intelligent if not always kind, and whenthese failed, he readily descended to meaner levels. John Richard Green, whowas Palgrave's precise opposite, and whose Irish charm of touch and humordefended him from most assaults, used to tell with delight of Palgrave's callon him just after he had moved into his new Queen Anne house in KensingtonSquare: "Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was, 'I'vecounted three anachronisms on your front doorstep.' "

Another savage critic, also a poet, was Thomas Woolner, a type almost moreemphatic than Palgrave in a society which resounded with emphasis. Woolner'ssculpture showed none of the rough assertion that Woolner himself showed, whenhe was not making supernatural effort to be courteous, but his busts wereremarkable, and his work altogether was, in Palgrave's clamorous opinion, thebest of his day. He took the matter of British art — or want of art— seriously, almost ferociously, as a personal grievance and torture; attimes he was rather terrifying in the anarchistic wrath of his denunciation. asHenry Adams felt no responsibility for English art, and had no American art tooffer for sacrifice, he listened with enjoyment to language much likeCarlyle's, and accepted it without a qualm. On the other hand, as a thirdmember of this critical group, he fell in with Stopford Brooke whose tastes layin the same direction, and whose expression was modified by clerical propriety.Among these men, one wandered off into paths of education much too devious andslippery for an American foot to follow. He would have done better to go on therace-track, as far as concerned a career.

Fortunately for him he knew too little ever to be an art-critic, still lessan artist. For some things ignorance is good, and art is one of them. He knewhe knew nothing, and had not the trained eye or the keen instinct that trusteditself; but he was curious, as he went on, to find out how much others knew. Hetook 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 theirauthority to any dealer, the dealer pooh-poohed it, and declared that it had noweight in the trade. If he went to a sale of drawings or paintings, atSotheby's or Christie's, an hour afterwards, he saw these same dealers watchingPalgrave or Woolner for a point, and bidding over them. He rarely found twodealers agree in judgment. He once bought a water-color from the artist himselfout of his studio, and had it doubted an hour afterwards by the dealer to whoseplace he took it for framing He was reduced to admit that he could not proveits authenticity; internal evidence was against it.

One morning in early July, 1867, Palgrave stopped at the Legation inPortland 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 rathera curious one, said to be that of Sir Anthony Westcomb, from Liverpool, with anundisturbed record of a century, but with nothing to attract notice. Probablynone but collectors or experts examined the portfolios. Some dozens of thesewere always on hand, following every sale, and especially on the lookout forold drawings, which became rarer every year. Turning rapidly over the numbers,Palgrave stopped at one containing several small drawings, one marked asRembrandt, one as Rafael; and putting his finger on the Rafael, after carefulexamination; "I should buy this," he said; "it looks to me like one of thosethings that sell for five shillings one day, and fifty pounds the next." Adamsmarked it for a bid, and the next morning came down to the auction. The numberssold slowly, and at noon he thought he might safely go to lunch. When he cameback, half an hour afterwards, the drawing was gone. Much annoyed at his ownstupidity, since Palgrave had expressly said he wanted the drawing for himselfif he had not in a manner given it to Adams, the culprit waited for the sale toclose, and then asked the clerk for the name of the buyer. It was Holloway, theart-dealer, near Covent Garden, whom he slightly knew. Going at once to theshop 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, anumber that I wanted. Do you mind letting me have it?" Holloway took out theparcel, looked over the drawings, and said that he had bought the number forthe 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 — twelveshillings.

Thus, down to that moment, every expert in London had probably seen thesedrawings. Two of them — only two — had thought them worth buying atany price, and of these two, Palgrave chose the Rafael, Holloway the one markedas Rembrandt. Adams, the purchaser of the Rafael, knew nothing whatever on thesubject, but thought he might credit himself with education to the value oftwelve shillings, and call the drawing nothing. Such items of educationcommonly came higher.

He took the drawing to Palgrave. It was closely pasted to an old, ratherthin, cardboard mount, and, on holding it up to the window, one could see lineson 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 offthe mount." Adams amused himself for a day or two by searching Rafael's worksfor 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 — theBritish 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, withsome 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, feelinghimself incompetent to discuss this subject, reported the result to Palgrave,who said that Reed knew nothing about it. Also this point lay beyond Adams'scompetence; but he noted that Reed was in the employ of the British Museum asCurator of the best — or nearly the best — collection in the world,especially of Rafaels, and that he bought for the Museum. As expert he hadrejected both the Rafael and the Rembrandt at first-sight, and after hisattention was recalled to the Rafael for a further opinion he rejected itagain.

A week later, Adams returned for the drawing, which Mr. Reed took out of hisdrawer and gave him, saying with what seemed a little doubt or hesitation: "Ishould tell you that the paper shows a water-mark, which I kind the same asthat of paper used by Marc Antonio." A little taken back by this method ofstudying art, a method which even a poor and ignorant American might use aswell 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! InAdams's opinion it was alone worth another twelve shillings as education; butthis 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, theywill read it for you."

Adams took the sheet down to the keeper of the manuscripts and begged him toread the lines. The keeper, after a few minutes' study, very obligingly said hecould not: "It is scratched with an artist's crayon, very rapidly, with manyunusual abbreviations and old forms. If any one in Europe can read it, it isthe old man at the table yonder, Libri! Take it to him!"

This expert broke down on the alphabet! He could not even judge amanuscript; but Adams had no right to complain, for he had nothing to pay, noteven twelve shillings, though he thought these experts worth more, at least forhis education. Accordingly he carried his paper to Libri, a total stranger tohim, and asked the old man, as deferentially as possible, to tell him whetherthe lines had any meaning. Had Adams not been an ignorant person he would haveknown all about Libri, but his ignorance was vast, and perhaps was for thebest. Libri looked at the paper, and then looked again, and at last bade himsit down and wait. Half an hour passed before he called Adams back and showedhim 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 headded that the abbreviations were many and unusual; that the writing was veryancient; and that the word he read as "elleria" in the first line was notItalian at all.

By this time, one had got too far beyond one's depth to ask questions. IfLibri could not read Italian, very clearly Adams had better not offer to helphim. He took the drawing, thanked everybody, and having exhausted the expertsof the British Museum, took a cab to Woolner's studio, where he showed thefigure and repeated Reed's opinion. Woolner snorted: "Reed's a fool!" he said;"he knows nothing about it; there maybe a rotten line or two, but the drawing'sall right."

For forty years Adams kept this drawing on his mantelpiece, partly for itsown interest, but largely for curiosity to see whether any critic or artistwould ever stop to look at it. None ever did, unless he knew the story. Adamshimself 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 versewere Rafael's, or whether even the water-mark was Rafael's. The experts —some scores of them including the British Museum, — had affirmed that thedrawing 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 profitedby it to that extent — his amusem*nt even more.

Art was a superb field for education, but at every turn he met the same oldfigure, like a battered and illegible signpost that ought to direct him to thenext station but never did. There was no next station. All the art of athousand — or ten thousand — years had brought England to stuffwhich Palgrave and Woolner brayed in their mortars; derided, tore in tatters,growled at, and howled at, and treated in terms beyond literary usage. Whistlerhad 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, diningwith Stopford Brooke, some one asked Adams what impression the Royal AcademyExhibition made on him. With a little hesitation, he suggested that it wasrather a chaos, which he meant for civility; but Stopford Brooke abruptly metit by asking whether chaos were not better than death. Truly the question wasworth discussion. For his own part, Adams inclined to think that neither chaosnor death was an object to him as a searcher of knowledge — neither wouldhave vogue in America — neither would help him to a career. Both of themled 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, buteven this question was open to argument. Adams went to the sales and boughtwhat he was told to buy; now a classical drawing by Rafael or Rubens; now awater-color by Girtin or Cotman, if possible unfinished because it was morelikely to be a sketch from nature; and he bought them not because they wenttogether — on the contrary, they made rather awkward spots on the wall asthey did on the mind — but because he could afford to buy those, and notothers. Ten pounds did not go far to buy a Michael Angelo, but was a great dealof 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 thoughtit*elf, history, and nature, were scrappy, and ought to be studied so. Turningfrom British art to British literature, one met the same dangers. Thehistorical school was a playground of traps and pitfalls. Fatally one fell intothe sink of history — antiquarianism. For one who nourished a naturalweakness for what was called history, the whole of British literature in thenineteenth century was antiquarianism or anecdotage, for no one except Bucklehad tried to link it with ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as havingfailed. Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest admirationfor Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even distantly imitateMacaulay would perish in self-contempt. One might as well imitate Shakespeare.Yet evidently something was wrong here, for the poet and the historian ought tohave different methods, and Macaulay's method ought to be imitable if it weresound; yet the method was more doubtful than the style. He was a dramatist; apainter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the English mind, method, genius, orwhatever one might call it; but one never could quite admit that the methodwhich ended in Froude and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion andpoetry were eccentricities. Both Froude and Kinglake, when one met them atdinner, were very agreeable, very intelligent; and perhaps the English methodwas right, and art fragmentary by essence. History, like everything else, mightbe a field of scraps, like the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace. Onefelt a little natural reluctance to decline and fall like Silas Wegg on thegolden dust-heap of British refuse; but if one must, one could at least expecta degree from Oxford and the respect of the Athenæum Club.

While drifting, after the war ended, many old American friends came abroadfor a holiday, and among the rest, Dr. Palfrey, busy with his "History of NewEngland." 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 meadowsof antiquarianism, and had forgotten the world in his pursuit of the NewEngland Puritan. Although America seemed becoming more and more indifferent tothe Puritan except as a slightly rococo ornament, he was only the more amusingas 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 theGreek sense; a justification of the ways of God to Man, or, what was much thesame thing, of Puritans to other men; and the task of justification was onerousenough to require the occasional relief of a contrast or scapegoat. When Dr.Palfrey happened on the picturesque but unpuritanic figure of Captain JohnSmith, he felt no call to beautify Smith's picture or to defend his moralcharacter; he became impartial and penetrating. The famous story of Pocahontasroused his latent New England scepticism. He suggested to Adams, who wanted tomake a position for himself, that an article in the North AmericanReview on Captain John Smith's relations with Pocahontas would attract asmuch attention, and probably break as much glass, as any other stone that couldbe thrown by a beginner. Adams could suggest nothing better. The task seemedlikely to be amusing. So he planted himself in the British Museum and patientlyworked over all the material he could find, until, at last, after three or fourmonths of labor, he got it in shape and sent it to Charles Norton, who was thenediting the North American. Mr. Norton very civilly and even kindlyaccepted it. The article appeared in January, 1867.

Surely, here was something to ponder over, as a step in education; somethingthat tended to stagger a sceptic! In spite of personal wishes, intentions, andprejudices; in spite of civil wars and diplomatic education; in spite ofdetermination to be actual, daily, and practical, Henry Adams found himself, attwenty-eight, still in English society, dragged on one side into Englishdilettantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most futile; and, on theother, into American antiquarianism, which of all antiquarianism he held themost foolish. This was the result of five years in London. Even then he knew itto be a false start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to amount toanything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with a newpurpose.

CHAPTER XV. DARWINISM(1867-1868)

POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened nooutlet for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even inPortland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly long.At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The geological champion of Darwinwas Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate at the Legation. SirCharles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave said of Tennyson, that thefirst time he came to town, Adams should be asked to meet him, but neither ofthem ever came to town, or ever cared to meet a young American, and one couldnot go to them because they were known to dislike intrusion. The only Americanswho were not allowed to intrude were the half-dozen in the Legation. Adams wascontent to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his "Voyage ofthe Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a predestined follower ofthe tide; but he was hardly trained to follow Darwin's evidences. Fragmentarythe British mind might be, but in those days it was doing a great deal of workin a very un-English way, building up so many and such vast theories on suchnarrow foundations as to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous. Theatomic theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanicaltheory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin's Law ofNatural 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 ofmathematics, he was particularly helpless; but this never stood in his way. Theideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere — to some greatgeneralization which would finish one's clamor to be educated. That a beginnershould understand them all, or believe them all, no one could expect, stillless exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist because it was easier than not, for hisignorance exceeded belief, and one must know something in order to contradicteven such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.

By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow trait of theNew England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to makehimself a convert. He did the next best thing; he became a Comteist, within thelimits of evolution. He was ready to become anything but quiet. As though theworld 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 understandthem.

He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he might get thebest part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology; a science which suitedidle minds as well as though it were history. Every curate in England dabbledin geology and hunted for vestiges of Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestigesof Natural Selection, and Adams followed him, although he cared nothing aboutSelection, unless perhaps for the indirect amusem*nt of upsetting curates. Hefelt, like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt nomore concern in Natural than in unnatural Selection, though he seized withgreediness the new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir Charles Lyellpublished 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," thenthe highest text-book of geology; but here the Darwinian doctrine grew instature. Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at last toNatural Uniformity. This was a vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniformconditions pleased every one — except curates and bishops; it was thevery best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughlyCommon-Law deity. Such a working system for the universe suited a young man whohad just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a millionlives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected toit; 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 atrue Englishman, preferred to back into it — to reach God aposteriori — rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the differenceof method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was tounite. Any road was good that arrived.

Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither andthither 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 hadacted wisely because of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one'sself-esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemedeasy. So, one day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire aboutgetting his "Principles" properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothingsimpler than to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles would tellhim what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the universe before onesuccumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir Charles's ready assent, andstill more so at finding himself, after half an hour's conversation, sittingdown to clear the minds of American geologists about the principles of theirprofession. This was getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone sofar.

The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt by Adams'slearning, nor did he throw away much concern on their account. He undertook thetask 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 ofthe "Principia," Adams would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately the merereading such works for amusem*nt is quite a different matter from studying themfor criticism. Ignorance must always begin at the beginning. Adams mustinevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason why theapple 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 wouldhave been thrown quite off his base if Sir Isaac had answered that he did notknow.

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 chasmbetween him and a uniformitarian world. If the glacial period were uniformity,what was catastrophe? To him the two or three labored guesses that Sir Charlessuggested or borrowed to explain glaciation were proof of nothing, and werequite unsolid as support for so immense a superstructure as geologicaluniformity. If one were at liberty to be as lax in science as in theology, andto assume unity from the start, one might better say so, as the Church did, andnot invite attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man,altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir IsaacNewton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views, which he thought weakas 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 thebold experiment of inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provokecorrection. "The introduction [by Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agentseemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument, obliging him toallow that causes had in fact existed on the earth capable of producing moreviolent geological changes than would be possible in our own day." The hintproduced 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 hisuniformitarian creed; but he doubted.

Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far as concernedthe article, the matter ended there, although the glacial epoch remained amisty region in the young man's Darwinism. Had it been the only one, he wouldnot have fretted about it; but uniformity often worked queerly and sometimesdid not work as Natural Selection at all. Finding himself at a loss for somesingle figure to illustrate the Law of Natural Selection, Adams asked SirCharles for the simplest case of uniformity on record. Much to his surprise SirCharles told him that certain forms, like Terebratula, appeared to beidentical from the beginning to the end of geological time. Since this wasaltogether too much uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up theattempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the end —himself. Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his purpose, heasked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate. Infinitely to hisbewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first vertebrate was a veryrespectable fish, among the earliest of all fossils, which had lived, and whosebones were still reposing, under Adams's own favorite Abbey on WenlockEdge.

By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire familiarly, andit was the part of his diplomatic education which he loved best. Like CatherineOlney in "Northanger Abbey," he yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel athome in a thirteenth-century Abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-centuryPrior's House, and both these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions orwithout, he never tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited allthe historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel andUriconium; or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins, all wasamusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roman Campagna; butperhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge on a summer afternoon and lookacross the Marches to the mountains of Wales. The peculiar flavor of thescenery has something to do with absence of evolution; it was better marked inEgypt: it was felt wherever time-sequences became interchangeable. One'sinstinct abhors time. As one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepilythrough the summer haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc orUriconium, nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the railroad;Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildwas were far superior toBridgnorth. The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa, or the monks of Buildwas, hadthey approached where he lay in the grass, would have taken him only foranother and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They would have seen little tosurprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the steam of a distantrailway. One might mix up the terms of time as one liked, or stuff the presentanywhere into the past, measuring time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, withoutviolent sense of wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but thetriumph of all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's earliestancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according toProfessor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whosekingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria. Life beganand ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without vertebratesor any other organism except a few shell-fish. On the further verge of theCambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of organic existencehad been erased.

That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American, seeking onlyfrivolous amusem*nt, should find a legitimate parentage as modern as thoughjust caught in the Severn below, astonished him as much as though he had foundDarwin himself. In the scale of evolution, one vertebrate was as good asanother. For anything he, or any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nineparts 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 fatherbreathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind wasaltogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether onetraced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. Thismatter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine andother fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher thanman; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on thefacts of moral evolution:—

"Tout bien considéré, je te soutiens en somme,
Que scélérat pour scélérat,
Il vaut mieux être un loup qu'un homme."

It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the problem ofPteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete proof of NaturalSelection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis, and that beforePteraspis was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate had been foundthere; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites whose kindlydescendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the shores of QuincyBay.

That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, orgrandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them should beolder than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor could he at allsimplify the problem by taking the sudden back-somersault into Quincy Bay insearch of the fascinating creature he had called a horseshoe, whose huge domeof shell and sharp spur of tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Siluria, heunderstood, Sir Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Limulus ,which helped nothing. Neither in the Limulus nor in theTerebratula , nor in the Cestracion Philippi ,any more thanin the Pteraspis, could one conceive an ancestor, but, if one must,the choice mattered little. Cousinship had limits but no one knew enough to fixthem. When the vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly andforever. Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace ofascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow shale, ascomplete as Adams himself — in some respects more so — at the topof the column of organic evolution: and geology offered no sort of proof thathe had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might, Adams could seenothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure inference, precisely like theinference of Paley, that, if one found a watch, one inferred a maker. He coulddetect no more evolution in life since the Pteraspis than he coulddetect it in architecture since the Abbey. All he could prove was change.Coal-power alone asserted evolution — of power — and only byviolence could be forced to assert selection of type.

All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir Charles it wasmere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles labored only to heap up theevidences 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 notuniform; and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians — exceptDarwin — Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of theAthanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of ultimateperfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in the object; butwhen he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had noFaith; that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he should surelydrop 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; thatwhat he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind wasChange.

Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of education. As he layon Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass close about him as they ortheir betters had nibbled the grass — or whatever there was to nibble— in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on anevolution far more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he couldnot account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never since the days of hisLimulus ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modesof thought might be many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions ofmillions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probablylived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which hadnever changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover andadmit 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 processwere 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 andjustly, 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 ofthought on enterprises great or small. He had no notion of letting the currentsof his action be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him, the current ofhis time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology underlock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming atultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of every question, lookinginto every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciouslypointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. Onecould not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits. One had no time topaint and putty the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. Forthe 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 themass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order;and he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though he shouldsacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million more lives.

As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this; but at thetime, he thought the price he named a high one, and he could not foresee thatscience and society would desert him in paying it. He, at least, took hiseducation 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 wasthe result of five or six years in England; a result so British as to be almostthe equivalent of an Oxford degree.

Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing his ideasabout geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who left him hisfield-compass in token of it, Adams turned resolutely to business, and attackedthe burning question of specie payments. His principles assured him that thehonest way to resume payments was to restrict currency. He thought he might wina name among financiers and statesmen at home by showing how this task had beendone by England, after the classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himselfto the study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through amorass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his confusionthat the Bank of England itself and all the best British financial writers heldthat restriction was a fatal mistake, and that the best treatment of a debasedcurrency was to let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done. Time and patiencewere the remedies.

The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was serious; muchmore serious than the shock of the Terebratula and Pteraspisto his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution was not fatal; amistake about specie payments would destroy forever the last hope of employmentin State Street. Six months of patient labor would be thrown away if he did notpublish, and with it his whole scheme of making himself a position as apractical man-of-business. If he did publish, how could he tell virtuousbankers 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 letit alone? Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revengeimpertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot orforgave.

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 onepackage, he sent it to the North American for choice. He knew that twoheavy, technical, financial studies thus thrown at an editor's head, wouldprobably return to crush the author; but the audacity of youth is moresympathetic — when successful — than his ignorance. The editoraccepted both.

When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though he were adebtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with as much relief as thedebtor, if it had brought him the loan. The letter gave the new writer literaryrank. Henceforward he had the freedom of the press. These articles, followingthose on Pocahontas and Lyell, enrolled him on the permanent staff of theNorth American Review . Precisely what this rank was worth, no onecould say; but, for fifty years the North American Review had been thestage coach which carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they hadachieved. Few writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development,but for such as thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An articlewas a small volume which required at least three months' work, and was paid, atbest, five dollars a page. Not many men even in England or France could write agood thirty-page article, and practically no one in America read them; but afew score of people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages toextract an idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game — a bluefish ora teal — worth anywhere from fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaperwriters had their eye on quarterly pickings. The circulation of theReview had never exceeded three or four hundred copies, and theReview had never paid its reasonable expenses. Yet it stood at thehead of American literary periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaperworkers; it reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was anorgan worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in someindistinct future, to playing on a New York daily newspaper.

With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself what better hecould have done. On the whole, considering his helplessness, he thought he haddone as well as his neighbors. No one could yet guess which of hiscontemporaries was most likely to play a part in the great world. A shrewdprophet in Wall Street might perhaps have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, buthardly on the Rockefellers or William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one wouldhave 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 HenryHigginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard; Howells wasnew; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start. Out of any score ofnames and reputations that should reach beyond the century, thethirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could show none that was sofar in advance as to warrant odds in its favor. The army men had for the mostpart fallen to the ranks. Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, hewould 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 wasalready old in society, and belonged to the Silurian horizon. The Prince ofWales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury hadthrown into the background the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe wasmoving rapidly, and the conduct of England during the American Civil War wasthe last thing that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 wasnearly complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himselfalmost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before he shouldfeel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary could afford to behappy. His old education was finished; his new one was not begun; he stillloitered a year, feeling himself near the end of a very long, anxious,tempestuous, successful voyage, with another to follow, and a summer seabetween.

He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back in Rome withhis friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season he wandered on horseback over thecampagna or on foot through the Rome of the middle ages, and sat once more onthe steps of Ara Cœli, as had become with him almost a superstition, likethe waters of the fountain of Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever,with its mediæval society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itselfas seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years ofaccidental education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more intelligibleto him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no better when he got backto London and went through his last season. London had become his vice. Heloved his haunts, his houses, his habits, and even his hansom cabs. He lovedgrowling 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 anddisappointments of his friends. When at last he found himself back again atLiverpool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved mechanically,unstrung, but he had no more acquired education than when he first trod thesteps of the Adelphi Hotel in November, 1858. He could see only one greatchange, and this was wholly in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed hisimagination; even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest; hefelt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British peerage, but mainlyan 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 longerwith the awe of American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather wornsuit of clothes. As far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant bysocial education, but in any case it was all the education he had gained fromseven years in London.

CHAPTER XVI. THE PRESS(1868)

AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made thetropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family clambereddown the side of their Cunard steamer into the government tugboat, which setthem ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River pier. Had theybeen Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000 landing from a galley fresh fromGibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, sochanged from what it had been ten years before. The historian of the Dutch, nolonger historian but diplomatist, started up an unknown street, in company withthe private secretary who had become private citizen, in search of carriages toconvey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous butsuccessful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in their nativeland.

How much its character had changed or was changing, they could not whollyknow, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the land itself knew nomore than they. Society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as anearthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, andto twist about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a long,straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the prairies, its few score ofleaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians farin the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage overEurope that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction, while Europewasted most of its energy in trying several contradictory movements at once;but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or oriented towards the samepoint, America might easily lose her lead. Meanwhile each newcomer needed toslip into a place as near the head of the caravan as possible, and needed mostto know where the leaders could be found.

One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten yearshad given to the great mechanical energies — coal, iron, steam — adistinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements —agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on asurvivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twistedabout, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his owntrail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belatedreveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not aPolish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaacstill reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of thecustoms — but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer handthan he — American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans andPatriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made nocomplaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse off than theIndians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by his ownpeople; but he vehemently insisted that he was not himself at fault. The defeatwas not due to him, nor yet to any superiority of his rivals. He had beenunfairly forced out of the track, and must get back into it as best hecould.

One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be fitted for thework that was before him, he had only to look at his father and Motley to seefigures less fitted for it than he. All were equally survivals from the forties— bric-à-brac from the time of Louis Philippe; stylists;doctrinaires; ornaments that had been more or less suited to the colonialarchitecture, but which never had much value in Desbrosses Street or FifthAvenue. They could scarcely have earned five dollars a day in any modernindustry. The men who commanded high pay were as a rule not ornamental. EvenCommodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked social charm. Doubtless the countryneeded ornament — needed it very badly indeed — but it neededenergy still more, and capital most of all, for its supply was ridiculously outof proportion to its wants. On the new scale of power, merely to make thecontinent habitable for civilized people would require an immediate outlay thatwould have bankrupted the world. As yet, no portion of the world except a fewnarrow stretches of western Europe had ever been tolerably provided with theessentials of comfort and convenience; to fit out an entire continent withroads 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 thesimplicity of nature's noblemen; but the mere suggestion that a sun existedabove him would outrage the self-respect of a deep-sea fish that carried alantern 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 Streetferry, found his energies exhausted in the effort to see his own length. Thenew 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 theirday's work; their attitude to the universe outside them was that of thedeep-sea fish. Above all, they naturally and intensely disliked to be told whatto do, and how to do it, by men who took their ideas and their methods from theabstract theories of history, philosophy, or theology. They knew enough to knowthat their world was one of energies quite new.

All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could not helphimself 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. Societyknew as much as this, and seemed rather inclined to boast of it, at least onthe stump; but the leaders of industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other.They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at hand. They hadbeen obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste immense energy in settling whathad been settled a thousand years before, and should never have been revived.At prodigious expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leavingeverything but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing else had asolution. 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 controloffhand; and society dropped every thought of dealing with anything more thanthe single fraction called a railway system. This relatively small part of itstask was still so big as to need the energies of a generation, for it requiredall the new machinery to be created — capital, banks, mines, furnaces,shops, power-houses, technical knowledge, mechanical population, together witha steady remodelling of social and political habits, ideas, and institutions tofit the new scale and suit the new conditions. The generation between 1865 and1895 was already mortgaged to the railways, and no one knew it better than thegeneration 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 haddetermined to strike for the railroads; Henry was to strike for the press; andthey hoped to play into each other's hands. They had great need, for they foundno one else to play with. After discovering the worthlessness of a so-callededucation, they had still to discover the worthlessness of so-called socialconnection. No young man had a larger acquaintance and relationship than HenryAdams, yet he knew no one who could help him. He was for sale, in the openmarket. So were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and knew too thatthey were cheap; to be bought at the price of a mechanic. There was noconcealment, no delicacy, and no illusion about it. Neither he nor his friendscomplained; 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 theirfitness. The want of solidarity between old and young seemed American. Theyoung man was required to impose himself, by the usual business methods, as anecessity 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 mancomplained to him in after life of the same experience, which became a matterof curious reflection as he grew old. The labor market of good society wasill-organized.

Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor. A peculiar andperplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had changed much in tenyears, it was not less perplexing. One no longer dined at two o'clock; onecould no longer skate on Back Bay; one heard talk of Bostonians worth fivemillions or more as something not incredible. Yet the place seemed stillsimple, and less restless-minded than ever before. In the line that Adams hadchosen to follow, he needed more than all else the help of the press, but anyshadow of hope on that side vanished instantly. The less one meddled with theBoston press, the better. All the newspapermen were clear on that point. Thesame was true of politics. Boston meant business. The Bostonians were buildingrailways. Adams would have liked to help in building railways, but had noeducation. He was not fit.

He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations, renewingfriendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years old, the man who hasnot yet got further than to study the situation, is lost, or near it. He couldsee nothing in the situation that could be of use to him. His friends had wonno 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 ofincome. His brother John had become a brilliant political leader on the wrongside. 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 lifeof 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had learned so painfully inLondon 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 gavewas much gayer and pleasanter, and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships inthat 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, andasking the same question of the future. None could help. Society seemed foundedon the law that all was for the best New Yorkers in the best of Newports, andthat all young people were rich if they could waltz. It was a new version ofthe 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 acquaintancewith his doings, was Edward Atkinson. Boston was cool towards sons, whetherprodigals or other, and needed much time to make up its mind what to do forthem — time which Adams, at thirty years old, could hardly spare. He hadnot the courage or self-confidence to hire an office in State Street, as somany of his friends did, and doze there alone, vacuity within and a snowstormoutside, waiting for Fortune to knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleepin 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 wasone of the points in practical education which most needed a clearunderstanding, and he could never reach it. His father and mother would havebeen glad to see him stay with them and begin reading Blackstone again, and heshowed no very filial tenderness by abruptly breaking the tie that had lastedso long. After all, perhaps Beacon Street was as good as any other street forhis objects in life; possibly his easiest and surest path was from BeaconStreet to State Street and back again, all the days of his years. Who couldtell? Even after life was over, the doubt could not be determined.

In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path that had led himfrom the beginning. Boston was full of his brothers. He had reckoned fromchildhood on outlawry as his peculiar birthright. The mere thought of beginninglife again in Mount Vernon Street lowered the pulsations of his heart. This isa story of education — not a mere lesson of life — and, witheducation, temperament has in strictness nothing to do, although in practicethey run close together. Neither by temperament nor by education was he fittedfor Boston. He had drifted far away and behind his companions there; no onetrusted his temperament or education; he had to go.

Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his plan of joiningthe press, and selected Washington as the shortest road to New York, but, in1868, Washington stood outside the social pale. No Bostonian had ever gonethere. One announced one's self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a personof deplorably bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances of ending inthe 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 musteducate himself over again, for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostileto 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 israrely serious for a young American unless he is married, and money nevertroubled Adams more than others; not because he had it, but because he could dowithout it, like most people in Washington who all lived on the income ofbricklayers; but with or without money he met the difficulty that, aftergetting to Washington in order to go on the press, it was necessary to seek apress to go on. For large work he could count on the North AmericanReview, but this was scarcely a press. For current discussion andcorrespondence, he could depend on the New York Nation; but what heneeded was a New York daily, and no New York daily needed him. He lost his onechance by the death of Henry J. Raymond. The Tribune under HoraceGreeley was out of the question both for political and personal reasons, andbecause Whitelaw Reid had already undertaken that singularly venturesomeposition, amid difficulties that would have swamped Adams in four-and-twentyhours. Charles A. Dana had made the Sun a very successful as well as avery amusing paper, but had hurt his own social position in doing it; and Adamsknew himself well enough to know that he could never please himself and Danatoo; with the best intentions, he must always fail as a blackguard, and at thattime a strong dash of blackguardism was life to the Sun. As for theNew York Herald, it was a despotic empire admitting no personality butthat of Bennett. Thus, for the moment, the New York daily press offered nofield except the free-trade Holy Land of the Evening Post underWilliam Cullen Bryant, while beside it lay only the elevated plateau of the NewJerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation. Much as Adams likedGodkin, and glad as he was to creep under the shelter of the EveningPost and the Nation, he was well aware that he should find thereonly the same circle of readers that he reached in the North AmericanReview.

The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington, except forthe personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then Attorney General and livingthere, he would stand in solitude much like that of London in 1861. Evarts didwhat no one in Boston seemed to care for doing; he held out a hand to the youngman. Whether Boston, like Salem, really shunned strangers, or whether Evartswas an exception even in New York, he had the social instinct which Boston hadnot. Generous by nature, prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and aborn man-of-the-world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without scruple, andaccepted the world without fearing or abusing it. His wit was the least part ofhis 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 histemper or became ill-natured. Like all New Yorkers he was decidedly not aBostonian; but he was what one might call a transplanted New Englander, likeGeneral Sherman; a variety, grown in ranker soil. In the course of life, and inwidely different countries, Adams incurred heavy debts of gratitude to personson whom he had no claim and to whom he could seldom make return; perhapshalf-a-dozen such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is a large numberas lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily than when Mr. Evarts tookhim to Washington in October, 1868.

Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep gratitude, the morebecause 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 theshelter of Mr. Evarts's house in H Street at the corner of Fourteenth, where heabode in safety and content till he found rooms in the roomless village. To himthe village seemed unchanged. Had he not known that a great war and eight yearsof astonishing movement had passed over it, he would have noticed nothing thatbetrayed growth. As of old, houses were few; rooms fewer; even the men were thesame. No one seemed to miss the usual comforts of civilization, and Adams wasglad 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 firstacquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an aspirant to the pressofficially paid respect. Evarts immediately took him to the White House andpresented him to President Andrew Johnson. The interview was brief andconsisted in the stock remark common to monarchs and valets, that the young manlooked even younger than he was. The younger man felt even younger than helooked. He never saw the President again, and never felt a wish to see him, forAndrew Johnson was not the sort of man whom a young reformer of thirty, withtwo or three foreign educations, was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet, musingover the interview as a matter of education, long years afterwards, he couldnot help recalling the President's figure with a distinctness that surprisedhim. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and statesman sat in his chair at hisdesk with a look of self-esteem that had its value. None doubted. All weregreat men; some, no doubt, were greater than others; but all were statesmen andall were supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness. Tothem the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their universe, aSouthern conception of right. Lamar used to say that he never entertained adoubt of the soundness of the Southern system until he found that slavery couldnot stand a war. Slavery was only a part of the Southern system, and the lifeof it all — the vigor — the poetry — was its moral certaintyof self. The Southerner could not doubt; and this self-assurance not only gaveAndrew Johnson the look of a true President, but actually made him one. WhenAdams came to look back on it afterwards, he was surprised to realize howstrong the Executive was in 1868 — perhaps the strongest he was ever tosee. Certainly he never again found himself so well satisfied, or so much athome.

Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man, though showingmarks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed little changed in these eightyears. He was the same — with a difference. Perhaps he — unlikeHenry Adams — had at last got an education, and all he wanted. Perhaps hehad resigned himself to doing without it. Whatever the reason, although hismanner was as roughly kind as ever, and his talk as free, he appeared to haveclosed his account with the public; he no longer seemed to care; he askednothing, gave nothing, and invited no support; he talked little of himself orof others, and waited only for his discharge. Adams was well pleased to be nearhim in these last days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in theevenings 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 evenas a volunteer — recognized some personal relation, he asked Mr. Sewardto dine with him one evening in his rooms, and play his game of whist there, ashe did every night in his own house. Mr. Seward came and had his whist, andAdams remembered his rough parting speech: "A very sensible entertainment!" Itwas the only favor he ever asked of Mr. Seward, and the only one he everaccepted.

Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example, Governor Sewardpassed out of one's life, and Adams lost what should have been his firmestally; but in truth the State Department had ceased to be the centre of hisinterest, and the Treasury had taken its place. The Secretary of the Treasurywas a man new to politics — Hugh McCulloch — not a person of muchimportance in the eyes of practical politicians such as young members of thepress meant themselves to become, but they all liked Mr. McCulloch, though theythought him a stop-gap rather than a force. Had they known what sort of forcesthe Treasury was to offer them for support in the generation to come, theymight have reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams wasfated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he ever cared toknow, and he rather came back in the end to the idea that McCulloch was thebest 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 ordecorative. He was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the narrowprejudice which the serf feels to his overerseer; for he knew he must obey, andhe knew that the helpless showed only their helplessness when they temperedobedience by mockery. The world, after 1865, became a bankers' world, and nobanker would ever trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone toWashington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at all, for hecould not have put up enough collateral to borrow five thousand dollars of anybank in America. The banker never would trust him, and he would never trust thebanker. To him, the banking mind was obnoxious; and this antipathy caused himthe 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 wasvery great. The whole financial system was in chaos; every part of it requiredreform; the utmost experience, tact, and skill could not make the machine worksmoothly. No one knew how well McCulloch did it until his successor took it incharge, and tried to correct his methods. Adams did not know enough toappreciate McCulloch's technical skill, but he was struck at his open andgenerous treatment of young men. Of all rare qualities, this was, in Adams'sexperience, the rarest. As a rule, officials dread interference. The strongestoften resent it most. Any official who admits equality in discussion of hisofficial course, feels it to be an act of virtue; after a few months or yearshe tires of the effort. Every friend in power is a friend lost. This rule is sonearly 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 jealousywhich are the commoner results of early political education. He had neitherpast nor future, and could afford to be careless of his company. Adams foundhim surrounded by all the active and intelligent young men in the country. Fullof faith, greedy for work, eager for reform, energetic, confident, capable,quick of study, charmed with a fight, equally ready to defend or attack, theywere unselfish, and even — as young men went — honest. They camemostly from the army, with the spirit of the volunteers. Frank Walker, FrankBarlow, Frank Bartlett were types of the generation. Most of the press, andmuch of the public, especially in the West, shared their ideas. No one deniedthe need for reform. The whole government, from top to bottom, was rotten withthe 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 fabricrequired reconstruction as much as in 1789, for the Constitution had become asantiquated as the Confederation. Sooner or later a shock must come, the moredangerous 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 governmentneeded reform most urgently; all needed it enough, but no one denied that thefinances were a scandal, and a constant, universal nuisance. The tariff wasworse, though more interests upheld it. McCulloch had the singular merit offacing reform with large good-nature and willing sympathy — outside ofparties, jobs, bargains, corporations or intrigues — which Adams neverwas to meet again.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil War had bredlife. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer type were not alwaysdocile under control, but they were handy in a fight. Adams was greatly pleasedto 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 — inthe atmosphere of the Treasury. He had no strong party passion, and he felt asthough 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 wasalive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme Court was about to take up theLegal Tender cases where Judge Curtis had been employed to argue against theconstitutional power of the Government to make an artificial standard of valuein time of peace. Evarts was anxious to fix on a line of argument that shouldhave a chance of standing up against that of Judge Curtis, and was puzzled todo it. He did not know which foot to put forward. About to deal with JudgeCurtis, the last of the strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could risk nochances. In doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to discuss, andEvarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving, dining, walkinghe provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He needed an anvil, he said, tohammer his ideas on.

Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all, more solid thanthe hammer; and he did not feel called on to treat Mr. Evarts's arguments withmore respect than Mr. Evarts himself expressed for them; so he contradictedwith freedom. Like most young men, he was much of a doctrinaire, and thequestion was, in any event, rather historical or political than legal. He couldeasily maintain, by way of argument, that the required power had never beengiven, and that no sound constitutional reason could possibly exist forauthorizing the Government to overthrow the standard of value withoutnecessity, 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 Justicehimself. Following up the subject for his letters to the Nation andhis articles in the North American Review, Adams grew to be intimatewith the Chief Justice, who, as one of the oldest and strongest leaders of theFree Soil Party, had claims to his personal regard; for the old Free Soilerswere becoming few. Like all strong-willed and self-asserting men, Mr. Chase hadthe faults of his qualities. He was never easy to drive in harness, or light inhand. He saw vividly what was wrong, and did not always allow for what wasrelatively right. He loved power as though he were still a Senator. Hisposition towards Legal Tender was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury he hadbeen its author; as Chief Justice he became its enemy. Legal Tender caused nogreat pleasure or pain in the sum of life to a newspaper correspondent, but itserved as a subject for letters, and the Chief Justice was very willing to winan ally in the press who would tell his story as he wished it to be read. Theintimacy in Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly, and the alliance was no small helpto the comforts of a struggling newspaper adventurer in Washington. No matterwhat one might think of his politics or temper, Mr. Chase was a dramaticfigure, of high senatorial rank, if also of certain senatorial faults; avaluable ally.

As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met Charles Sumner onthe street, and instantly stopped to greet him. As though eight years of brokenties were the natural course of friendship, Sumner at once, after anexclamation of surprise, dropped back into the relation of hero to the schoolboy. Adams enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner wasfifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever dreamed of, and hefelt 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 itbristled with thorns, for Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not been the mostdelicate of his ruptured relations, and he was liable to be sensitive in manyways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in constant mind; yet it interestedand fascinated Henry Adams as a new study of political humanity. The youngerman knew that the meeting would have to come, and was ready for it, if only asa newspaper need; but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a disagreeable one,as Adams conceived. He learned something — a piece of practical educationworth the effort — by watching Sumner's behavior. He could see that manythoughts — mostly unpleasant — were passing through his mind, sincehe made no inquiry about any of Adams's family, or allusion to any of hisfriends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present. To him, Adamsin Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic, perhaps a spy,certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of others; a politicianwithout party; a writer without principles; an office-seeker certain to beg forsupport. All this was, for his purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, andwould 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. Hewas 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 afourth 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 curiousgaps 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. Attimes he inclined to think that Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the politicalwilderness, craved educated society; but this hardly told the whole story.Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects imageswithout absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself. The images fromwithout, the objects mechanically perceived by the senses, existed by courtesyuntil 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 wouldhave ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected, as it hadmechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more aggressively egoistic thanother Senators — Conkling, for instance — but that with him thedisease had affected the whole mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, withother Senators for the most part, it was still acute.

Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable acquaintance fora newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful; perhaps quite the most useful ofall these great authorities who were the stock-in-trade of the newspaperbusiness; the accumulated capital of a Silurian age. A few months or yearsmore, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town itself, changing butnot 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, onefound all one's acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and nationalgovernment. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or fashionablestranger 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 agreat city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps one or two ofthe diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of world. The happy village wasinnocent of a club. The one-horse tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample fortraffic. Every pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society metto bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The StateDepartment was lodged in an infant asylum far out on Fourteenth Street whileMr. Mullett was constructing his architectural infant asylum next the WhiteHouse. The value of real estate had not increased since 1800, and the pavementswere more impassable than the mud. All this favored a young man who had come tomake a name. In four-and-twenty hours he could know everybody; in two dayseverybody knew him.

After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore the outskirtsof 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 themen he was to work with — or against — he had to admit thatnine-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 theWestern Congressman, and to hide his own antecedents. The task was amusing. Hecould see nothing to prevent him from enjoying it, with immoral unconcern forall that had gone before and for anything that might follow. The lobby offereda spectacle almost picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were moreentertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew more of life than all thedepartments of the Government together, including the Senate and theSmithsonian. Society had not much to give, but what it had, it gave with anopen hand. For the moment, politics had ceased to disturb social relations. Allparties were mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water. TheGovernment resembled Adams himself in the matter of education. All that hadgone 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 oflow spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the overpoweringbeauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost unendurable for its strainon one who had toned his life down to the November grays and browns of northernEurope. Life could not go on so beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else feltit 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 thoseof a clerk in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown, wherean old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the Russian Minister Stoeckellong before, had bought or built a new house. Congress had met. Two or threemonths remained to the old administration, but all interest centred in the newone. The town began to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young writer waslost. He drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover ofthe confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew he shouldfail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but he picked up friends onthe press — Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles —all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled together in a tidal wave ofexpectation, waiting for General Grant to give orders. No one seemed to knowmuch about it. Even Senators had nothing to say. One could only make notes andstudy finance.

In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusem*nts of Washington,education had no part, but the simplicity of the amusem*nts proved thesimplicity of everything else, ambitions, interests, thoughts, and knowledge.Proverbially Washington was a poor place for education, and of course youngdiplomats avoided or disliked it, but, as a rule, diplomats disliked everyplace except Paris, and the world contained only one Paris. They abused Londonmore violently than Washington; they praised no post under the sun; and theywere merely describing three-fourths of their stations when they complainedthat there were no theatres, no restaurants, no monde, nodemi-monde, no drives, no splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used tosay, no grandezza. This was all true; Washington was a mere politicalcamp, as transient and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, butthe diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought forthere than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men Washington was in oneway paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand. After watching theabject unimportance of the young diplomat in London society, Adams foundhimself a young duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make up, and aravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society he had ever seen, andeven the Bostonian became simple, good-natured, almost genial, in the softnessof a Washington spring. Society went on excellently well without houses, orcarriages, or jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, orgrandezza 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 theWashington girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated norclever, had singular charm, and used it. According to Mr. Adams the father,this charm dated back as far as Monroe's administration, to his personalknowledge.

Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial or newspapertraining, the social side of Washington was to be taken for granted asthree-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing. Life ceased to bestrenuous, and the victim thanked God for it. Politics and reform became thedetail, and waltzing the profession. Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had asprivate secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerousexample of frivolity. The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with himfrom Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey. Anotherimpenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far down in thelist. He wished he had been higher. He could have spared a world ofsuperannuated history, science, or politics, to have reversed better inwaltzing.

He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of women, andWashington offered no standard of comparison. All were profoundly ignoranttogether, 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 worldof strenuousness could dream of. This must be taken as background for suchlittle 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 presence of hard work. If the worldwants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if it will not pay, it has nofault to find with the worker. Thus far, no one had made a suggestion of payfor any work that Adams had done or could do; if he worked at all, it was forsocial consideration, and social pleasure was his pay. For this he was willingto 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 hasexpired, since they cannot help themselves, and they find their return in thepride of their social superiority as they feel it. Society commonly abets themand encourages their attitude of contempt. The society of Washington was toosimple and Southern as yet, to feel anarchistic longings, and it never read orsaw what artists produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when ithad the chance, and respected itself the more for the frailty. Adams found eventhe 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 wouldhave required of him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work defiedfrivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world ever got fromreading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was he. One must not try toamuse moneylenders or investors, and this was the class to which he began byappealing. He gave three months to an article on the finances of the UnitedStates, just then a subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finishedit, he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous editor of theEdinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good; at all events, hesaid so; and he printed it in April. Of course it was reprinted in America, butin England such articles were still anonymous, and the author remainedunknown.

The author was not then asking for advertisem*nt, and made no claim forcredit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a place on the staff of theEdinburgh Review, under the vast shadow of Lord Macaulay; and, to ayoung American in 1868, such rank seemed colossal — the highest in theliterary world — as it had been only five-and-twenty years before. Timeand tide had flowed since then, but the position still flattered vanity, thoughit 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 theNorth American Review. In England, Lord Robert Cecil had invented forthe London Quarterly an annual review of politics which he called the"Session." Adams stole the idea and the name — he thought he had beenenough in Lord Robert's house, in days of his struggle with adversity, toexcuse the theft — and began what he meant for a permanent series ofannual political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a politicalauthority. With his sources of information, and his social intimacies atWashington, he could not help saying something that would command attention. Hehad the field to himself, and he meant to give himself a free hand, as he wenton. 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 inCongress or reports to the President that could be crammed into the Governmentpresses.

The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could not becondensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in October byanother which bore the title of "Civil Service Reform," and was really a partof 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 andnever 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 hecan select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. The fatefulyear 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; volumesto pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and Robert LouisStevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling brought up the rear,and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found himself fifty years behind histime, but a number of belated wanderers kept him company, and they produced oneach other the effect or illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, atlonger and longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still withinhearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially conservative.Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority, of the quarterlies laid downan apparent law, and no one could surely say where the real authority, or thereal law, lay. Science lid not know. Truths a priori held their ownagainst truths surely relative. According to Lowell, Right was forever on thescaffold, Wrong was forever on the Throne; and most people still thought theybelieved it. Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and hecould 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 thatrespect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if this had been hisonly hazard. Where he broke down was at a point where he always suffered wreckand where nine adventurers out of ten make their errors. One may be more orless certain of organized forces; one can never be certain of men. He belongedto the eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his plans. Forthe moment, America was more eighteenth century than himself; it reverted tothe stone age.

As education — of a certain sort — the story had probably acertain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see much educationin the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule. The lesson itteaches is only that of getting out of the animal's way. This was the lessonthat 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, andprobably had been more or less affected in their choice by the parallel theyfelt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more obvious. Grantrepresented order. He was a great soldier, and the soldier always representedorder. He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organizedand commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know how toadminister. Even Washington, who was, in education and experience, a merecave-dweller, had known how to organize a government, and had found Jeffersonsand Hamiltons to organize his departments. The task of bringing the Governmentback to regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order toadministration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do it itself, with alittle encouragement. No doubt the confusion, especially in the old slaveStates and in the currency, was considerable, but, the general disposition wasgood, 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 wasunreasonable. 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 goodintentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect forthe 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 andtact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: "Youcan't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take astick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too little, compared with theSecretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh evenas applied to the average Congressman of 1869 — he saw little or nothingof later ones — but he knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He hadbut to ask: "If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocentquestion, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sata week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief. Thecomic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but faction hadgone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catchhysterics of nervous bucking without apparent reason. Great leaders, likeSumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesque thanridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, becamewitty on their account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughingmatter. They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, andeven McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of a reformPresident was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.

Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope that anyPresident chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians would raise thecharacter of government; and by instinct if not by reason, all the world unitedon Grant. The Senate understood what the world expected, and waited in silencefor a struggle with Grant more serious than that with Andrew Johnson.Newspaper-men were alive with eagerness to support the President against theSenate. The newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and hisperson feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one senseand thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote, felt alikeabout the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was eager to join in thefight which he foresaw as sooner or later inevitable. He meant to support theExecutive in attacking the Senate and taking away its two-thirds vote and powerof confirmation, nor did he much care how it should be done, for he thought itsafer 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 namesannounced 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 whichactually, within five minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity solaughable as to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinetannouncements not much weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none ofthem made him blush, while Grant's nominations had the singular effect ofmaking the hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had madeanother total misconception of life — another inconceivable false start.Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and hisintention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of sayingwith senatorial frankness that Grant's nominations betrayed his intent asplainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier might be a babypolitician.

Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition that herecalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13, 1861; he felt inhimself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, "the incapacity of viewing things allround." He knew, without absolutely saying it, that Grant had cut short thelife which Adams had laid out for himself in the future. After such amiscarriage, no thought of effectual reform could revive for at least onegeneration, and he had no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could hesail next? He had tried so many, and society had barred them all! For themoment, he saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launchedhimself. The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile. Subsequently Grantmade changes in the list which were mostly welcome to a Bostonian — orshould have been — although fatal to Adams. The name of Hamilton Fish, asSecretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism and probable deference toSumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as Secretary of the Treasury, suggestedonly a somewhat lugubrious joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as theopposite of Mr. McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain words, totalextinction for any one resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the name ofJacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the Interior, suggested help and comfort; whilethat of Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, thepersonal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful, and thepolitical outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant himself. No one doubtedthat Grant's intention had been one of reform; that his aim had been to placehis administration above politics; and until he should actually drive hissupporters away, one might hope to support him. One's little lantern musttherefore be turned on Grant. One seemed to know him so well, and really knewso little.

By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of rooms atDohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the two men dinedtogether and became intimate. Badeau was exceedingly social, though not inappearance imposing. He was stout; his face was red, and his habits wereregularly irregular; but he was very intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and anexcellent military historian. His life of Grant was no ordinary book. Unlikemost newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of Grant, as suited an officer whohad been on the General's staff. As a rule, the newspaper correspondents inWashington were unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heardtales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army officerswere no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow, dull, andvindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a consulate which was slowto reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and becameirritable, besides being loquacious. He talked much about Grant, and showed acertain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a true literary criticwould naturally do. Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who actedas his patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive abouteither, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood theGeneral. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerfulwhen awake, but passive and plastic in repose. He said that neither he nor therest of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of hissuccess. For stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the otherswould systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but bydiscussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would announce theidea as his own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would givethe 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 couldnever follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he didthink.

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 inorder to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his portrait gallery of greatmen was becoming large, and it amused him to add an authentic likeness of thegreatest general the world had seen since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis wasrather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or CharlesNordhoff.

Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to thePresident and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen Presidents at theWhite House, and the most famous were by no means the most agreeable, but hefound Grant the most curious object of study among them all. About no one didopinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. Asingle word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words herisked, the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the sameintellectual or unintellectual type — Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldiseemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellectcounted for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual,archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers. Adam, according tolegend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences andvariations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less theywasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustfulof themselves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or lessdull in outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom action wasthe highest stimulant — the instinct of fight. Such men were forces ofnature, energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis , but they madeshort work of scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more inthem than in others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect atonce.

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw only anuncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow; only whentorpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand near, like Rawlins,and practice more or less sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond theexperience of Wall Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of thesame intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Letus have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or ascore of such reversible sentences generally to be gauged by theirsententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when heseriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be afine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have takenrank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of simplicity notsingular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual commonplace, in aVirginian form, not to the same degree, but quite distinctly enough for one whoknew the American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, asusual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like theTerebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right toexist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grewolder, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That,two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man likeGrant should be called — and should actually and truly be — thehighest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. Onemust be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such anabsurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to PresidentGrant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was worth the penthat 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 acave and worn skins. Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting tothe stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that ofevolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch atrait 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 whodied 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 thetradition of New York social values; he was human and took no pleasure ingiving pain. Adams felt no prejudice whatever in his favor, and he had nothingin mind or person to attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable; hewas not in the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he won confidencefrom 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 theInterior Department with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the Treasury andBoutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite satisfied as far aspersonal relations went, while, in the Attorney-General's Office, Judge Hoarseemed to fill every possible ideal, both personal and political.

The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole governmentbeen filled with them, it would have helped little without the President andthe Treasury. Grant avowed from the start a policy of drift; and a policy ofdrift attaches only barnacles. At thirty, one has no interest in becoming abarnacle, but even in that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen. Hisfriends were reformers, critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he washimself an object of suspicion. Grant had no objects, wanted no help, wishedfor no champions. The Executive asked only to be let alone. This was hismeaning when he said: "Let us have peace! "

No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his hopes of successin life turned on his finding an administration to support. He knew well enoughthe rules of self-interest. He was for sale. He wanted to be bought. His pricewas excessively cheap, for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, noton 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. Foronce, 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, butthe young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his son Sam toWashington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the charm ofWashington spring. Education for education, none ever compared with the delightof this. The Potomac and its tributaries squandered beauty. Rock Creek was aswild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a negro log cabin alone disturbedthe dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel. The tulip and thechestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, fulloutlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom.The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the runningwater; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitarywoods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown himthe same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that markedthe 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 Southernways of the summer village about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights ofinheritance could not be questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to questionthem.

In spite of the fatal deception — or undeception — about Grant'spolitical character, Adams's first winter in Washington had so much amused himthat he had not a thought of change. He loved it too much to question itsvalue. What did he know about its value, or what did any one know? His fatherknew more about it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused to find thathis father, whose recollections went back to 1820, betrayed for Washington muchthe same sentimental weakness, and described the society about President Monroemuch as his son felt the society about President Johnson. He feared its effecton young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two of hisbrothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in Quincy orBoston was not likely to deaden it.

Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw Boutwells atevery counter. He found a personal grief in every tree. Fifteen or twenty yearsafterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him by mourning over the narrow escapethat nature had made in attaining perfection. Except for two mistakes, theearth would have been a success. One of these errors was the inclination of theecliptic; the other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddestthought about the last was that it should have been so modern. Adams, in hissplenetic temper, held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked theirworst on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and sex was a speciesof crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was asthin as the elm trees. Of course he was in the wrong. The thinness was inhimself, not in Boston; but this is a story of education, and Adams wasstruggling to shape himself to his time. Boston was trying to do the samething. Everywhere, except in Washington, Americans were toiling for the sameobject. Every one complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington,there were no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better than itsneighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove it, even to Adams'sconfusion.

Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over, and inanother six weeks the effects of President Grant's character showed themselves.They were startling — astounding — terrifying. The mystery thatshrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold inSeptember, 1869, has never been cleared up — at least so far as to makeit intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into thebelief that he could safely corner gold without interference from theGovernment. He took a number of precautions, which he admitted; and he spent alarge sum of money, as he also testified, to obtain assurances which were notsufficient to have satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Anycriminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously, that nosuch 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 pleawas professionally inadmissible.

This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to start aninvestigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from the White House orthe Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him. To young men wastingtheir summer at Quincy for want of some one to hire their services at threedollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adamsjumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or hisâme damnée Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and with aslittle fear of consequences. They risked something; no one could say what; butthe people about the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.

The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway was a taskthat 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 itup. The surface was in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and theypaid 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 penetratethe political mystery, and for this purpose he had to wait for Congress tomeet. At first he feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but theCongressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew all thatwas to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by theGovernment.

Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or historians,for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery, and as usual, the chiefmystery was the means of making sure that any mystery existed. All Adams'sgreat friends — Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings— were precisely the persons most mystified. They knew less than Adamsdid; they sought information, and frankly admitted that their relations withthe White House and the Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteeredadvice. No one offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the press,although press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions withtheir usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a quantity ofevidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze. Although the faultlay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie nowhere else, the trailalways faded and died out at the point where any member of the Administrationbecame visible. Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself fearedfinding out too much. He found out too much already, when he saw in evidencethat Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching his net over Grant'sclosest surroundings, and that Boutwell's incompetence was the bottom ofGould's calculation. With the conventional air of assumed confidence, every onein public assured every one else that the President himself was the savior ofthe situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had notbeen caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the ways of WallStreet were dark and double. All this was wildly exciting to Adams. That Grantshould have fallen, within six months, into such a morass — or shouldhave let Boutwell drop him into it — rendered the outlook for the nextfour years — probably eight — possibly twelve — mysterious,or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his wagon, as Emerson toldhim, to the star of reform. The country might outlive it, but not he. The worstscandals of the eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side ofthis, which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems,professions, and people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirtycesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man,fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter anhonorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a newWashington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping thestables of American society clear of the endless corruption which his secondWashington was quite certain to breed.

By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an AssistantSecretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie scandal, and still helphis friends or allies in the Government who were doing their best to give it anair of decency; but a few weeks showed that the Erie scandal was a mereincident, a rather vulgar Wall Street trap, into which, according to one'spoint of view Grant had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misledby Grant. One could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished anddisgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute Americanmind — still less the complex Jew — could ever have accustomeditself to the incredible and inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; andperhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if victims theyboth were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap which might easily havebecome the penitentiary, led the United States Senate, the Executivedepartments and the Judiciary into confusion, cross-purposes, and ill-temperthat would have been scandalous in a boarding-school of girls. For satirists orcomedians, the study was rich and endless, and they exploited its corners withhappy results, but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity of Londonnoticed with horror that the grossest satires on the American Senator andpolitician never failed to excite the laughter and applause of every audience.Rich and poor joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives. Societylaughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure. Nothingremained 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 thepublic. Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind offolly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragmentsthat 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 thechance. He is horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards. One dulladministration can rapidly drive out every active subordinate. At Washington,in 1869-70, every intelligent man about the Government prepared to go. Thepeople 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 contentthemselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on theirrailroads 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 heunderstood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one who couldinterfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in it, alone. What hedid there, no one knew. His colleagues asked him in vain. Not a word could theyget from him, either in the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or informationon matters even of vital interest. The Treasury as an active influence ceasedto exist. Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society to drag hisdepartment 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 onlythe State and Interior Departments left to serve. He wanted no better than toserve them. Opposition was his horror; pure waste of energy; a union withNorthern Democrats and Southern rebels who never had much in common with anyAdams, and had never shown any warm interest about them except to drive themfrom public life. If Mr. Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with theindifference or contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened theState Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as anynewspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this last plank ofsalvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized champion of Mr. Fish in theNew York press. He never once thought of his disaster between Seward and Sumnerin 1861. Such an accident could not occur again. Fish and Sumner wereinseparable, and their policy was sure to be safe enough for support. Nomosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught a second time between a Secretaryand a Senator who were both his friends.

This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861. Adams sawSumner take possession of the Department, and he approved; he saw Sumner seizethe British mission for Motley, and he was delighted; but when he renewed hisrelations with Sumner in the winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp theidea that Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he proposed also toforce on the Department. This was not all. Secretary Fish seemed to havevanished. Besides the Department of State over which he nominally presided inthe Infant Asylum on Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of ForeignRelations 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 theWest Indies which no Northeastern man ever approved. For his life, Adams couldnot learn where to place himself among all these forces. Officially he wouldhave followed the responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find theSecretary. 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 neverhad a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he did know, he wasready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came only when he heardSumner's views, which, as he had reason to know, were always commands, to bedisregarded only by traitors.

Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams gasped withfresh astonishment at every new article of the creed. To his profound regret heheard 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 ofSamana as an alternative, and ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened withincredulous stupor while Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating andpressing every possible American claim against England, with a view ofcompelling the cession of Canada to the United States.

Adams did not then know — in fact, he never knew, or could find anyone 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 gameof cross-purposes was as impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the GoldConspiracy. President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported, Adamscould 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 aboutEngland, and he listened with the more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, becauseit opened the gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, andCanada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams was ready totreat it seriously; but if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as avoluntary 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 onlywonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr. Fish did say it, ayear later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.

Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as toquarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnsonwas bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant waslunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper orintellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared tochallenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was a very lightweight in the Republican Party, if separated from his Committee of ForeignRelations. As a party manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whosevery names were unknown to him.

Between these great forces, where was the Administration and how was one tosupport 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 sometimesindulged in, that Grant took a dislike to Motley because he parted his hair inthe middle. Adams repeated the story to Godkin, who made much play with it inthe Nation, till it was denied. Adams saw no reason why it should bedenied. Grant had as good a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hairseemed to him a part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments onless material than hair — on clothes, for example, according to Mr.Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz — and nine men in tencould hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes or dislikes. Intruth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in common; andfor the same reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason he would be sure todislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish could not be quite sure ofGrant, except for the powerful effect which wealth had, or appeared to have, onGrant's imagination.

The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not break in stormtill July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but another quarrel, almost as fatalto Adams as that between Fish and Sumner, worried him even more. Of all membersof the Cabinet, the one whom he had most personal interest in cultivating wasAttorney General Hoar. The Legal Tender decision, which had been the firststumbling-block to Adams at Washington, grew in interest till it threatened tobecome something more serious than a block; it fell on one's head like aplaster ceiling, and could not be escaped. The impending battle between Fishand Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between Hoar and ChiefJustice Chase. Adams had come to Washington hoping to support the Executive ina policy of breaking down the Senate, but he never dreamed that he would berequired to help in breaking down the Supreme Court. Although, step by step, hehad been driven, like the rest of the world, to admit that American society hadoutgrown most of its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme Court, much asa churchman clings to his bishops, because they are his only symbol of unity;his last rag of Right. Between the Executive and the Legislature, citizenscould have no Rights; they were at the mercy of Power. They had created theCourt to protect them from unlimited Power, and it was little enough protectionat best. Adams wanted to save the independence of the Court at least for hislifetime, and could not conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrowit.

Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the Court, he hadpromised Adams for the North American Review an article on the historyof 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 banishmentsuch reformers as he could find place for, and he saved Walker for a time bygiving him the Census of 1870. Walker was obliged to abandon his article forthe North American in order to devote himself to the Census. He gaveAdams his notes, and Adams completed the article.

He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction. He knewenough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks and bankers wantedfiat money, fiat money was good enough for a newspaper-man; and if they changedabout and wanted "intrinsic" value, gold and silver came equally welcome to awriter who was paid half the wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion ofattacking or defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justiceand the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have been thenecessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time the Actwas passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections, Adams completedthe 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 thehatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and the Springfield Republican,and his energy ran away with Adams's restraint. The unfortunate Spauldingcomplained loudly of this treatment, not without justice, but the articleitself had serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred ofSpaulding's contention that legal tender was necessary at the time; and theChief Justice told his part of the story with conviction. The Chief Justiceseemed to be pleased. The Attorney General, pleased or not, made no sign. Thearticle had enough historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in avolume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not itspoint in education. The point was that, in spite of the best intentions, theplainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to escape further trouble, thearticle threw Adams into opposition. Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, wasimplacable.

Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams went on,drifting further and further from the Administration. He did this in commonwith all the world, including Hoar himself. Scarcely a newspaper in the countrykept discipline. The New York Tribune was one of the most criminal.Dissolution of ties in every direction marked the dissolution of temper, andthe Senate Chamber became again a scene of irritated egotism that passedridicule. Senators quarrelled with each other, and no one objected, but theypicked quarrels also with the Executive and threw every Department intoconfusion. Among others they quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him fromoffice.

That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position who happenedto be the two persons most necessary for his success at Washington, should bethe first victims of Grant's lax rule, must have had some meaning for Adams'seducation, if Adams could only have understood what it was. He studied, butfailed. Sympathy with him was not their weakness. Directly, in the form ofhelp, he knew he could hope as little from them as from Boutwell. So far frominviting 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 helpAdams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although they would alwaysaccept whatever services they had not to pay for. The lesson of education wasnot there. The selfishness of politics was the earliest of all politicaleducation, and Adams had nothing to learn from its study; but the situationstruck him as curious — so curious that he devoted years to reflectingupon 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 foreignaffairs 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 ofstatesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or Colonel Mulberry Sellers,but what was his value? The statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners orConklings or Hoars or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature couldproduce. They trod with lofty contempt on other people's jobs, especially whenthere was good in them. Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling costthe country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just asLamar 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 thanit worried his friends and the public, but it affected the whole field ofpolitics for twenty years. The newspapers discussed little else than thealleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield, and Blaine. If the press were takenseriously, politics turned on jobs, and some of Adams's best friends, likeGodkin, ruined their influence by their insistence on points of morals. Societyhesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilesslysacrificing the weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite of allsuch criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for thePresidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for thequestion; until young men were forced to see that either some new standard mustbe created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had expired — like theConstitution.

Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency, but scoresof promising men, whom the country could not well spare, were ruined in sayingso. 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 foundneither. Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. Hisfriends had been driven out of Washington or had taken to fisticuffs. Hehimself sat down and stared helplessly into the future.

The result was a review of the Session for the July North Americaninto which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he had observed andall he had been told. He thought it good history then, and he thought it bettertwenty years afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint. As ithappened, in the process of his devious education, this "Session" of 1869-70proved to be his last study in current politics, and his last dying testamentas a humble member of the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said nomore, had he gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century. Thepolitical dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 Thesystem of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric ofa priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given it up.Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's politicalenergies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out — to patch— or, in vulgar language, to tinker — the political machine asoften 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 — themost 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 ofpolitics — to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even Mr. Sumner — hecould not honestly say that such an education, even when it carried one up tothese unattainable heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standingon lower levels — clever and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine —who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial demi-gods, and whoused language about Grant himself which the North American Reviewwould not have admitted. One asked doubtfully what was likely to become ofthese men in their turn. What kind of political ambition was to result fromthis destructive political education?

Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the attainment of aworking political system. Society needed to reach it. If moral standards brokedown, and machinery stopped working, new morals and machinery of some sort hadto be invented. An eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings orof Jay Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible. Practical Americanslaughed, and went their way. Society paid them to be practical. Wheneversociety cared to pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and holdhis tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with DemocraticCongressmen and educate them. He served David Wells as an active assistantprofessor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a college. TheAdministration 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 possessionof the President. Every hope or thought which had brought Adams to Washingtonproved to be absurd. No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends inreform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as ofbusiness.

All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy, sointerested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew Congressmen by scoresand newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote for his various organs all sorts ofattacks and defences. He enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself ashappy 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. Whenspring came, he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the firstof April, what Maurice de Guérin called "the vast maternity" of natureshowed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United StatesSenate. Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree.They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by remarkingwhat a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest possibledistance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage. Atsuch moments he pondered on the distant beauty of St. Peter's and the steps ofAra Cœli.

Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to London for theseason. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy," which he meant for hisfriend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review. It was the best piece ofwork he had done, but this was not his reason for publishing it in England. TheErie scandal had provoked a sort of revolt among respectable New Yorkers, aswell as among some who were not so respectable; and the attack on Erie wasbeginning to promise success. London was a sensitive spot for the Eriemanagement, and it was thought well to strike them there, where they weresocially and financially exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, forany expression about America in an English review attracted ten times theattention in America that the same article would attract in the NorthAmerican. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in full.Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest ambition was to bepirated 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 likedit.

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 hadpassed 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 thanever prominent. John Bright was in the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about toenter 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 greatestof prophets in the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown theIrish Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass anEducation Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping and bounding overevery 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; therebellion had passed into history. In society no one cared to recall the yearsbefore the Prince of Wales. The smart set had come to their own. Half thehouses that Adams had frequented, from 1861 to 1865, were closed or closing in1870. Death had ravaged one's circle of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell and hersister Miss Charlotte Wynn were both dead, and Mr. James Milnes Gaskell was nolonger in Parliament. That field of education seemed closed too.

One found one's self in a singular frame of mind — moreeighteenth-century than ever — almost rococo — and unable to catchanywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate. Londontaught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading to another— that the older men were more amusing than the younger — that LordHoughton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill — that there werefewer men one wanted to meet — these, and a hundred more such remarks,helped little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity. For Englishreforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves mediæval. TheEducation Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him a guaranty against alleducation he had use for. He resented change. He would have kept the Pope inthe Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments. He did notcare to Americanize Europe. The Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth agreat 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. Adamscame back to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or reform.He wanted amusem*nt, quiet, and gaiety.

Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State House, andbeen brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have cast off his oldskin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in partnership with the Americanwoman and the Jew banker. Common-sense dictated it; but Adams and his friendswere unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom — some innateatrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action, and rather far uptowards the front, he had no idea of making a new effort or catching up with anew world. He saw nothing ahead of him. The world was never more calm. Hewanted to talk with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked onthe Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him and his fatherlong before they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to make notes forhis 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, morecontentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical than ever, because Napoleon IIIseemed to be threatening war with Germany. Palgrave said that "Germany wouldbeat France into scraps" if there was war. Adams thought not. The chances werealways 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 begansmoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of familiarity and dinners.He sniffed with voluptuous delight the coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled inthe architecture of Oxford Street. May Fair never shone so fair to ArthurPendennis as it did to the returned American. The country never smiled itsvelvet smile of trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as tobe asked on a country visit. He loved it all — everything — hadalways loved it! He felt almost attached to the Royal Exchange. He thought heowned the St. James's Club. He patronized the Legation.

The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing tricks on herspoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted herself to spoil him. Reeverefused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams had become used to the idea that he was freeof the Quarterlies, and that his writing would be printed of course; but he wasstunned by the reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen libelsuits on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as great in England asin 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 ithad professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal of slavery, but when invitedto support those who were trying to abate these scandals, the English presssaid it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's refusal seemed portentous. He and hisbrother and the North American Review were running greater risks everyday, and no one thought of fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from anofficial document, should scare the Endinburgh Review into silence forfear of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's experience of Englisheccentricity, though it was large.

He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to respectabilityand editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to theQuarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. Theliterary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that thearticle was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor toredeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 withthe same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself tounderstand it. As usual, when an ally was needed, the American was driven intothe arms of the radicals. Respectability, everywhere and always, turned itsback the moment one asked to do it a favor. Called suddenly away from England,he despatched the article, at the last moment, to the WestminsterReview and heard no more about it for nearly six months.

He had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram from hisbrother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his sister had beenthrown from a cab and injured, and that he had better come on. He started thatnight, and reached the Bagni di Lucca on the second day. Tetanus had alreadyset in.

The last lesson — the sum and term of education — began then. Hehad passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without having oncefelt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen Nature — only hersurface — the sugar-coating that she shows to youth. Flung suddenly inhis face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the terror of the blow stayed byhim thenceforth for life, until repetition made it more than the will couldstruggle 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 hadbeen in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserablecab-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 shedied in convulsion.

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little ofit, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry whichseemed 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 sensuoussurroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm,she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had oneseen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over themarket-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of theTuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed burstingwith mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy oflife; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows;even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvetair, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faceddeath, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly tounconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle.For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone onsabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the mind; they arefelt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels them is a differentone from that which reasons; it is thought of a different power and a differentperson. The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture — herattitude towards life — took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, aninsanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the sensescollapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void ofshapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, anddestroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity toperfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanicalmotion; and its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, andpleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine became evidentartifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion was the most human; but theidea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poorwoman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted andinsane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, itmade pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, butHe could not be a Person.

With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of tension, heslowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped for a few days atOuchy to recover his balance in a new world; for the fantastic mystery ofcoincidences had made the world, which he thought real, mimic and reproduce thedistorted nightmare of his personal horror. He did not yet know it, and he wastwenty years in finding it out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lakebelow and of the Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the firsttime in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was — achaos of anarchic and purposeless forces — and he needed days of reposeto see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the whitepurity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of itsheavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, andthe Alps put on charms real as terrors; but man became chaotic, and before theillusions of Nature were wholly restored, the illusions of Europe suddenlyvanished, leaving a new world to learn.

On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was in fullchaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one might have been king orkaiser without feeling stronger to deal with the chaos. Mr. Gladstone was asmuch astounded as Adams; the Emperor Napoleon was nearly as stupefied aseither, and Bismarck: himself hardly knew how he did it. As education, theout-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 gotup to Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe. Providence set up noaffiches to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut herselfadrift, 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 onestood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an army corps. The effect waslurid. The public seemed to look on the war, as it had looked on the wars ofLouis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of decorative art. The French, like trueartists, 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 samespirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought outlike an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a supernumerary hired to fillthe scene. Every evening at the theatre the comedy was interrupted by order,and one stood up by order, to join in singing the Marseillaise toorder. For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden to sing theMarseillaise under any circ*mstances, but at last regiment afterregiment marched through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while the bystanderscared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been brought out of theGovernment stores, and distributed by grammes per capita. One had seenone's own people dragged unwillingly into a war, and had watched one's ownregiments march to the front without sign of enthusiasm; on the contrary, mostserious, anxious, and conscious of the whole weight of the crisis; but in Parisevery one conspired to ignore the crisis, which every one felt at hand. Herewas education for the million, but the lesson was intricate. SuperficiallyNapoleon and his Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers andGambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the result. Howcould Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he spoke of hisParis and its tastes, people would smile at his dotage?

As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took refuge in theprofound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining monks, undisturbed bythe 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, onefelt a palpable haze of peace brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches.Since the reign of Pterspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothingexcept the monks. Lying on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, themonks studied the war correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded ineducating himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.

While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot inviting him totake an Assistant Professorship of History, to be created shortly at HarvardCollege. After waiting ten or a dozen years for some one to show consciousnessof his existence, even a Terabratula would be pleased and grateful fora compliment which implied that the new President of Harvard College wanted hishelp; but Adams knew nothing about history, and much less about teaching, whilehe knew more than enough about Harvard College; and wrote at once to thankPresident 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 onlyamusem*nt and social relations with new people, had ended in the most intimatepersonal tragedy, and the most terrific political convulsion he had ever knownor was likely to know. He had failed in every object of his trip. TheQuarterlies had refused his best essay. He had made no acquaintances and hardlypicked up the old ones. He sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to beginagain where he had started two years before, but with no longer a hope ofattaching himself to a President or a party or a press. He was a free lance andno other career stood in sight or mind. To that point education had broughthim.

Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so badly as hefeared. His article on the Session in the July North American had madea success. Though he could not quite see what partisan object it served, heheard with flattered astonishment that it had been reprinted by the DemocraticNational Committee and circulated as a campaign document by the hundredthousand copies. He was henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and aMassachusetts Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or returnfor this partisan service consisted in being formally answered by SenatorTimothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document, presumed to bealso 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 makethe 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 themost prominent positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia inWashington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful statesman, and hethought about it still more when the Westminster Review for Octoberbrought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy, which was also instantlypirated on a great scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth driven to be, andhe asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to be paid; but the honors ofpiracy resemble the colors of the begonia; they are showy but not useful. Herewas a tour de force he had never dreamed himself equal to performing:two long, dry, quarterly, thirty or forty page articles, appearing in quicksuccession, 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 theways of America to a young person of literary and political tastes were such asthe so-called evolution of civilized man had not before evolved. No sooner hadAdams made at Washington what he modestly hoped was a sufficient success, thanhis whole family set on him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861 hisfather interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles argued andurged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles had views of furtherjoint operations in a new field. He said that Henry had done at Washington allhe 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 personalweight; that his chief function was not to be that of teacher, but that ofediting the North American Review which was to be coupled with theprofessorship, and would lead to the daily press. In short, that he needed theuniversity more than the university needed him.

Henry knew the university well enough to know that the department of historywas controlled by one of the most astute and ideal administrators in the world— Professor Gurney — and that it was Gurney who had established thenew professorship, and had cast his net over Adams to carry the double load ofmediæval history and the Review. He could see no relationwhatever between himself and a professorship. He sought education; he did notsell it. He knew no history; he knew only a few historians; his ignorance wasmischievous because it was literary, accidental, indifferent. On the other handhe knew Gurney, and felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot take one'sself quite seriously in such matters; it could not much affect the sum of solarenergies whether one went on dancing with girls in Washington, or began talkingto boys at Cambridge. The good people who thought it did matter had a sort ofright to guide. One could not reject their advice; still less disregard theirwishes.

The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and had a fewwords with President Eliot which seemed to him almost as American as the talkabout diplomacy with his father ten years before. "But, Mr. President," urgedAdams, "I know nothing about Mediæval History." With the courteous mannerand bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans Mr. Eliotmildly 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 notsay that, under the circ*mstances, the appointment of any professor at allseemed to him unnecessary.

So, at twenty-four hours' notice, he broke his life in halves again in orderto begin a new education, on lines he had not chosen, in subjects for which hecared less than nothing; in a place he did not love, and before a future whichrepelled. Thousands of men have to do the same thing, but his case was peculiarbecause he had no need to do it. He did it because his best and wisest friendsurged 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 hadreached cross-roads of education which all led astray. What he could gain atHarvard College he did not know, but in any case it was nothing he wanted. Whathe 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 findlittle but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren inresults.

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 aboutthem. 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 wieldinginfluence second to none. With nobody did Adams form closer or longer relationsthan with Mr. Hewitt, whom he regarded as the most useful public man inWashington; and he was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end of hislaborious career as legislator, that he left behind him no permanent resultexcept the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew no other man who had doneso much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is accepted as an instance ofsuccess. Hewitt's nearest rival would probably have been Senator Pendleton whostood father to civil service reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice thatshould never have been allowed to be born. These were the men whosucceeded.

The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political writer, andno public administrator achieved enough good reputation to preserve his memoryfor twenty years. A number of them achieved bad reputations, or damaged goodones 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 wereWilliam C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to return to it. Suchambitions as these were out of one's reach, but supposing one tried for whatwas feasible, attached one's self closely to the Garfields, Arthurs,Frelinghuysens, Blaines, Bayards, or Whitneys, who happened to hold office; andsupposing 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 Tribuneor Times — how much more education would one have gained than bygoing to Harvard College? These questions seemed better worth an answer thanmost 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, andbecause, to his mind, the value of American society altogether was mixed upwith the value of Washington.

At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles, wanted throw offresponsibility on the American people, whose bare and toiling shoulders had tocarry the load of every social or political stupidity; but the American peoplehad no more to do with it than with the customs of Peking. American charactermight perhaps account for it, but what accounted for American character? AllBoston, all New England, and all respectable New York, including CharlesFrancis Adams the father and Charles Francis Adams the son, agreed thatWashington was no place for a respectable young man. All Washington, includingPresidents, Cabinet officers, Judiciary, Senators, Congressmen, and clerks,expressed the same opinion, and conspired to drive away every young man whohappened to be there or tried to approach. Not one young man of promiseremained in the Government service. All drifted into opposition. The Governmentdid not want them in Washington. Adams's case was perhaps the strongest becausehe thought he had done well. He was forced to guess it, since he knew no onewho would have risked so extravagant a step as that of encouraging a young manin a literary career, or even in a political one; society forbade it, as wellas residence in a political capital; but Harvard College must have seen somehope for him, since it made him professor against his will; even the publishersand editors of the North American Review must have felt a certainamount of confidence in him, since they put the Review in his hands.After all, the Review was the first literary power in America, eventhough it paid almost as little in gold as the United States Treasury. Thedegree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephemeral as the commission ofa President of the United States; but the government of the college, measuredby money alone, and patronage, was a matter of more importance than that ofsome branches of the national service. In social position, the college was thesuperior of them all put together. In knowledge, she could assert nosuperiority, since the Government made no claims, and prided itself onignorance. The service of Harvard College was distinctly honorable; perhaps themost honorable in America; and if Harvard College thought Henry Adams worthemploying at four dollars a day, why should Washington decline his serviceswhen he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a career he liked in aplace 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 barrenand dangerous? What made Washington more dangerous than New York?

The American character showed singular limitations which sometimes drove thestudent of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his own ignorance — lostin the darkness of his own gropings — the scholar finds himself jostledof a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to him ignorant that there is a thingcalled ignorance; who have forgotten how to amuse themselves; who cannot evenunderstand that they are bored. The American thought of himself as a restless,pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead ofhis neighbors. Perhaps this idea of the national character might be correct forNew York or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the Americanshowed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather inthe mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; orlike Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still moredistrustful of others, and awed by money. That the American, by temperament,worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was aform of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.The amusem*nt of the pursuit was all the amusem*nt he got from it; he had nouse for wealth. Jim Fisk alone seemed to know what he wanted; Jay Gould neverdid. At Washington one met mostly such true Americans, but if one wanted toknow them better, one went to study them in Europe. Bored, patient, helpless;pathetically dependent on his wife and daughters; indulgent to excess; mostly amodest, decent, excellent, valuable citizen; the American was to be met atevery railway station in Europe, carefully explaining to every listener thatthe happiest day of his life would be the day he should land on the pier at NewYork. He was ashamed to be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulusof variety; he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength hisintense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in onedirection, and he could not change it. Congress was full of such men; in theSenate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the Executive, Grant andBoutwell 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 peoplewere amused. Work, whiskey, and cards were life. The atmosphere of politicalWashington was theirs — or was supposed by the outside world to be intheir control — and this was the reason why the outside world judged thatWashington was fatal even for a young man of thirty-two, who had passed throughthe whole variety of temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozenyears; who never played cards, and who loathed whiskey.

CHAPTER XX. FAILURE(1871)

FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, HenryAdams could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have been nineyears old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter afternoons which beguiledCambridgeport, his mother drove him out to visit his aunt, Mrs. Everett. EdwardEverett was then President of the college and lived in the old President'sHouse on Harvard Square. The boy remembered the drawing-room, on the left ofthe hall door, in which Mrs. Everett received them. He remembered a marblegreyhound in the corner. The house had an air of colonial self-respect thatimpressed even a nine-year-old child.

When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked the Bursarabout 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 privatestaircase. Opposite was J. R. Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary asAdams himself, and more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry revealed aboarding-table, somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior inits class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or theirequivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, among three or four lawstudents like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements, all of them hadto be satisfied. The standard was below that of Washington, but it was, for themoment, the best.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to waste oncomforts or amusem*nts. He exhausted all his strength in trying to keep one dayahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short. Hecould not stop to think whether he were doing the work rightly. He could notget it done to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfyhimself what to do.

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate must havebeen more or less just, for the college was making a great effort to meet theseself-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot in 1869 to carry out itsreforms. Professor Gurney was one of the leading reformers, and had tried hishand on his own department of History. The two full Professors of History— Torrey and Gurney, charming men both — could not cover theground. Between Gurney's classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gapof a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had alreadyelected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught orwho was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was in theirminds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in their minds, sincetheir professor had nothing in his, and down to the moment he took his chairand 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. Hiscourse had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one oceaninto another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was aserious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderertakes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can nevertell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and mayperhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or themultiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with aspoon; 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 asan evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all theburning fa*ggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars either priests oratheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite ofhimself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught assuch — or falsified.

Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to teach, andcould not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for telling agreeable talesto 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 andthe Venerable Bede by heart. He saw no relation whatever between his studentsand the Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground wasparticularly dangerous. He knew better than though he were a professionalhistorian that the man who should solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bringthem into the line of evolution from past to present, would be a greater manthan Lamarck or Linnæus; but history had nowhere broken down so pitiably,or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there. Since Gibbon, the spectaclewas almost a scandal. History had lost even the sense of shame. It was ahundred years behind the experimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it wasless 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 thescandal, and made it more scandalous. No doubt, a teacher might make some useof these writers or their theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory ofhis own. The college expected him to pass at least half his time teaching theboys a few elementary dates and relations, that they might not be a disgrace tothe university. This was formal; and he could frankly tell the boys that,provided they passed their examinations, they might get their facts where theyliked, and use the teacher only for questions. The only privilege a student hadthat was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and theprofessor was bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was toget them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they werethinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any largebody of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more thanhalf-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of itscost in money.

The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much that of thetwelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from philosophy and bored byfacts, he wanted to teach his students something not wholly useless. The numberof students whose minds were of an order above the average was, in hisexperience, barely one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by anyinducements a teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven yearsof contact, Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in tentake 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 tocultivate 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 jointhem in trying to find the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious nameof historical method was sometimes given to this process of instruction, butthe name smacked of German pedagogy, and a young professor who respectedneither 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 haslittle use. History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, andbreak when one has unravelled enough; but complexity precedes evolution. ThePteraspis grins horribly from the closed entrance. One may not beginat 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 amethod could be applied. He could think only of law as subject; the Law Schoolas end; and he took, as victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highlyintelligent young men who seemed willing to work. The course began with thebeginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man, and camedown through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no textbooksexisted, the professor refused to profess, knowing no more than his students,and the students read what they pleased and compared their results. Aspedagogy, nothing could be more triumphant. The boys worked like rabbits, anddug holes all over the field of archaic society; no difficulty stopped them;unknown languages yielded before their attack, and customary law becamefamiliar as the police court; undoubtedly they learned, after a fashion, tochase an idea, like a hare, through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as theywere likely to meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experiencethat his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to exert themselvesto get rid of it in the Law School even more than they exerted themselves toacquire 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, theprofessor could not make it actual.

What was the use of training an active mind to waste its energy? Theexperiments might in time train Adams as a professor, but this result was stillless to his taste. He wanted to help the boys to a career, but not one of hismany devices to stimulate the intellectual reaction of the student's mindsatisfied either him or the students. For himself he was clear that the faultlay in the system, which could lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge ofhimself as he possessed warranted him in affirming that his mind requiredconflict, competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He toowanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the system would havebegun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He would have seated a rivalassistant professor opposite him, whose business should be strictly limited toexpressing opposite views. Nothing short of this would ever interest either theprofessor or the student; but of all university freaks, no irregularity shockedthe intellectual atmosphere so much as contradiction or competition betweenteachers. In that respect the thirteenth-century university system was worththe whole teaching of the modern school.

All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his studentsfailed for want of system. None met the needs of instruction. In spite ofPresident Eliot's reforms and his steady, generous, liberal support, the systemremained costly, clumsy and futile. The university — as far as it wasrepresented by Henry Adams — produced at great waste of time and moneyresults not worth reaching.

He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to inflict theirresults on his students, and by a happy chance he was in the full tide offashion. The Germans were crowning their new emperor at Versailles, andsurrounding his head with a halo of Pepins and Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas.James Bryce had even discovered the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never sopowerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing else as his stockin trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He wasrejoiced; but he sometimes doubted whether they should be grateful. On thewhole, he was content neither with what he had taught nor with the way he hadtaught it. The seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.

The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a professor, heregarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he thought he knew what hemeant. He had tried a great many experiments, and wholly succeeded in none. Hehad succumbed to the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that hetried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachersthan to the students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted theuniversity at last, in 1877, with a feeling. that, if it had not been for theinvariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it, from the Presidentto 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 hisundergraduate days, the college insisted on expressing an opposite view. JohnFiske went so far in his notice of the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as tosay that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which was aproof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set thekind expression down to camaraderie. The case was different whenPresident Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adamscould have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the raregood-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow the college tothink that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction. He knew better, and hiswas among the failures which were respectable enough to deserve self-respect.Yet nothing in the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than thatHarvard College, which he had persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, andneglected, should alone have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement,or a kindness. Harvard College might have its faults, but at least it redeemedAmerica, since it was true to its own.

The only part of education that the professor thought a success was thestudents. He found them excellent company. Cast more or less in the same mould,without violent emotions or sentiment, and, except for the veneer of Americanhabits, ignorant of all that man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burstopen 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 sofull of pathos that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do witheducation when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of them, and wassurprised at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is worth money to me inChicago." This reply upset his experience; for the degree of Harvard Collegehad been rather a drawback to a young man in Boston and Washington. So far asit 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 nonearer a result than they. He still had to take for granted many things thatthey need not — among the rest, that his teaching did them more good thanharm. In his own opinion the greatest good he could do them was to hold histongue. They needed much faith then; they were likely to need more if theylived long.

He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about their ownutility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their business. He could nottell his scholars that history glowed with social virtue; the Professor ofChemistry cared not a chemical atom whether society was virtuous or not. Adamscould not pretend that mediæval society proved evolution; the Professor ofPhysics smiled at evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of theChurch and the triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had totreat 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 nothingelse of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was only educatinghimself at their cost.

Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has toshut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest. The studentsalone satisfied. They thought they gained something. Perhaps they did, for evenin America and in the twentieth century, life could not be wholly industrial.Adams fervently hoped that they might remain content; but supposing twentyyears more to pass, and they should turn on him as fiercely as he had turned onhis old instructors — what answer could he make? The college had pleadedguilty, and tried to reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and hisreforms had failed before those of the college.

The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was worse. Americansociety feared total wreck in the maelstrom of political and corporateadministration, but it could not look for help to college dons. Adams knew, inthat 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 Americaunited in Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polarbear. The liveliest and most agreeable of men — James Russell Lowell,Francis J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, WilliamJames 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 andBoston, but society called them professors, and professors they had to be.While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all were famishedfor want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The elementswere there; but society cannot be made up of elements — people who areexpected to be silent unless they have observations to make — and all theelements are bound to remain apart if required to make observations.

Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams thought that ofschool-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to admit that the education ofan 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 abook-review on the virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; forhe knew more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did aboutPresident Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived onhis brother Charles's railway articles. The editor could help others, but coulddo nothing for himself. As a writer, he was totally forgotten by the time hehad been an editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to takehis place for politics and affairs of current concern. The Reviewbecame chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him to keepit literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes, if he made any,belonged to his writers; but whose failures might easily bankrupt himself. Sucha Review may be made a sink of money with captivating ease. The secrets ofsuccess as an editor were easily learned; the highest was that of gettingadvertisem*nts. Ten pages of advertising made an editor a success; five markedhim as a failure. The merits or demerits of his literature had little to dowith his results except when they led to adversity.

A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his appetite for thatcareer as a profession. After a very slight experience, he said no more on thesubject. 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 littlebetter when it did. A professor had at least the pleasure of associating withhis students; an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became apedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On thewhole, 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 suchaccidental education as luck had given him; but he held that it was wrong, andthat, if he were to begin again, he would do it on a better system. He thoughthe knew nearly what system to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had notyet got his head above water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twentyor thirty years afterwards; but the editorship of the North AmericanReview had one solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a distancewith almost every one in the country who could write or who could be the causeof writing. Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever peopleas one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at their treating himas an equal, for they all had education; but among them, only one stood out inextraordinary prominence as the type and model of what Adams would have likedto be, and of what the American, as he conceived, should have been and wasnot.

Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a friend ofgeologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much less to them than theextent of his friendship, for geologists were as a class not much better offthan himself, and friends were sorely few. One of his friends from earliestchildhood, and nearest neighbor in Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologistand joined the Fortieth Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington in thewinter of 1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out with him on one of thefield-parties in summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he putit 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 JulyNorth American appeared, he drew a long breath of relief, and took thenext train for the West. Of his year's work he was no judge. He had become asmall spring in a large mechanism, and his work counted only in the sum; but hehad 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 anotice of the Fortieth Parallel Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he startedfor 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; butit was not that which Adams sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land ofthe future. The Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest stationin case of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers andgeologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux. They held under theirhammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all its riddles to solve, andits 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 comein to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge of Adams for a time. Theirwanderings or adventures matter nothing to the story of education. They wereall hardened mountaineers and surveyors who took everything for granted, andspared each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, thestories of the big game they killed. A bear was an occasional amusem*nt; awapiti was a constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man wasa rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusem*nt, but one had other matters totalk about.

Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of cutting it up; sothat 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 dayfishing a mountain stream or exploring a valley. One morning when the party wascamped 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 wasfine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand miles away; the parkstretched its English beauties off to the base of its bordering mountains innatural landscape and archaic peace; the stream was just fishy enough to temptlingering along its banks. Hour after hour the sun moved westward and the fishmoved eastward, or disappeared altogether, until at last when the fishermancinched his mule, sunset was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him beforehe 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 thehills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw no prospect of supper orof bed.

Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer night for an armyof professors, but the supper question offered difficulties. There was but onecabin in the Park, near its entrance, and he felt no great confidence infinding it, but he thought his mule cleverer than himself, and the dim lines ofmountain crest against the stars fenced his range of error. The patient muleplodded on without other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some twohours must have passed before a light showed in the distance. As the mule cameup 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 fellinto his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a matter of growth ordoubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons; they were shaped with thePteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with the accident ofspace. 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 knowsince he went back in the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a room and onebed for guests. They shared the room and the bed, and talked till far towardsdawn.

King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more than Adamsdid of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of the hundredthmeridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by heart, and he knew theCongressman better than he did the professor. He knew even women; even theAmerican woman; even the New York woman, which is saying much. Incidentally heknew more practical geology than was good for him, and saw ahead at least onegeneration further than the text-books. That he saw right was a differentmatter. Since the beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seenright; 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 currentof his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his faculty of givingand taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought or in money as though hewere Nature herself, marked him almost alone among Americans. He had in himsomething of the Greek — a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander. One ClarenceKing only existed in the world.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a birdof paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime ismuch; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certainparallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, likeAdams, and all their generation, was at that moment passing the critical pointof his career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine ofthe Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the fogs ofLondon, and both had the same problems to handle — the same stock ofimplements — the same field to work in; above all, the same obstacles toovercome.

As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality that somuch 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 wasnever guilty of a witticism, unless by accident. King and the Fortieth Parallelinfluenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives converged, butKing had moulded and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adamsthought American life should be directed. He had given himself education all ofa piece, yet broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their paths atlast 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 asuccession of violent breaks or waves, with no base at all. King's abnormalenergy had already won him great success. None of his contemporaries had doneso much, single-handed, or were likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managedto induce Congress to adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He hadorganized, as a civil — not military — measure, a GovernmentSurvey. He had paralleled the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yetunequalled by other governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. Hewas creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The chanceswere 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 fortuneas he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted lay ready for him — scientificsocial, literary, political — and he knew how to take them in turn. Withordinary luck he would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided genius ofhis day.

So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of hisextraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that women werejealous 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 allwanted to be. The women were jealous because, at heart, King had no faith inthe American woman; he loved types more robust.

The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian instincts; they werebrothers of Bret Harte. They felt no leanings towards the simple uniformitiesof Lyell and Darwin; they saw little proof of slight and imperceptible changes;to them, catastrophe was the law of change; they cared little for simplicityand much for complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New Yorkor even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them likerabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but they delightedAdams, for they helped, among other things, to persuade him that history wasmore amusing than science. The only question left open to doubt was theirrelative money value.

In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were continued till thefrosts became sharp in the mountains. History and science spread out inpersonal horizons towards goals no longer far away. No more education waspossible for either man. Such as they were, they had got to stand the chancesof the world they lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge, to takeup again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to hiscart. Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, hewent 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 toseek help — but it is not meant to amuse them. What one did — ordid not do — with one's education, after getting it, need trouble theinquirer 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 thinkthat barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of reacting to any purposeon the forces that surround him, and fully half of these react wrongly. Theobject of education for that mind should be the teaching itself how to reactwith vigor and economy. No doubt the world at large will always lag so farbehind the active mind as to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as itdid for Henry Adams; but education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminishthe friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not athaphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. Whatone knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how tolearn. Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, asthis story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt theteacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags thestudent from his course. The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, themost highly fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or theviscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of theirenergy in doing it.

Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871, and began toapply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At the end of twenty years, hefound that he had finished, and could sum up the result. He had no complaint tomake against man or woman. They had all treated him kindly; he had never metwith ill-will, ill-temper, or even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He hadnever seen serious dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a readiness in theyoung to respond to suggestion that seemed to him far beyond all he had reasonto expect. Considering the stock complaints against the world, he could notunderstand why he had nothing to complain of.

During these twenty years he had done as much work, in quantity, as hisneighbors wanted; more than they would ever stop to look at, and more than hisshare. Merely in print, he thought altogether ridiculous the number of volumeshe counted on the shelves of public libraries. He had no notion whether theyserved a useful purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of hisfriends, even the artists, none of whom held any lofty opinion of their successin raising the standards of society, or felt profound respect for the methodsor manners of their time, at home or abroad, but all of whom had tried, in away, 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 mademore figure, not in proportion to public wealth or in the census, but in theirown self-assertion. A fair number of the men who were born in the thirties hadwon 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 inthe mental inertia of sixty or eighty million people. Among all these ClarenceKing, John Hay, and Henry Adams had led modest existences, trying to fill inthe social gaps of a class which, as yet, showed but thin ranks and littlecohesion. The combination offered no very glittering prizes, but they pursuedit for twenty years with as much patience and effort as though it led to fameor power, until, at last, Henry Adams thought his own duties sufficientlyperformed and his account with society settled. He had enjoyed his lifeamazingly, 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 thathad 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 in1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so little!

As had happened so often, he found himself in London when the question ofreturn imposed its verdict on him after much fruitless effort to restelsewhere. 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 PallMall had forgotten him as completely as it had forgotten his elders. He had notseen London for a dozen years, and was rather amused to have only a bed for aworld and a familiar black fog for horizon. The coal-fire smelt homelike; thefog had a fruity taste of youth; anything was better than being turned out intothe wastes of Wigmore Street. He could always amuse himself by living over hisyouth, and driving once more down Oxford Street in 1858, with life before himto imagine far less amusing than it had turned out to be.

The future attracted him less. Lying there for a week he reflected on whathe 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 grindingroutine of studio-work at an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, aschoice, have gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in thetrade-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 onRudyard 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 itis. Nothing attracted him less than the idea of beginning a new education. Theold one had been poor enough; any new one could only add to its faults. Lifehad 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 Willingto admit it real in the sense of having some kind of existence outside his ownmind, he could not admit it reasonable. In Paris, his heart sank to mere pulpbefore the dismal ballets at the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at theold Palais Royal; but, except for them, his own Paris of the Second Empire wasas extinct as that of the first Napoleon. At the galleries and exhibitions, hewas racked by the effort of art to be original, and when one day, after muchreflection, John La Farge asked whether there might not still be room forsomething simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the world, it was nolonger simple and could not express itself simply. It should express what itwas; and this was something that neither Adams nor La Farge understood.

Under the first blast of this furnace-heat, the lights seemed fairly to goout. He felt nothing in common with the world as it promised to be. He wasready to quit it, and the easiest path led back to the east; but he could notventure alone, and the rarest of animals is a companion. He must return toAmerica to get one. Perhaps, while waiting, he might write more history, and onthe chance as a last resource, he gave orders for copying everything he couldreach in archives, but this was mere habit. He went home as a horse goes backto his stable, because he knew nowhere else to go.

Home was Washington. As soon as Grant's administration ended, in 1877, andEvarts became Secretary of State, Adams went back there, partly to writehistory, but chiefly because his seven years of laborious banishment, inBoston, convinced him that, as far as he had a function in life, it was asstable-companion to statesmen, whether they liked it or not. At about the sametime, old George Bancroft did the same thing, and presently John Hay came on tobe 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 buildthem adjoining houses on La Fayette Square. As far as Adams had a home this wasit. 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 hismanger. His father and mother were dead. All his family led settled lives oftheir own. Except for two or three friends in Washington, who were themselvesuncertain 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 seemedcontented. Since 1871 nothing had ruffled the surface of the American world,and even the progress of Europe in her side-way track to dis-Europeaningherself had ceased to be violent.

After a dreary January in Paris, at last when no excuse could be persuadedto offer itself for further delay, he crossed the channel and passed a weekwith his old friend, Milnes Gaskell, at Thornes, in Yorkshire, while thewesterly gales raved a warning against going home. Yorkshire in January is notan island in the South Seas. It has few points of resemblance to Tahiti; notmany to Fiji or Samoa; but, as so often before, it was a rest between past andfuture, 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, andhad never seen an ocean steamer of the new type. He had seen nothing new of anysort, or much changed in France or England. The railways made quicker time, butwere no more comfortable. The scale was the same. The Channel service washardly improved since 1858, or so little as to make no impression. Europeseemed to have been stationary for twenty years. To a man who had beenstationary like Europe, the Teutonic was a marvel. That he should be able toeat his dinner through a week of howling winter gales was a miracle. That heshould 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, inits old forms. Wonder may be double — even treble. Adams's wonder ran offinto 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 suchconundrum. There one might double scale and speed indefinitely without passingbounds.

Fate was kind on that voyage. Rudyard Kipling, on his wedding trip toAmerica, thanks to the mediation of Henry James, dashed over the passenger hisexuberant fountain of gaiety and wit — as though playing a garden hose ona thirsty and faded begonia. Kipling could never know what peace of mind hegave, for he could hardly ever need it himself so much; and yet, in the fulldelight of his endless fun and variety; one felt the old conundrum repeatit*elf. Somehow, somewhere, Kipling and the American were not one, but two, andcould not be glued together. The American felt that the defect, if defect itwere, 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 notcarry self-abasem*nt to the point of thinking himself singular. Whatever thedefect might be, it was American; it belonged to the type; it lived in theblood. Whatever the quality might be that held him apart, it was English; itlived also in the blood; one felt it little if at all, with Celts, and oneyearned reciprocally among Fiji cannibals. Clarence King used to say that itwas due to discord between the wave-lengths of the man-atoms; but the theoryoffered difficulties in measurement. Perhaps, after all, it was only thatgenius soars; but this theory, too, had its dark corners. All through life, onehad seen the American on his literary knees to the European; and all throughmany lives back for some two centuries, one had seen the European snub orpatronize the American; not always intentionally, but effectually. It was inthe nature of things. Kipling neither snubbed nor patronized; he was all gaietyand good-nature; but he would have been first to feel what one meant. Geniushas to pay itself that unwilling self-respect.

Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again inWashington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to lifeworth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead. Changeshad 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 onealmost as strange as in Boston or London. Slowly, a certain society had builtit*elf up about the Government; houses had been opened and there was muchdining; much calling; much leaving of cards; but a solitary man counted forless than in 1868. Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both Executiveand Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have the ear of anybodyin Government. No one in Government knew any reason for consulting any one insociety. The world had ceased to be wholly political, but politics had becomeless social. A survivor of the Civil War — like George Bancroft, or JohnHay — tried to keep footing, but without brilliant success. They werefree to say or do what they liked; but no one took much notice of anything saidor done.

A presidential election was to take place in November, and no one showedmuch interest in the result. The two candidates were singular persons, of whomit was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other, onlyenemies. Calvin Brice, who was at that time altogether the wittiest andcleverest member of the Senate, was in the habit of describing Mr. Cleveland inglowing terms and at great length, as one of the loftiest natures and noblestcharacters of ancient or modern time; "but," he concluded, "in future I preferto 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 thegreatest of Presidents, for, whatever harm they might do their enemies, was asnothing when compared to the mortality they inflicted on their friends. Menfled them as though they had the evil eye. To the American people, the twocandidates and the two parties were so evenly balanced that the scales showedhardly a perceptible difference. Mr. Harrison was an excellent President, a manof ability and force; perhaps the best President the Republican Party had putforward since Lincoln's death; yet, on the whole, Adams felt a shade ofpreference for President Cleveland, not so much personally as because theDemocrats represented to him the last remnants of the eighteenth century; thesurvivors of Hosea Biglow's Cornwallis; the sole remaining protestants againsta banker's Olympus which had become, for five-and-twenty years, more and moredespotic over Esop's frog-empire. One might no longer croak except to vote forKing Log, or — failing storks — for Grover Cleveland; and even thencould not be sure where King Banker lurked behind. The costly education inpolitics had led to political torpor. Every one did not share it. Clarence Kingand John Hay were loyal Republicans who never for a moment conceived that therecould be merit in other ideals. With King, the feeling was chiefly love ofarchaic races; sympathy with the negro and Indian and corresponding dislike oftheir enemies; but with Hay, party loyalty became a phase of being, a littlelike the loyalty of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw all thefailings of the party, and still more keenly those of the partisans; but hecould not live outside. To Adams a Western Democrat or a Western Republican, acity Democrat or a city Republican, a W. C. Whitney or a J. G. Blaine, wereactually 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 asRepublicans or Democrats. To Hay, the difference was that of being respectableor not.

Since 1879, King, Hay, and Adams had been inseparable. Step by step, theyhad gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shunning than inviting publicposition, 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 CarlSchurz, had carried the bill for uniting the Surveys and had placed King at thehead of the Bureau; but King waited only to organize the service, and thenresigned, in order to seek his private fortune in the West. Hay, after servingas Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary Evarts during a part of Hayes'sadministration, then also insisted on going out, in order to write with Nicolaythe "Life" of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and when his friends asked thereason, he could not go into long explanations, but preferred to answer simplythat no President had ever invited him to fill one. The reason was good, andwas also conveniently true, but left open an awkward doubt of his morals orcapacity. Why had no President ever cared to employ him? The question needed avolume of intricate explanation. There never was a day when he would haverefused to perform any duty that the Government imposed on him, but theAmerican Government never to his knowledge imposed duties. The point was neverraised with regard to him, or to any one else. The Government requiredcandidates to offer; the business of the Executive began and ended with theconsent or refusal to confer. The social formula carried this passive attitudea shade further. Any public man who may for years have used some other man'shouse as his own, when promoted to a position of patronage commonly feelshimself obliged to inquire, directly or indirectly, whether his friend wantsanything; which is equivalent to a civil act of divorce, since he feels awkwardin the old relation. The handsomest formula, in an impartial choice, was thegrandly courteous Southern phrase of Lamar: "Of course Mr. Adams knows thatanything 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 thesubject forever, and every one felt flattered.

Such an intimate, promoted to power, was always lost. His duties and caresabsorbed him and affected his balance of mind. Unless his friend served somepolitical purpose, friendship was an effort. Men who neither wrote fornewspapers nor made campaign speeches, who rarely subscribed to the campaignfund, and who entered the White House as seldom as possible, placed themselvesoutside the sphere of usefulness, and did so with entirely adequate knowledgeof what they were doing. They never expected the President to ask for theirservices, and saw no reason why he should do so. As for Henry Adams, in fiftyyears that he knew Washington, no one would have been more surprised thanhimself had any President ever asked him to perform so much of a service as tocross the square. Only Texan Congressmen imagined that the President neededtheir services in some remote consulate after worrying him for months to findone.

In Washington this law or custom is universally understood, and no one'scharacter necessarily suffered because he held no office. No one took officeunless he wanted it; and in turn the outsider was never asked to do work orsubscribe money. Adams saw no office that he wanted, and he gravely thoughtthat, from his point of view, in the long run, he was likely to be a moreuseful citizen without office. He could at least act as audience, and, in thosedays, a Washington audience seldom filled even a small theatre. He felt quitewell satisfied to look on, and from time to time he thought he might risk acriticism of the players; but though he found his own position regular, henever quite understood that of John Hay. The Republican leaders treated Hay asone of themselves; they asked his services and took his money with a freedomthat staggered even a hardened observer; but they never needed him inequivalent office. In Washington Hay was the only competent man in the partyfor diplomatic work. He corresponded in his powers of usefulness exactly withLord Granville in London, who had been for forty years the saving grace ofevery Liberal administration in turn. Had usefulness to the public service beenever a question, Hay should have had a first-class mission under Hayes; shouldhave been placed in the Cabinet by Garfield, and should have been restored toit by Harrison. These gentlemen were always using him; always invited hisservices, and always took his money.

Adams's opinion of politics and politicians, as he frankly admitted, lackedenthusiasm, although never, in his severest temper, did he apply to them theterms they freely applied to each other; and he explained everything by his oldexplanation of Grant's character as more or less a general type; but whatroused in his mind more rebellion was the patience and good-nature with whichHay allowed himself to be used. The trait was not confined to politics. Hayseemed to like to be used, and this was one of his many charms; but in politicsthis sort of good-nature demands supernatural patience. Whatever astonishinglapses of social convention the politicians betrayed, Hay laughed equallyheartily, and told the stories with constant amusem*nt, 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 himselffor laughing.

One must be rich, and come from Ohio or New York, to gratify an expensivetaste like this. Other men, on both political flanks, did the same thing, anddid it well, less for selfish objects than for the amusem*nt of the game; butHay alone lived in Washington and in the centre of the Ohio influences thatruled the Republican Party during thirty years. On the whole, these influenceswere respectable, and although Adams could not, under any circ*mstances, havehad any value, even financially, for Ohio politicians, Hay might have much, ashe showed, if they only knew enough to appreciate him. The American politicianwas occasionally an amusing object; Hay laughed, and, for want of otherresource, Adams laughed too; but perhaps it was partly irritation at seeing howPresident Harrison dealt his cards that made Adams welcome President Clevelandback to the White House.

At all events, neither Hay nor King nor Adams had much to gain byreëlecting Mr. Harrison in 1892, or by defeating him, as far as he wasconcerned; and as far as concerned Mr. Cleveland, they seemed to have even lesspersonal concern. The whole country, to outward appearance, stood in much thesame frame of mind. Everywhere was slack-water. Hay himself was almost aslanguid and indifferent as Adams. Neither had occupation. Both had finishedtheir literary work. The "Life" of Lincoln had been begun, completed, andpublished hand in hand with the "History" of Jefferson and Madison, so thatbetween them they had written nearly all the American history there was towrite. The intermediate period needed intermediate treatment; the gap betweenJames Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially filled by either ofthem. Both were heartily tired of the subject, and America seemed as tired asthey. What was worse, the redeeming energy of Americans which had generallyserved as the resource of minds otherwise vacant, the creation of new force,the application of expanding power, showed signs of check. Even the yearbefore, in 1891, far off in the Pacific, one had met everywhere in the East asort of stagnation — a creeping paralysis — complaints of shippingand 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 matterdid not concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always richest when the richwere poor; but it helped to dull the vibration of society.

However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the last twentyyears, for the three friends, King, Hay, and Adams, was exceedingly obscure in1892. They had lost twenty years, but what had they gained? They oftendiscussed the question. Hay had a singular faculty for remembering faces, andwould break off suddenly the thread of his talk, as he looked out of the windowon La Fayette Square, to notice an old corps commander or admiral of the CivilWar, tottering along to the club for his cards or his co*cktail: "There is oldDash who broke the rebel lines at Blankburg! Think of his having been athunderbolt of war!" Or what drew Adams's closer attention: "There goes oldBoutwell gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they went! Men who hadswayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King, and Adams, lessvalued than the ephemeral Congressman behind them, who could not have toldwhether the general was a Boutwell or Boutwell a general. Theirs was thehighest known success, and one asked what it was worth to them. Apart frompersonal vanity, what would they sell it for? Would any one of them, fromPresident downwards, refuse ten thousand a year in place of all theconsideration he received from the world on account of his success?

Yet consideration had value, and at that time Adams enjoyed lecturingAugustus St. Gaudens, in hours of depression, on its economics: "Honestly youmust admit that even if you don't pay your expenses you get a certain amount ofadvantage from doing the best work. Very likely some of the really successfulAmericans would be willing you should come to dinner sometimes, if you did notcome too often, while they would think twice about Hay, and would never standme." The forgotten statesman had no value at all; the general and admiral notmuch; the historian but little; on the whole, the artist stood best, and ofcourse, wealth rested outside the question, since it was acting as judge; but,in the last resort, the judge certainly admitted that consideration had somevalue 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 theantiquities of La Fayette Square, with the sense of having all that any onehad; all that the world had to offer; all that they wanted in life, includingtheir names on scores of title-pages and in one or two biographicaldictionaries; but this had nothing to do with consideration, and they knew nomore than Boutwell or St. Gaudens whether to call it success. Hay had passedten years in writing the "Life" of Lincoln, and perhaps President Lincoln wasthe better for it, but what Hay got from it was not so easy to see, except theprivilege of seeing popular book-makers steal from his book and cover the theftby abusing the author. Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson andMadison, with expenses which, in any mercantile business, could hardly havebeen reckoned at less than a hundred thousand dollars, on a salary of fivethousand 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, hecould see none whatever. Such works never return money. Even Frank Parkmannever 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. Athousand copies of a book that cost twenty dollars or more was as much as anyauthor could expect; two thousand copies was a visionary estimate unless itwere canvassed for subscription. As far as Adams knew, he had but three seriousreaders — Abram Hewitt, Wayne McVeagh, and Hay himself. He was amplysatisfied with their consideration, and could dispense with that of the otherfifty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred andninety-seven; but neither he nor Hay was better off in any other respect, andtheir chief title to consideration was their right to look out of their windowson great men, alive or dead, in La Fayette Square, a privilege which hadnothing to do with their writings.

The world was always good-natured; civil; glad to be amused; open-armed toany one who amused it; patient with every one who did not insist on puttinghimself in its way, or costing it money; but this was not consideration, stillless power in any of its concrete forms, and applied as well or better to acomic actor. Certainly a rare soprano or tenor voice earned infinitely moreapplause as it gave infinitely more pleasure, even in America; but one doeswhat one can with one's means, and casting up one's balance sheet, one expectsonly a reasonable return on one's capital. Hay and Adams had risked nothing andnever played for high stakes. King had followed the ambitious course. He hadplayed 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 yearsof his life underground. For companionship he was mostly lost.

Thus, in 1892, neither Hay, King, nor Adams knew whether they had attainedsuccess, or how to estimate it, or what to call it; and the American peopleseemed to have no clearer idea than they. Indeed, the American people had noidea at all; they were wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than theHebrews had ever trodden about Sinai; they had neither serpents nor goldencalves to worship. They had lost the sense of worship; for the idea that theyworshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of money was an old-world trait; ahealthy appetite akin to worship of the Gods, or to worship of power in anyconcrete shape; but the American wasted money more recklessly than any one everdid before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant courtaristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not what to do withhis 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 asthe houses of the San Francisco millionaires on Nob Hill. Except for therailway system, the enormous wealth taken out of the ground since 1840, haddisappeared. West of the Alleghenies, the whole country might have been sweptclean, and could have been replaced in better form within one or two years. TheAmerican mind had less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind, andbore its loss more easily; but it had been deflected by its pursuit till itcould turn in no other direction. It shunned, distrusted, disliked, thedangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in history for its ignorance ofthe past.

Personal contact brought this American trait close to Adams's notice. Hisfirst step, on returning to Washington, took him out to the cemetery known asRock Creek, to see the bronze figure which St. Gaudens had made for him in hisabsence. Naturally every detail interested him; every line; every touch of theartist; every change of light and shade; every point of relation; everypossible doubt of St. Gaudens's correctness of taste or feeling; so that, asthe spring approached, he was apt to stop there often to see what the figurehad to tell him that was new; but, in all that it had to say, he never oncethought of questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the onecommonplace about it — the oldest idea known to human thought. He knewthat if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man, woman, or child from Cairoto Kamtchatka would have needed more than a glance to reply. From the EgyptianSphinx to the Kamakura Daibuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angeloto Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though it hadnothing else to say. The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but inthe response of the observer. As Adams sat there, numbers of people came, forthe figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know itsmeaning. Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were vacant-mindedin the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would have been anursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese jinricksha-runner. The onlyexceptions were the clergy, who taught a lesson even deeper. One after anotherbrought companions there, and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection,broke out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure ofdespair, of atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest saw only what hebrought. 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 lostsight of faith. Both were more American than the old, half-witted soldiers whodenounced the wasting, on a mere grave, of money which should have been givenfor drink.

Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain ofself-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to which all others weresubservient, and which absorbed the energies of some sixty million people tothe exclusion of every other force, real or imaginary. The power of the railwaysystem had enormously increased since 1870. Already the coal output of160,000,000 tons closely approached the 180,000,000 of the British Empire, andone 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 wasdeeply exciting to a historian, but the railway system itself interested oneless than in 1868, since it offered less chance for future profit. Adams hadbeen born with the railway system; had grown up with it; had been over prettynearly every mile of it with curious eyes, and knew as much about it as hisneighbors; but not there could he look for a new education. Incomplete thoughit was, the system seemed on the whole to satisfy the wants of society betterthan any other part of the social machine, and society was content with itscreation, for the time, and with itself for creating it. Nothing new was to bedone or learned there, and the world hurried on to its telephones, bicycles,and electric trams. At past fifty, Adams solemnly and painfully learned to ridethe bicycle.

Nothing else occurred to him as a means of new life. Nothing else offereditself, however carefully he sought. He looked for no change. He lingered inWashington till near July without noticing a new idea. Then he went back toEngland to pass his summer on the Deeside. In October he returned to Washingtonand there awaited the reëlection of Mr. Cleveland, which led to no deeperthought than that of taking up some small notes that happened to beoutstanding. He had seen enough of the world to be a coward, and above all hehad an uneasy distrust of bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrowprejudices.

CHAPTER XXII. CHICAGO(1893)

DRIFTING in the dead-water of thefin-de-siècle — and during this last decade every onetalked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siècle — where not abreath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor ofself-content, one lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. Foryears he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was asunknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed that six months'oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing iseasier, 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 anight on their passage south or northwards, but existence was, on the whole,exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him. Of the society favorites who madethe life of every dinner- table and of the halls of Congress — Tom Reed,Bourke co*ckran, Edward Wolcott — he knew not one. Although Calvin Bricewas his next neighbor for six years, entertaining lavishly as no one had everentertained before in Washington, Adams never entered his house. W. C. Whitneyrivalled Senator Brice in hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance ofthe reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, PresidentCleveland, or President Harrison or Secretary Bayard or Blaine or Olney. Onehas no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one may pick and choosebetween houses, or accept hospitality without returning it. He loved solitudeas little as others did; but he was unfit for social work, and he sank underthe surface.

Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men, the world is not onlygood-natured but even friendly and generous; it loves to pardon if pardon isnot demanded as a right. Adams's social offences were many, and no one was moresensitive to it than himself; but a few houses always remained which he couldenter 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 singulareffect of educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politicianwho had done most to block his intended path in life. Senator Cameron ofPennsylvania 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 areign of sixteen years, during which Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Lodge led a career,without precedent and without succession, as the dispensers of sunshine overWashington. Both of them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of thisintimacy had made him one of their habitual household, as he was of Hay's. In asmall 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 theRepublican interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Hay, andCabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home in them all, and CecilSpring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The relation was daily, and thealliance undisturbed by power or patronage, since Mr. Harrison, in thoserespects, showed little more taste than Mr. Cleveland for the society andinterests of this particular band of followers, whose relations with the WhiteHouse were sometimes comic, but never intimate.

In February, 1893, Senator Cameron took his family to South Carolina, wherehe had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point on St. Helena Island, andAdams, as one of the family, was taken, with the rest, to open the newexperience. From there he went on to Havana, and came back to Coffin's Point tolinger till near April. In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to seethe Exposition, and Adams went with them. Early in June, all sailed for Englandtogether, and at last, in the middle of July, all found themselves inSwitzerland, at Prangins, Chamounix, and Zermatt. On July 22 they drove acrossthe Furka Pass and went down by rail to Lucerne.

Months of close contact teach character, if character has interest; and toAdams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since it had shipwrecked hiscareer 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 onlyto the blood of the cottager working against the blood of the townsman; butwhatever it was, one liked it for its simplicity. The Pennsylvania mind, asminds go, was not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but inpractical matters it was the steadiest of all American types; perhaps the mostefficient; certainly the safest.

Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never been able tofind a type to describe, the two great historical Pennsylvanians having been,as every one had so often heard, Benjamin Franklin of Boston and AlbertGallatin of Geneva. Of Albert Gallatin, indeed, he had made a voluminous studyand an elaborate picture, only to show that he was, if American at all, a NewYorker, with a Calvinistic strain — rather Connecticut thanPennsylvanian. The true Pennsylvanian was a narrower type; as narrow as thekirk; as shy of other people's narrowness as a Yankee; as self-limited as aPuritan farmer. To him, none but Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, negro,Dago, Italian, Englishman, Yankee — all was one in the depths ofPennsylvanian consciousness. The mental machine could run only on what it tookfor American lines. This was familiar, ever since one's study of PresidentGrant in 1869; but in 1893, as then, the type was admirably strong and usefulif one wanted only to run on the same lines. Practically the Pennsylvanianforgot his prejudices when he allied his interests. He then became supple inaction and large in motive, whatever he thought of his colleagues. When hehappened 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 allthe rest, because he understood his own class, who were always a majority; andknew how to deal with them as no New Englander could. If one wanted work donein Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a New Englander to do it. APennsylvanian not only could do it, but did it willingly, practically, andintelligently.

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, almostalways worked together. The Camerons had what the Adamses thought the politicalvice of reaching their objects without much regard to their methods. Theloftiest virtue of the Pennsylvania machine had never been its scrupulouspurity or sparkling professions. The machine worked by coarse means on coarseinterests, but its practical success had been the most curious subject of studyin American history. When one summed up the results of Pennsylvanian influence,one inclined to think that Pennsylvania set up the Government in 1789; saved itin 1861; created the American system; developed its iron and coal power; andinvented its great railways. Following up the same line, in his studies ofAmerican character, Adams reached the result — to him altogetherparadoxical — that Cameron's qualities and defects united in equal shareto make him the most useful member of the Senate.

In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable specimen ofthis American type which had so persistently suppressed his own, Adams was slowto notice that Cameron strongly influenced him, but he could not see a trace ofany influence which he exercised on Cameron. Not an opinion or a view of his onany subject was ever reflected back on him from Cameron's mind; not even anexpression or a fact. Yet the difference in age was trifling, and in educationslight. On the other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and innothing so much as on the great subject of discussion that year — thequestion of silver.

Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing about it, exceptas a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana Horton; but inevitably, from themoment he was forced to choose sides, he was sure to choose silver. Everypolitical idea and personal prejudice he ever dallied with held him to thesilver standard, and made a barrier between him and gold. He knew well enoughall that was to be said for the gold standard as economy, but he had never inhis life taken politics for a pursuit of economy. One might have a political oran economical policy; one could not have both at the same time. This was heresyin the English school, but it had always been law in the American. Equally heknew all that was to be said on the moral side of the question, and he admittedthat 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 hisbankers or croupiers to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure hiswinning the stakes. At least he was bound to profess disapproval — orthought he was. From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindlywith his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others —masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals. Morality is aprivate and costly luxury. The morality of the silver or gold standards was tobe 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 hiseighteenth-century principles, strict construction, limited powers, GeorgeWashington, John Adams, and the rest. He had, in a half-hearted way, struggledall his life against State Street, banks, capitalism altogether, as he knew itin old England or new England, and he was fated to make his last resistancebehind the silver standard.

For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in company withnine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little difference on themerits. Adams was sure to learn backwards, but the case seemed entirelydifferent with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian, a practical politician, whomall the reformers, including all the Adamses. had abused for a lifetime forsubservience to moneyed interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go withthe 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. Thereformers, represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose personalinterests lay with the gold standard, at once assumed that Senator Cameron hada personal interest in silver, and denounced his corruption as hotly as thoughhe had been convicted of taking a bribe.

More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams. His owninterests were with gold, but he supported silver; the Evening Post'sand Godkin's interests were with gold, and they frankly said so, yet theyavowedly pursued their interests even into politics; Cameron's interests hadalways been with the corporations, yet he supported silver. Thus moralityrequired that Adams should be condemned for going against his interests; thatGodkin was virtuous in following his interests; and that Cameron was ascoundrel 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 thenewspapers or a popular election has decided a question of doubtful morality,individuals are apt to err, especially when putting money into their ownpockets; but in democracies, the majority alone gives law. To any one who knewthe relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a popular votebetween them seemed excessively humorous; yet the popular vote in the end diddecide 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 thedark to discover where his greater interest lay. As usual, the banks taughthim. In the course of fifty years the banks taught one many wise lessons forwhich an insect had to be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all thelessons Adams learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that ofJuly 22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameronon the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they reachedLucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from his brothersrequesting his immediate return to Boston because the community was bankruptand he was probably a beggar.

If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a lesson thanthat of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was himself surprised at hisown slowness to understand what had struck him. For several years a suffererfrom insomnia, his first thought was of beggary of nerves, and he made ready toface a sleepless night, but although his mind tried to wrestle with the problemhow any man could be ruined who had, months before, paid off every dollar ofdebt he knew himself to owe, he gave up that insoluble riddle in order to fallback on the larger principle that beggary could be no more for him than it wasfor others who were more valuable members of society, and, with that, he wentto sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started for Quincy where hearrived August 7.

As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years old, the shockof finding one's self suspended, for several months, over the edge ofbankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how to get away, is to bestrongly recommended. By slow degrees the situation dawned on him that thebanks had lent him, among others, some money — thousands of millions were— as bankruptcy — the same — for which he, among others, wasresponsible and of which he knew no more than they. The humor of this situationseemed to him so much more pointed than the terror, as to make him laugh athimself with a sincerity he had been long strange to. As far as he couldcomprehend, he had nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood tolose their existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but moneywas their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power; he couldafford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position, though fewlaughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks were going to doabout 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 muchbetter. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something thatnobody wanted done. When Adams went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars ofhis 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 refusingto let the banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Eachwanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he couldfind no answer to the question which was responsible for getting the other intothe situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same interest and sociallythe same person. Evidently the force was one; its operation was mechanical; itseffect must be proportional to its power; but no one knew what it meant, andmost people dismissed it as an emotion — a panic — that meantnothing.

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 ofhis world and could finish his education, interrupted for twenty years. Hecared 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 aboutto happen to the world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the forcesat work; the old machine ran far behind its duty; somewhere — somehow— it was bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely overone's head, it gave the better chance for study.

For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother Brooks inQuincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities. Brookswas then a man of forty-five years old; a strong writer and a vigorous thinkerwho irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit the atmosphere; but thetwo brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used toaudiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history thatcivilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for theMediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic. Everything American, as wellas most things European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking newequilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with theadvantages of ten years' study, had swept away much rubbish in the effort tobuild up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that no paradoxcompared with that of daily events. The facts were constantly outrunning histhoughts. The instability was greater than he calculated; the speed ofacceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid down the paradoxthat, in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logicaloutcome was not collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it forstudy.

By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the storm havingpartly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one so interesting that heset off to Chicago to study the Exposition again, and stayed there a fortnightabsorbed in it. He found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and hiseducation spread over chaos. Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year,education went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell into relationsas simple as words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit andexchange that came to complicate it; and when one sought rest at Chicago,educational game started like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sightamong thousands of its kind before one could mark its burrow. The Expositionitself defied philosophy. One might find fault till the last gate closed, onecould still explain nothing that needed explanation. As a scenic display, Parishad never approached it, but the inconceivable scenic display consisted in itsbeing there at all — more surprising, as it was, than anything else onthe continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railwaysystem 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 andill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcriesas the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the Lakes.

The first astonishment became greater every day. That the Exposition shouldbe a natural growth and product of the Northwest offered a step in evolution tostartle Darwin; but that it should be anything else seemed an idea morestartling still; and even granting it were not — admitting it to be asort of industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Artsartistically 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 homein 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 thoughhe had passed his life in landscape gardening and architectural decoration. Ifhe had not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as heknew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at Worth's or Paquin's. Perhapshe could not do it again; the next time he would want to do it himself andwould show his own faults; but for the moment he seemed to have leaped directlyfrom Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, toimpose classical standards on plastic Chicago. Critics had no trouble incriticising the classicism, but all trading cities had always shown traders'taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner thanVenetian Gothic. All trader's taste smelt of bric-à-brac; Chicago tried atleast to give her taste a look of unity.

One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome almost asdeeply as on the steps of Ara Cœli, and much to the same purpose. Here wasa breach of continuity — a rupture in historical sequence! Was it real,or only apparent? One's personal universe hung on the answer, for, if therupture was real and the new American world could take this sharp and conscioustwist towards ideals, one's personal friends would come in, at last, as winnersin the great American chariot-race for fame. If the people of the Northwestactually knew what was good when they saw it, they would some day talk aboutHunt and Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham and McKim, and StanfordWhite when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten. Theartists and architects who had done the work offered little encouragement tohope 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 theyworked only for themselves; as though art, to the Western people, was a stagedecoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a paper collar; but possibly the architectsof Pæstum and Girgenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had saidthe same thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.

Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits for help, andfound it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much and so quickly that theinstruction ran to waste. Some millions of other people felt the samehelplessness, but few of them were seeking education, and to them helplessnessseemed natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking asteam-engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and expected to understand oneas little as the other. For the historian alone the Exposition made a seriouseffort. Historical exhibits were common, but they never went far enough; nonewere 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 penciland several sheets of paper trying to calculate exactly when, according to thegiven increase of power, tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean steamerwould reach its limits. His figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927;another generation to spare before force, space, and time should meet. Theocean steamer ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because itwas the nearest of man's products to a unity; railroads taught less becausethey seemed already finished except for mere increase in number; explosivestaught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians toexplain; the dynamo taught least because it had barely reached infancy, and, ifits progress was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it wouldresult in infinite costless energy within a generation. One lingered long amongthe dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase. Men ofscience could never understand the ignorance and naïveté of thehistorian, who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what itwas; did it pull or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow orvibrate? Was it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such questions towhich he expected answers and was astonished to get none.

Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had neverfaced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant. Men whoknew nothing whatever — who had never run a steam-engine, the simplest offorces — who had never put their hands on a lever — had nevertouched an electric battery — never talked through a telephone, and hadnot the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt oran ampère or an erg , or any other term of measurementintroduced within a hundred years — had no choice but to sit down on thesteps 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 allthese years, and still more ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babblingfutility of the society that let them say and do it. The historical mind canthink only in historical processes, and probably this was the first time sincehistorians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanicalsequence. Before a metaphysical or a theological or a political sequence, mosthistorians had felt helpless, but the single clue to which they had hithertotrusted was the unity of natural force.

Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not! If he had knownenough to state his problem, his education would have been complete at once.Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the Americanpeople knew where they were driving. Adams answered, for one, that he did notknow, but would try to find out. On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under theshadow of Richard Hunt's architecture, he decided that the American peopleprobably knew no more than he did; but that they might still be driving ordrifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was saidto be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relationsenough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the firstexpression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.

Washington was the second. When he got back there, he fell headlong into theextra session of Congress called to repeal the Silver Act. The silver minoritymade an obstinate attempt to prevent it, and most of the majority had littleheart in the creation of a single gold standard. The banks alone, and thedealers in exchange, insisted upon it; the political parties divided accordingto capitalistic geographical lines, Senator Cameron offering almost the onlyexception; but they mixed with unusual good-temper, and made liberal allowancefor each others' actions and motives. The struggle was rather less irritablethan such struggles generally were, and it ended like a comedy. On the eveningof the final vote, Senator Cameron came back from the Capitol with SenatorBrice, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and Moreton Frewen, all in the gayest ofhumors as though they were rid of a heavy responsibility. Adams, too, in abystander's spirit, felt light in mind. He had stood up for his eighteenthcentury, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College,his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as any one would stand up withhim. He had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, inthe same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogetheralone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic societyuntil he had become little better than a crank. He had known for years that hemust accept the régime, but he had known a great many other disagreeablecertainties — like age, senility, and death — against which onemade what little resistance one could. The matter was settled at last by thepeople. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people hadhesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simplyindustrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, theissue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declareditself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all itsnecessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens, reformers,churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submissionto capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. Of all formsof society or government, this was the one he liked least, but his likes ordislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of State rights. Acapitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it mustbe run by capital and by capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass thenonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine bySouthern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, ashad been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simpleconditions.

There, education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was question ofgear; of running machinery; of economy; and involved no disputed principle.Once admitted that the machine must be efficient, society might dispute in whatsocial interest it should be run, but in any case it must work concentration.Such great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing inpolitics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and hissilver friends slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single goldstandard and the capitalistic system with its methods; the protective tariff;the corporations and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalismwhich necessarily made their complement; the whole mechanical consolidation offorce, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class into which Adams wasborn, but created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies thatAmerica adored.

Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders of amisdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing remained for ahistorian but to ask — how long and how far!

CHAPTER XXIII. SILENCE(1894-1898)

The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, andclosed much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such asno 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 thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to 1897, had no valuein the drama of education, and might be left out. Much that had made lifepleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the ruin, and among the earliestwreckage had been the fortunes of Clarence King. The lesson taught whatever thebystander 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 forthe combination of chances — physical energy, social standing, mentalscope and training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlativelyAmerican 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 therunning. The result of twenty years' effort proved that the theory ofscientific education failed where most theory fails — for want of money.Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he thought, quite outside of everypossible financial risk, had been caught in the cogs, and held for months overthe gulf of bankruptcy, saved only by the chance that the whole class ofmillionaires were more or less bankrupt too, and the banks were forced to letthe mice escape with the rats; but, in sum, education without capital couldalways be taken by the throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was ithelped by the knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered.Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education was the same. Thefailure of the scientific scheme, without money to back it, was flagrant.

The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science should beequivalent to money; in practice science was helpless without money. The weakholder was, in his own language, sure to be frozen out. Education must fit thecomplex conditions of a new society, always accelerating its movement, and itsfitness could be known only from success. One looked about for examples ofsuccess among the educated of one's time — the men born in the thirties,and trained to professions. Within one's immediate acquaintance, three weretypical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and William C. Whitney; all of whom owedtheir free hand to marriage, education serving only for ornament, but amongwhom, 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 themost of them got out of money. New York might occasionally fear them, but moreoften laughed or sneered at them, and never showed them respect. Scarcely oneof the very rich men held any position in society by virtue of his wealth, orcould have been elected to an office, or even into a good club. Setting asidethe few, like Pierpont Morgan, whose social position had little to do withgreater or less wealth, riches were in New York no object of envy on account ofthe joys they brought in their train, and Whitney was not even one of the veryrich; yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason for it. Alreadyin 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having gratified everyambition, and swung the country almost at his will; he had thrown away theusual objects of political ambition like the ashes of smoked cigarettes; hadturned to other amusem*nts, satiated every taste, gorged every appetite, wonevery object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had carried hisfield of activity abroad, until New York no longer knew what most to envy, hishorses or his houses. He had succeeded precisely where Clarence King hadfailed.

Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a bunch to racefor power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal; but one knew no betterin 1894 than in 1854 what an American education ought to be in order to countas success. Even granting that it counted as money, its value could not becalled 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 whomthe task of making money equivalent to education offered more difficulties thanto Adams the task of making education equivalent to money. Social positionseemed to have value still, while education counted for nothing. Amathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if fortunate mightaverage a value of ten dollars a day in the open market. An administrator,organizer, manager, with mediæval qualities of energy and will, but noeducation beyond his special branch, would probably be worth at least ten timesas much.

Society had failed to discover what sort of education suited it best. Wealthvalued social position and classical education as highly as either of thesevalued wealth, and the women still tended to keep the scales even. For anythingAdams 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 phenomenalsuccess.

Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he must haverepeated that all he asked of education was the facile use of the four oldtools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With these he could still makehis way to any object within his vision, and would have a decisive advantageover nine rivals in ten. Statesman or lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest orprofessor, native or foreign, he would fear none.

King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the indirect gainto Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced him to go to Cuba, where,in January, 1894, they drifted into the little town of Santiago. Thepicturesque Cuban society, which King knew well, was more amusing than anyother that one had yet discovered in the whole broad world, but made noprofession of teaching anything unless it were Cuban Spanish or thedanza; and neither on his own nor on King's account did the visitorask any loftier study than that of the buzzards floating on the trade-wind downthe valley to Dos Bocas, or the colors of sea and shore at sunrise from theheight of the Gran Piedra; but, as though they were still twenty years old andrevolution were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never beensolid, fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief. Inthe half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were always falling on one'shead, and, of all lessons, these constant political convulsions taught least.Since the time of Rameses, revolutions have raised more doubts than theysolved, but they have sometimes the merit of changing one's point of view, andthe Cuban rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams to aDemocratic administration. He thought that President Cleveland could havesettled the Cuban question, without war, had he chosen to do his duty, and thisfeeling, generally held by the Democratic Party, joined with the stress ofeconomical needs and the gold standard to break into bits the old organizationand to leave no choice between parties. The new American, whether consciouslyor not, had turned his back on the nineteenth century before he was done withit; the gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass could haveno other outcome, and, as so often before, the movement, once accelerated byattempting to impede it, had the additional, brutal consequence of crushingequally the good and the bad that stood in its way.

The lesson was old — so old that it became tedious. One had studiednothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet another year Adamslingered on these outskirts of the vortex, among the picturesque, primitivetypes 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 Kingin the West Indies, he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and foundthere little to study. The Geysers were an old story; the Snake River posed novital statistics except in its fordings; even the Tetons were as calm as theywere lovely; while the wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and corners, laidno traps. In return the party treated them with affection. Never did a bandless bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the roof of the continent. Hay loved aslittle as Adams did, the labor of skinning and butchering big game; he had evenoutgrown the sedate, middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and foundthe trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself, whomanaged the party loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so much as afieldmouse; Iddings the geologist was reduced to shooting only for the table,and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the simple life. Comparedwith the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had vanished; one saw nopossible adventures except to break one's neck as in chasing an aniseed fox.Only the more intelligent ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociablebear.

When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone to Seattleand Vancouver to inspect the last American railway systems yet untried. They,too, offered little new learning, and no sooner had he finished this debauch ofNorthwestern geography than with desperate thirst for exhausting the Americanfield, he set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean andclearing up, in these six or eight months, at least twenty thousand miles ofAmerican 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, mountainsolitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types. Infinitely more amusing andincomparably more picturesque than civilization, they educated only artists,and, as one's sixtieth year approached, the artist began to die; only a certainintense cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensualstimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art were atrotting-match. For this, one was in some degree prepared, for the old man hadbeen a stage-type since drama began; but one felt some perplexity to accountfor failure on the opposite or mechanical side, where nothing but cerebralaction was needed.

Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic, plunged deepinto statistics, fancying that education would find the surest bottom there;and the study proved the easiest he had ever approached. Even the Governmentvolunteered unlimited statistics, endless columns of figures, bottomlessaverages merely for the asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Fordsupplied any material that curiosity could imagine for filling the vast gaps ofignorance, and methods for applying the plasters of fact. One seemed for awhile to be winning ground, and one's averages projected themselves as lawsinto the future. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in theattitude of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in theirown figures. They should have reached certainty, but they talked like other menwho knew less. The method did not result faith. Indeed, every increase of mass— of volume and velocity — seemed to bring in new elements, and, atlast, a scholar, fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into asuperstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came out as itshould. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up or pull down asociety. One could frame no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructivedoctrines of Adam Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or tothe anarchistic imprecations of Élisée Reclus. One revelled at willin the ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving theprospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the future; butmeanwhile these societies which violated every law, moral, arithmetical, andeconomical, not only propagated each other, but produced also freshcomplexities with every propagation and developed mass with everycomplexity.

The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying discovery ofPteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as the conductof mankind in the fin-de-siècle. No one seemed very muchconcerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the anarchists,and they only because they disliked the present. Adams disliked the present asmuch as they did, and his interest in future society was becoming slight, yethe 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 SnakeRiver, tumbling from one morass into another, and at short intervals, for noreason but temper, falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres hadbecome so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed uphundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost continuous, and werebeginning again in Cuba, threatening in South Africa, and possible inManchuria; yet impartial judges thought them all not merely unnecessary, butfoolish — induced by greed of the coarsest class, as though the Pharaohsor the Romans were still robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be naturaland 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, hetook to study of the religious press. Possibly growth m human nature might showitself there. He found no need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent ofmotion, he preferred on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances ofbetterment; and he very gravely doubted, from his aching consciousness ofreligious 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 lostit*elf in studying what the world had ceased to care for; if it were to beginagain, 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 theChicago Fair had only confused the roads. Accidental education could go nofurther, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with themillions of chance images stored away without order in the memory. One might aswell try to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed astudent less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himselfridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman. Towardsmidsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe with theSenator and her two sons. The study of history is useful to the historian byteaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes onewho is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize howfew women have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man isknown wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sévigné, no womanhas pictured herself. The American woman of the nineteenth century will liveonly as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman of theeighteenth; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearlyso 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 thanthe American man; she was probably much better company than her grandmothers.With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, Senator since 1893, Adams's relations had beenthose of elder brother or uncle since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left hisexamination-papers on Assistant Professor Adams's desk, and crossed the streetto Christ Church in Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself, as scholar,fellow instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, andpolitical reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but with himafterwards as politician he had not much relation; and since Lodge had sufferedwhat Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not only a Senator but a Senatorfrom Massachusetts — a singular social relation which Adams had knownonly as fatal to friends — a superstitious student, intimate with thelaws 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 ofaverage humanity had been greatly dependent on his house. Senators can never beapproached with safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and severalsuperior children who feel no deference for Senators as such, may be approachedat times with relative impunity while they keep him under restraint.

Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it chancedthat in August one found one's self for the first time at Caen, Coutances, andMont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history had a chapter with which he thoughthimself familiar, it was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; yet so littlehas labor to do with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecturesystem turned into green and verdurous virgin forests merely through the mediumof younger eyes and fresher minds. His German bias must have given his youth aterrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessentialbecause un-German. They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, acompliment which would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or even insense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life in trying topersuade themselves and the public that they breathed nothing less Americanthan a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in the touch of a real emotion, betrayedthe unconscious humor of the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by anunusual 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 offall association with the German lecture-room. One could not at first see whatthis novelty meant; it had the air of mere antiquarian emotion like WenlockAbbey and Pteraspis; but it expelled archaic law and antiquarianismonce for all, without seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back toWashington with a new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and in Aprilreturned to Mexico with the Camerons to study the charms of pulque andChurriguerresque architecture. In May he ran through Europe again with Hay, asfar south as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage. After thus coveringonce more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went homeOctober, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and start the worldanew.

For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams wept notears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or historian, henever saw anything to admire in it, or anything he wanted to save; and in thisrespect he reflected only the public mind which balanced itself so exactlybetween 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 goodword to say for it. No period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in Americanpolitics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of Americansociety; but the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, ina small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to dependabjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged one's self down the longvista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's friends, and avoidingto look at anything else. Thus life had grown narrow with years, more and moreconcentrated on the circle of houses round La Fayette Square, which had nodirect or personal share in power except in the case of Mr. Blaine whosetumultuous struggle for existence held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley enteredthe White House and laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a momentthe whole nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over theworld. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders for London. Rockhilldeparted to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had been buried in Persia. Cameronrefused to remain in public life either at home or abroad, and broke up hishouse on the Square. Only the Lodges and Roosevelts remained, but even theywere at once absorbed in the interests of power. Since 1861, no such socialconvulsion had occurred.

Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay chiefly inforeign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most strongly the nightmare ofCuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the man in the State Department seemedmore important than the man in the White House. Adams knew no one in the UnitedStates fit to manage these matters in the face of a hostile Europe, and had nocandidate to propose; but he was shocked beyond all restraints of expression tolearn that the President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the StateDepartment in order to make a place for Mr. Hanna in the Senate. Grant himselfhad done nothing that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long enough todistinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not between the jobs.John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for the place, a friendly influencefor nearly forty years, was notoriously feeble and quite senile, so that theintrigue seemed to Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as of the StateDepartment. 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 ofexperience, and selections much worse than this had often turned out wellenough; but John Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down.

The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can bear coldlythe jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to Adams this kind ofjobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the petty money bribes everexploited by the newspapers. Nor was the matter improved by hints that thePresident might call John Hay to the Department whenever John Sherman shouldretire. Indeed, had Hay been even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, hewould have put an end, once for all, to further concern in public affairs onhis friend's part; but even without this last disaster, one felt thatWashington had become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there but solitarycontemplation of Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more amusingthan the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which offered nonovelty of what the French language expressively callsembêtement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surelycause anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!

Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing since the year1858, 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, onecould not recommend it to the young. The outlook lacked hope. The object oftravel had become more and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of theCivil Law had been locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860. Noah's dovehad not searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so littlesuccess. 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 haslost his taste even for olives. To this, also, the young may be driven, aseducation, end the lesson fails in humor; but it may be worth knowing to someof them that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man canpass 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 ofsixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not original. The man ofsixty, with a certain irritability proper to his years, retorts that the worldhas no business to throw on him the task of removing its carrion, and thatwhile he remains he has a right to require amusem*nt — or at leasteducation, since this costs nothing to any one — and that a world whichcannot educate, will not amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right toexist than he. Both views seem sound; but the world wearily objects to becalled by epithets what society always admits in practice; for no one likes tobe told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having nothing to sayin its defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is pardonable in youth, theman of sixty who wishes consideration had better hold his tongue. This truthalso has the defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for men of halfthat age Only the very young have the right to betray their ignorance orill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to betray themselves.

Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its acutesuffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one point withsingular unanimity; each praised silence in others. Of all characteristics inhuman nature, this has been one of the most abiding. Mere superficial gleaningof what, in the long history of human expression, has been said by the fool orunsaid by the wise, shows that, for once, no difference of opinion has everexisted on this. "Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he holdeth hispeace, is counted wise," and still more often, the wisest of men, when he spokethe highest wisdom, has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the merits ofsilence in others. Socrates made remarks in its favor, which should have struckthe Athenians as new to them; but of late the repetition had grown tiresome.Thomas Carlyle vociferated his admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it thebest form of expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form ofexpression 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 bebut 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 torturingflame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The evidence of the poets couldnot 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 curefor 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 inresult the same. More than this, in every society worth the name, the man ofsixty had been encouraged to ride this hobby — the Pursuit of Ignorancein Silence — as though it were the easiest way to get rid of him. InAmerica the silence was more oppressive than the ignorance; but perhapselsewhere the world might still hide some haunt of futilitariansilence 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 hadseen so many American Ministers received in London that the Lord Chamberlainhimself scarcely knew more about it; education could not be expected there; butthere Adams arrived, April 21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so manydays, for Queen Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in St. James'sStreet. True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets of Rome, actuallysqueaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like Odysseus before the pressof 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 thereturn of life after the long winter since 1893. One's fortunes, or one'sfriends' fortunes, were again in flood.

This amusem*nt could not be prolonged, for one found one's self the oldestEnglishman in England, much too familiar with family jars better forgotten, andold traditions better unknown. No wrinkled Tannhäuser, returning to theWartburg, 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 Frenchhistory for nieces who swarmed under the venerable cedars of the Pavillond'Angoulême, and rode about the green forest-alleys of St. Germain andMarly. From time to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred tobreak the summer-peace of the stranded Tannhäuser, who slowly began tofeel at home in France as in other countries he had thought more homelike. Atlength, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because he could go nowhereelse, 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 themto Egypt.

Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see Hay, andreadily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and what they said had aslittle to do with education as possible, until one evening, as they werelooking at the sun set across the Nile from Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought thema telegram to announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was thegreatest stride in education since 1865, but what did it teach? One leant on afragment of column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep downthe débris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the samewall when it was building. What was his view about the value of silence? Onelay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams hadtaught him that the relation between civilizations was that of trade. Henrywandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He tried to trace out theancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, andsearched for the harbor of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople andstudied the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian. Hishobby 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 ofexchange.

CHAPTER XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER(1898-1899)

The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer oflife to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap in peacesuch harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had reason to be more thancontent 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 ofsolidarity counts for much in one's contentment, but the sense of winning one'sgame counts for more; and in London, in 1898, the scene was singularlyinteresting to the last survivor of the Legation of 1861. He thought himselfperhaps the only person living who could get full enjoyment of the drama. Hecarried every scene of it, in a century and a half since the Stamp Act, quitealive in his mind — all the interminable disputes of his disputatiousancestors as far back as the year 1750 — as well as his owninsignificance in the Civil War, every step in which had the object of bringingEngland into an American system. For this they had written libraries ofargument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war, losing their tempers forlife, 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 yearsof stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument and no violence affected,the people of England learned their lesson just at the moment when Hay wouldotherwise have faced a flood of the old anxieties. Hay himself scarcely knewhow grateful he should be, for to him the change came almost of course. He sawonly 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 yearseffected what Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain — frightenedEngland into America's arms — seemed as melodramatic as any plot ofNapoleon the Great. He could feel only the sense of satisfaction at seeing thediplomatic triumph of all his family, since the breed existed, at last realizedunder his own eyes for the advantage of his oldest and closest ally.

This was history, not education, yet it taught something exceedinglyserious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For the first time in hislife, he felt a sense of possible purpose working itself out in history.Probably no one else on this earthly planet — not even Hay — couldhave come out on precisely such extreme personal satisfaction, but as he sat atHay's table, listening to any member of the British Cabinet, for all were alikenow, discuss the Philippines as a question of balance of power in the East, hecould see that the family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once intothe grand perspective of true empire-building, which Hay's work set off withartistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations looked stronger andlarger in scale for the refinement and certainty of the arcade. In the longlist of famous American Ministers in London, none could have given the workquite 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 ofsequence and intelligence in the affairs of man — a property which no oneelse had right to dispute; and this personal triumph left him a little coldtowards the other diplomatic results of the war. He knew that Porto Rico mustbe taken, but he would have been glad to escape the Philippines. Apart from toointimate an acquaintance with the value of islands in the South Seas, he knewthe West Indies well enough to be assured that, whatever the American peoplemight think or say about it, they would sooner or later have to police thoseislands, not against Europe, but for Europe, and America too. Education on theoutskirts of civilized life teaches not very much, but it taught this; and onefelt no call to shoulder the load of archipelagoes in the antipodes when onewas trying painfully to pluck up courage to face the labor of shoulderingarchipelagoes at home. The country decided otherwise, and one acquiescedreadily enough since the matter concerned only the public willingness to carryloads; 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 theresult as though one had shared in the danger, instead of being vigorouslyemployed in looking on from a great distance. After all, friends had done thework, if not one's self, and he too serves a certain purpose who only standsand cheers.

In June, at the crisis of interest, the Camerons came over, and took thefine old house of Surrenden Dering in Kent which they made a sort of countryhouse to the Embassy. Kent has charms rivalling those of Shropshire, and, evencompared with the many beautiful places scattered along the Welsh border, feware nobler or more genial than Surrenden with its unbroken descent from theSaxons, its avenues, its terraces, its deer-park, its large repose on theKentish hillside, and its broad outlook over whet was once the forest ofAnderida. Filled with a constant stream of guests, the house seemed to wait forthe chance to show its charms to the American, with whose activity the wholeworld was resounding; and never since the battle of Hastings could the littletelegraph office of the Kentish village have done such work. There, on a hotJuly 4, 1898, to an expectant group under the shady trees, came the telegramannouncing the destruction of the Spanish Armada, as it might have come toQueen Elizabeth in 1588; and there, later in the season, came the ordersummoning Hay to the State Department.

Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to remainAmbassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as he. No one knew sowell what sort of strain falls on Secretaries of State, or how little strengthhe had in reserve against it. Even at Surrenden he showed none too muchendurance, and he would gladly have found a valid excuse for refusing. Thediscussion on both sides was earnest, but the decided voice of the conclave wasthat, though if he were a mere office-seeker he might certainly declinepromotion, if he were a member of the Government he could not. No seriousstatesman could accept a favor and refuse a service. Doubtless he might refuse,but in that case he must resign. The amusem*nt of making Presidents has keenfascination for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old drawbackof all deviltry; one must serve the spirit one evokes, even though the servicewere 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 unselfishdecision, all would prove loss. For one, Adams on that subject had become alittle daft. No one in his experience had ever passed unscathed through thatmalarious marsh. In his fancy, office was poison; it killed — body andsoul — physically and socially. Office was more poisonous thanpriestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it held more power; but the poison hecomplained of was not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belatedpenitence for that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; hispoison was that of the will — the distortion of sight — the warpingof mind — the degradation of tissue — the coarsening of taste— the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed nooffice 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 withoutoffice; no one of his position, wealth, and political experience, living at thecentre of politics in contact with the active party managers, could escapeinfluence. His only ambition was to escape annoyance, and no one knew betterthan he that, at sixty years of age, sensitive to physical strain, still moresensitive to brutality, vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost oflife.

Neither he nor any of the Surrenden circle made presence of gladness at thenew dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and lightness of wit, he tookdark views of himself, none the lighter for their humor, and his obedience tothe President's order was the gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adamstook dark views, too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, whileHay had at least the honors of office, his friends would share only the ennuisof it; but, as usual with Hay, nothing was gained by taking such matterssolemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left their mark of military drill onevery 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 neverknown such sort of struggle to avail. The chance was desperate, but he couldnot afford to throw it away; so, as soon as the Surrenden establishment brokeup, on October 17, he prepared for return home, and on November 13, none toogladly, found himself again gazing into La Fayette Square.

He had made another false start and lost two years more of education; norhad he excuse; for, this time, neither politics nor society drew him away fromhis trail. He had nothing to do with Hay's politics at home or abroad, andnever affected agreement with his views or his methods, nor did Hay carewhether his friends agreed or disagreed. They all united in trying to help eachother to get along the best way they could, and all they tried to save was thepersonal relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten had he not beenhelped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her husbandinto the habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend off for an hour'swalk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards, and a chat with anyone who called.

For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved, at least in outwardappearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits which were slowlytaking a direction. Perhaps they had no right to be called pursuits, for intruth one consciously pursued nothing, but drifted as attraction offereditself. 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 Sicilyand Rome.

With the Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had left littleof the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860, but Sicily in allages seems to have taught only catastrophe and violence, running riot on thattheme ever since Ulysses began its study on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson inanarchy, 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 ofAra Cœli seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to acentre, for every new journey led back to its steps — Karnak, Ephesus,Delphi, Mycencæ, Constantinople, Syracuse — all lying on the road tothe Capitol. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not yetbe discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral; and New York sent most ofall, for, in forty years, America had made so vast a stride to empire that theworld of 1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same planewith the republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincolnas they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War onlyby school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were asfamiliar with political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. Theclimax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sullawere 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 onthe Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added apilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose solution ofhistorical riddles seemed the most satisfactory — or sufficient —ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and better worth it thanGibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The mostbewildering effect of all these fresh cross-lights on the old AssistantProfessor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he hadtaught then and what he found himself confusedly trying to learnfive-and-twenty years afterwards — between the twelfth century of histhirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spiritin the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts ofderision 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 theclaim 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 andpresumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of view had vanished in1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents orcreators 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 scholarsturned to the Law School, because one could see no other path to aprofession.

The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any other singlethread spun by the human spider; it offered no more continuity thanarchitecture or coinage, and no more force of its own. St. Francis expressedsupreme contempt for them all, and solved the whole problem by rejecting italtogether. Adams returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, preparedto admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it nolonger mattered. He passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with the lastat Surrenden; but the solitude did what the society did not — it forcedand drove him into the study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last heentered the practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could nolonger escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a methodical survey— a triangulation — of the twelfth century. The pursuit had asingular French charm which France had long lost — a calmness, lucidity,simplicity of expression, vigor of action, complexity of local color, that madeParis flat. In the long summer days one found a sort of saturated greenpleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the littletwelfth-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 andsummer was short, so that he was at last driven back to the quays andphotographs. 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 haddeeply affected their friends since 1850 John La Farge was certainly theforemost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the questionhow much he owed to La Farge could be answered only by admitting that he had nostandard to measure it by. Of all his friends La Farge alone owned a mindcomplex enough to contrast against the commonplaces of American uniformity, andin 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 somethingthat it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventionalanalysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression,all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality. The most disconcertingtrait of John La Farge was his reversal of the process. His approach was quietand indirect; he moved round an object, and never separated it from itssurroundings; he prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention; hewas never abrupt and abhorred dispute. His manners and attitude towards theuniverse were the same, whether tossing in the middle of the Pacific Oceansketching the trade-wind from a whale-boat in the blast of sea-sickness, ordrinking the cha-no-yu in the formal rites of Japan, or sipping hiscocoanut cup of kava in the ceremonial of Samoan chiefs, or reflecting underthe sacred bo-tree at Anaradjpura.

One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to respond, forhe 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 throughgrass, hidden perhaps but always there; and one felt often uncertain in whatdirection it flowed, for even a contradiction was to him only a shade ofdifference, a complementary color, about which no intelligent artist woulddispute. Constantly he repulsed argument: "Adams, you reason too much!" was oneof his standing reproaches even in the mild discussion of rice and mangoes inthe warm night of Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed Adams for being born inBoston. The mind resorts to reason for want of training, and Adams had nevermet a perfectly trained mind.

To La Farge, eccentricity meant convention; a mind really eccentric neverbetrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone — a shade — anuance — and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Ofcourse all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, butfew carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive between theirart and their talk. One evening Humphreys Johnston, who was devoted to LaFarge, asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. La Farge was ill — more illthan usual even for him — but he admired and liked Whistler, and insistedon going. By chance, Adams was so placed as to overhear the conversation ofboth, and had no choice but to hear that of Whistler, which engrossed thetable. At that moment the Boer War was raging, and, as every one knows, on thatsubject Whistler raged worse than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed againstEngland — 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 artcarried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point reached byLa Farge, or even attempted; but in talk he showed, above or below hiscolor-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 Fargeseemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value of La Farge's glass inthe history of glass-decoration, Adams was too ignorant to meddle, and as arule artists were if possible more ignorant than he; but whatever it was, itled him back to the twelfth century and to Chartres where La Farge not onlyfelt at home, but felt a sort of ownership. No other American had a rightthere, unless he too were a member of the Church and worked in glass. Adamshimself was an interloper, but long habit led La Farge to resign himself toAdams as one who meant well, though deplorably Bostonian; while Adams, thoughnear 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 knewenough at least to see that La Farge alone could use glass like athirteenth-century artist. In Europe the art had been dead for centuries, andmodern glass was pitiable. Even La Farge felt the early glass rather as adocument than as a historical emotion, and in hundreds of windows at Chartresand Bourges and Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant to holdtheir own against a color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La Farge'smind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with colortoned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it wasrenaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tonenever before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Élysée Palace Hotel wassomewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a step backwardstowards Chartres, but La Farge's health became more and more alarming, andAdams was glad to get him safely back to New York, January 15, 1900, while hehimself went at once to Washington to find out what had become of Hay. Nothinggood could be hoped, for Hay's troubles had begun, and were quite as great ashe had foreseen. Adams saw as little encouragement as Hay himself did, thoughhe dared not say so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness insupporting him, and the loyalty of his party friends; but all this worry onHay'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 sincethe Treason winter of 1860-61! Much to his astonishment, very few Americansseemed to share his point of view; their hostility to England seemed meretemper; but to Adams the war became almost a personal outrage. He had beentaught from childhood, even in England, that his forbears and their associatesin 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, andforced to sit down, a hundred and fifty years after John Adams had begun thetask, to prove, by appeal to law and fact, that George Washington was not afelon, whatever might be the case with George III. For reasons still morepersonal, he declined peremptorily to entertain question of the felony of JohnAdams. He felt obliged to go even further, and avow the opinion that if at anytime England should take towards Canada the position she took towards her Boercolonies, the United States would be bound, by their record, to interpose, andto insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him the attitude ofMr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed exceedingly un-American, and terriblyembarrassing to Hay.

Trained early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue, and to helpmake the political machine run somehow, since it could never be made to runwell, he would not bother Hay with theoretical objections which were every dayfretting him in practical forms. Hay's chance lay in patience and good-tempertill the luck should turn, and to him the only object was time; but aspolitical education the point seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shuttinghis eyes or denying an evident fact. Practical politics consists in ignoringfacts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictorythings. 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 amusem*nt, andplayed it, as a rule, much better than the professionals, but whose aims wereconsiderably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt no great lovefor the cheap drudgery of the work. In return, the professionals felt no greatlove for them, and set them aside when they could. Only their control of moneymade them inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. Thestory of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman series, and thatof Hay another. President Cleveland set aside the one; President Harrison setaside the other. "There is no politics in it," was his comment on Hay'sappointment to office. Hay held a different opinion and turned to McKinleywhose judgment of men was finer than common in Presidents. Mr. McKinley broughtto the problem of American government a solution which lay very far outside ofHenry Adams's education, but which seemed to be at least practical andAmerican. He undertook to pool interests in a general trust into which everyinterest should be taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose massshould, under his management, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkableresults. How much they cost was another matter; if the public is ever driven toits last resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the result will probablycost more.

Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several manipulators tohelp him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of whom was Hay; butunfortunately Hay's strength was weakest and his task hardest. At home,interests could be easily combined by simply paying their price; but abroadwhatever helped on one side, hurt him on another. Hay thought England must bebrought first into the combine; but at that time Germany, Russia, and Francewere all combining against England, and the Boer War helped them. For themoment Hay had no ally, abroad or at home, except Pauncefote, and Adams alwaysmaintained that Pauncefote alone pulled him through.

Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the obstacles athome. The Senate had grown more and more unmanageable, even since the time ofAndrew 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 beratified with unanimity in twenty-four hours. They wasted six weeks inwrangling over this one, and ratified it with one vote to spare. We have fiveor six matters now demanding settlement. I can settle them all, honorably andadvantageously to our own side; and I am assured by leading men in the Senatethat not one of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the Senate. I shouldhave a majority in every case, but a malcontent third would certainly dishevery one of them. To such monstrous shape has the original mistake of theConstitution grown in the evolution of our politics. You must understand, it isnot merely my solution the Senate will reject. They will reject, forinstance, any treaty, whatever, on any subject, with England. I doubt if theywould accept any treaty of consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrantthird would be differently composed, but it would be on hand. So that the realduties of a Secretary of State seem to be three: to fight claims upon us byother States; to press more or less fraudulent claims of our own citizens uponother countries; to find offices for the friends of Senators when there arenone. Is it worth while — for me — to keep up this uselesslabor?"

To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances struggling with thesame enemies, the question had scarcely the interest of a new study. He hadsaid all he had to say about it in a dozen or more volumes relating to thepolitics of a hundred years before. To him, the spectacle was so familiar as tobe humorous. The intrigue was too open to be interesting. The interference ofthe German and Russian legations, and of the Clan-na-Gael, with the press andthe Senate was innocently undisguised. The charming Russian Minister, CountCassini, the ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days passwithout appealing through the press to the public against the government. TheGerman Minister, Von Holleben, more cautiously did the same thing, and ofcourse every whisper of theirs was brought instantly to the Department. Thesethree forces, acting with the regular opposition and the naturalobstructionists, could always stop action in the Senate. The fathers hadintended to neutralize the energy of government and had succeeded, but theirmachine was never meant to do the work of a twenty-million horse-power societyin the twentieth century, where much work needed to be quickly and efficientlydone. 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 itwas given to do; and even if the charge were true, it applied equally to humansociety altogether, if one chose to treat mankind from that point of view. As amatter of mechanics, so much work must be done; bad machinery merely added tofriction.

Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had treated theworld as something to be taken in block without pulling it to pieces to get ridof its defects; he liked it all: he laughed and accepted; he had never knownunhappiness and would have gladly lived his entire life over again exactly asit happened. In the whole New York school, one met a similar dash of humor andcynicism more or less pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even the gayest oftempers succumbs at last to constant friction The old friend was rapidlyfading. The habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, thecasual humor, the equality of indifference, were sinking into the routine ofoffice; the mind lingered in the Department; the thought failed to react; thewit and humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and the irritationsmultiplied. To a head of bureau, the result seemed ennobling.

Although, as education, this branch of study was more familiar and olderthan the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two periods into a commonrelation was new. Ignorance required that these political and social andscientific values of the twelfth and twentieth centuries should be correlatedin some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor didone care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that oneknew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s =gt² /2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun andmoon, an obscure person in a remote wilderness like La Fayette Square couldtake liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply half its attraction intothe square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, forits attraction at any given time. A historical formula that should satisfy theconditions of the stellar universe weighed heavily on his mind; but a triflingmatter 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 almostimmoral — certainly hostile to sound historical system. Adams tried itonly because of its hostility to all that he had taught for history, since hestarted afresh from the new point that, whatever was right, all he had evertaught was wrong. He had pursued ignorance thus far with success, and had swepthis mind clear of knowledge. In beginning again, from the starting-point of SirIsaac Newton, he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in Washingtoncared 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, nevercame 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 moreaccessible, to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever hewanted an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley listened withoutward patience to his disputatious questionings; but he too nourished ascientific passion for doubt, and sentimental attachment for its avowal. He hadthe physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes ofintense perception. Like so many other great observers, Langley was not amathematician, and like most physicists, he believed in physics. Rigidlydenying himself the amusem*nt of philosophy, which consists chiefly insuggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew theproblems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing tothem distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting theirrespectability. 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 byJudge Stallo, which had been treated for a dozen years by the schools with aconspiracy of silence such as inevitably meets every revolutionary work thatupsets the stock and machinery of instruction. Adams read and failed tounderstand; then he asked questions and failed to get answers.

Probably this was education. Perhaps it was the only scientific educationopen to a student sixty-odd years old, who asked to be as ignorant as anastronomer. For him the details of science meant nothing: he wanted to know itsmass. Solar heat was not enough, or was too much. Kinetic atoms led only tomotion; never to direction or progress. History had no use for multiplicity; itneeded 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 12settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero.

CHAPTER XXV. THE DYNAMO AND THEVIRGIN (1900)

UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors inNovember, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to findit. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by thebest-informed man in the world. While he was thus meditating chaos, Langleycame by, and showed it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped itssuperfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley knew what tostudy, and why, and how; while Adams might as well have stood outside in thenight, staring at the Milky Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taughtnothing that one might not have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred yearsbefore; but though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as wellas one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge counted for nothinguntil some teacher should show how to apply it. Bacon took a vast deal oftrouble in teaching King James I and his subjects, American or other, towardsthe year 1620, that true science was the development or economy of forces; yetan elderly American in 1900 knew neither the formula nor the forces; or even somuch as to say to himself that his historical business in the Expositionconcerned only the economies or developments of force since 1893, when he beganthe study at Chicago.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance itaccumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked at most of theaccumulations of art in the storehouses called Art Museums; yet he did not knowhow to look at the art exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and hisdoctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them atParis. Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of thefield every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, andnaturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit. Equally, heignored almost the whole industrial exhibit. He led his pupil directly to theforces. His chief interest was in new motors to make his airship feasible, andhe taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor, and ofthe automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a hundredkilometres an hour, almost as destructive as the electric tram which was onlyten years older; and threatening to become as terrible as the locomotivesteam-engine itself, which was almost exactly Adams's own age.

Then he showed his scholar the great hall of dynamos, and explained howlittle he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own specialsun, 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. Tohim, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere theheat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefullykept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As hegrew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel theforty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt theCross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned,deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving withinarm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcelyhumming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect ofpower — 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 naturalexpression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbolsof ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the mostexpressive.

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 thedynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break ofcontinuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No morerelation could he discover between the steam and the electric current thanbetween the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if notreversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity asin faith. Langley could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried bythe same trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces wereanarchical, and especially that he was not responsible for the new rays, thatwere little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit towards science. His ownrays, with which he had doubled the solar spectrum, were altogether harmlessand beneficent; but Radium denied its God — or, what was to Langley thesame 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 orKelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed himself up in thetangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastlyconsoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself in vibrations and rayswhich were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, ashe hugged the dynamo; while he lost his arithmetic in trying to figure out theequation between the discoveries and the economies of force. The economies,like the discoveries, were absolute, supersensual, occult; incapable ofexpression in horse-power. What mathematical equivalent could he suggest as thevalue of a Branly coherer? Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had some scaleof measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a thermometer adequate tothe purpose; but X-rays had played no part whatever in man's consciousness, andthe atom itself had figured only as a fiction of thought. In these seven yearsman had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale ofmeasurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which hecould measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible tohis senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible toeach other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemedprepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universesinterfused — physics stark mad in metaphysics.

Historians undertake to arrange sequences, — called stories, orhistories — assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. Theseassumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, butcommonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious criticwere to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice,that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talkingabout. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he meant. He hadeven published a dozen volumes of American history for no other purpose than tosatisfy himself whether, by severest process of stating, with the leastpossible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorouslyconsequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of humanmovement. The result had satisfied him as little as at Harvard College. Wherehe saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw thesame unit of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about hisstatesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself and, as a rule, nomore honest; but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could notreach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfiedthat the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their societycould lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and thesequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; andthus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in theGallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck brokenby the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

Since no one else showed much concern, an elderly person without other careshad no need to betray alarm. The year 1900 was not the first to upsetschoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo had broken many professorial necks about1600; Columbus had stood the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearestapproach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up theCross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, wereoccult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energylike that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediæval science, werecalled immediate modes of the divine substance.

The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly if he wasbound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common value couldhave no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind. He must treatthem as they had been felt; as convertible, reversible, interchangeableattractions on thought. He made up his mind to venture it; he would risktranslating rays into faith. Such a reversible process would vastly amuse achemist, but the chemist could not deny that he, or some of his fellowphysicists, could feel the force of both. When Adams was a boy in Boston, thebest chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way ofscandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry; neither had he heard of dynamosor 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 themost hazardous of all. The knife-edge along which he must crawl, like SirLancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which hadnothing in common but attraction. They were as different as a magnet is fromgravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. Theforce of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent asX-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 Womanhad once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as asentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidentlyAmerica was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise theywould not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a trueforce, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made Americanfemale had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait wasnotorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew thatsex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty wasneeded. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of theEphesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. Shewas goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she wasreproduction — the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all sheneeded was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools ofeducation had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius,though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poetinvoked 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 trueAmerican knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read theletter, but he never felt the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind likethat of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo asthough he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, ashe knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was thehighest energy ever known to man, the creator four-fifths of his noblest art,exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all thesteam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown tothe American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an AmericanVenus would never dare exist.

The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth century seemedas remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost violently to study, once it wasposed; and on this point Langleys were as useless as though they were HerbertSpencers or dynamos. The idea survived only as art. There one turned asnaturally 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 onthe power of sex, as every classic had always done; but he could think only ofWalt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; andone or two painters, for the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex forsentiment, never for force; to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias anunfeminine horror. American art, like the American language and Americaneducation, was as far as possible sexless. Society regarded this victory oversex as its greatest triumph, and the historian readily admitted it, since themoral issue, for the moment, did not concern one who was studying the relationsof unmoral force. He cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until he couldmeasure its energy.

Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit, and, in hisstroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's General Sherman, whichhad 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 theusual contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors. Of all the Americanartists who gave to American art whatever life it breathed in the seventies,St. Gaudens was perhaps the most sympathetic, but certainly the mostinarticulate. General Grant or Don Cameron had scarcely less instinct ofrhetoric than he. All the others — the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge,Stanford White — were exuberant; only St. Gaudens could never discuss ordilate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work theforms that he felt. He never laid down the law, or affected the despot, orbecame brutalized like Whistler by the brutalities of his world. He required noincense; he was no egoist; his simplicity of thought was excessive; he couldnot imitate, or give any form but his own to the creations of his hand. No onefelt more strongly than he the strength of other men, but the idea that theycould 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 outfor a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, or dinner as pleased his moods, and inreturn St. Gaudens sometimes let Adams go about in his company.

Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of Frenchmen, to seethe cathedral. Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculptureof 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. Greatmen before great monuments express great truths, provided they are not takentoo solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idolGibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals: "I darted a contemptuous look on thestately monuments of supersition." Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbonhad never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one would have paidlargely for a photograph of the fat little historian, on the background ofNotre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his readers — perhaps himself— that he was darting a contemptuous look on the stately monument, forwhich he felt in fact the respect which every man of his vast study and activemind always feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one feltalso the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789 religiousmonuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and simple asthe 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 findit more instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one brings,and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution. Ruskin broughtreaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens had passed beyond all. He likedthe stately monuments much more than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved theirdignity; their unity; their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; theirdecorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the forcethat created it all — the Virgin, the Woman — by whose genius "thestately 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, whoexpressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even uponthe artist.

Yet in mind and person St. Gaudens was a survival of the 1500; he bore thestamp of the Renaissance, and should have carried an image of the Virgin roundhis neck, or stuck in his hat, like Louis XI. In mere time he was a lost soulthat had strayed by chance to the twentieth century, and forgotten where itcame from. He writhed and cursed at his ignorance, much as Adams did at hisown, but in the opposite sense. St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini,smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devouredby 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 havefelt in her the force that made them one; but it was not so. To Adams shebecame more than ever a channel of force; to St. Gaudens she remained as beforea channel of taste.

For a symbol of power, St. Gaudens instinctively preferred the horse, as wasplain in his horse and Victory of the Sherman monument. Doubtless Sherman alsofelt it so. The attitude was so American that, for at least forty years, Adamshad never realized that any other could be in sound taste. How many years hadhe 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 theVirgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres —perhaps at Lourdes — possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there thedivinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles — but otherwise one must look forforce to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in theGerman and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive tothe 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 arailway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complainedthat the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. Allthe steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies actedas interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may bemeasured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. Afteronce admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between twopoints, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited hisconvenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped himto accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle wasforce, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gainedby ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatestforce the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herselfmore strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; thehistorian's business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where itcame from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; itsvalues, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more complex thanradium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed moreperplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them,but as a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all wereoccult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgineasiest to handle.

The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last to the vastforests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with ThomasAquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one werestill a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could oneforce one's self into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulseda score of entrances more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had ledanywhere, unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years ofstudy had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one controlled nomore force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force controlled bysociety had enormously increased. The secret of education still hid itselfsomewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In suchlabyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the penbecomes 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 materialover and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is neverarbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knowstoo 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 dependsmore on what is struck out than on what is left in; on the sequence of the mainlines of thought, than on their play or variety. Compelled once more to leanheavily on this support, Adams covered more thousands of pages with figures asformal as though they were algebra, laboriously striking out, altering,burning, experimenting, until the year had expired, the Exposition had longbeen closed, and winter drawing to its end, before he sailed from Cherbourg, onJanuary 19, 1901, for home.

CHAPTER XXVI. TWILIGHT(1901)

WHILE the world that thought itself frivolous, andsubmitted meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the ParisExposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and Besnard, theworld that thought itself serious, and showed other infallible marks of comingmental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at Peking and elsewhere such asstartled even itself. Of all branches of education, the science of gaugingpeople and events by their relative importance defies study most insolently.For three or four generations, society has united in withering with contemptand 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 thetaste of either lady, one quickly found that it were better to buy half-a-dozenNapoleons or Frederics, or Maria Theresas, or all the philosophy and science oftheir time, than to bid for a cane-bottomed chair that either of these twoladies had adorned. The same thing might be said, in a different sense, ofVoltaire; while, as every one knows, the money-value of any hand-stroke ofWatteau or Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out of all proportion to theimportance of the men. Society seemed to delight in talking with solemnconviction about serious values, and in paying fantastic prices for nothing butthe most futile. The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, in theeyes of a student, the most serious that could be offered for his study, sinceit 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 amoney-value, the fall of China was chiefly studied in Paris and London as acalamity to Chinese porcelain. The value of a Ming vase was more serious thanuniversal war.

The drama of the Legations interested the public much as though it were anovel of Alexandre Dumas, but the bearing of the drama on future historyoffered an interest vastly greater. Adams knew no more about it than though hewere the best-informed statesman in Europe. Like them all, he took for grantedthat the Legations were massacred, and that John Hay, who alone championedChina's "administrative entity," would be massacred too, since he musthenceforth look on, in impotence, while Russia and Germany dismembered China,and shut up America at home. Nine statesmen out of ten, in Europe, acceptedthis result in advance, seeing no way to prevent it. Adams saw none, andlaughed 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 asEurope, though not quite so stupid, since, on that branch of education, he knewenough for his purpose. Nothing so meteoric had ever been done in Americandiplomacy. On returning to Washington, January 30, 1901, he found most of theworld 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 setthe Washington Government at the head of civilization so quietly thatcivilization submitted, by mere instinct of docility, to receive and obey hisorders; but, after the first shock of silence, society felt the force of thestroke through its fineness, and burst into almost tumultuous applause.Instantly the diplomacy of the nineteenth century, with all its painfulscuffles and struggles, was forgotten, and the American blushed to be told ofhis 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 aswith most men, success was a tonic, and depression a specific poison; but asusual, his troubles nested at home. Success doubles strain. PresidentMcKinley's diplomatic court had become the largest in the world, and thediplomatic relations required far more work than ever before, while the staffof the Department was little more efficient, and the friction in the Senate hadbecome coagulated. Hay took to studying the "Diary" of John Quincy Adams eightyyears before, and calculated that the resistance had increased about ten times,as measured by waste of days and increase of effort, although Secretary ofState J. Q. Adams thought himself very hardly treated. Hay cheerfully notedthat it was killing him, and proved it, for the effort of the afternoon walkbecame sometimes painful.

For the moment, things were going fairly well, and Hay's unruly team wereless fidgety, but Pauncefote still pulled the whole load and turned thedangerous corners safely, while Cassini and Holleben helped the Senate to makewhat trouble they could, without serious offence, and the Irish, after thegenial Celtic nature, obstructed even themselves. The fortunate Irish, thanksto their sympathetic qualities, never made lasting enmities; but the Germansseemed in a fair way to rouse ill-will and even ugly temper in the spirit ofpolitics, which was by no means a part of Hay's plans. He had as much as hecould do to overcome domestic friction, and felt no wish to alienate foreignpowers. Yet so much could be said in favor of the foreigners that they commonlyknew why they made trouble, and were steady to a motive. Cassini had for yearspursued, in Peking as in Washington, a policy of his own, never disguised, andas little in harmony with his chief as with Hay; he made his opposition onfixed lines for notorious objects; but Senators could seldom give a reason forobstruction. In every hundred men, a certain number obstruct by instinct, andtry to invent reasons to explain it afterwards. The Senate was no worse thanthe board of a university; but incorporators as a rule have not made this classof men dictators on purpose to prevent action. In the Senate, a single votecommonly stopped legislation, or, in committee, stifled discussion.

Hay's policy of removing, one after another, all irritations, and closingall discussions with foreign countries, roused incessant obstruction, whichcould be overcome only by patience and bargaining in executive patronage, ifindeed it could be overcome at all. The price actually paid was not very greatexcept in the physical exhaustion of Hay and Pauncefote, Root and McKinley. Noserious bargaining of equivalents could be attempted; Senators would notsacrifice five dollars in their own States to gain five hundred thousand inanother; but whenever a foreign country was willing to surrender an advantagewithout an equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a treaty. In allsuch cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the Senate, andamounted 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 theconsulates in the service; the Senators will all come to me and refuse tobelieve 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 canforesee is being sick a good part of the time; I am nearing my grandclimacteric, and the great culbute is approaching."

He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of all hispredecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as historian theirsufferings had been a long delight — the solitary picturesque and tragicelement in politics — incidentally requiring character-studies like AaronBurr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and Webster and Sumner, with Sir ForcibleFeebles like James M. Mason and stage exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. TheSenate took the place of Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses andBolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs, and Malvolios — endless varieties ofhuman nature nowhere else to be studied, and none the less amusing because theykilled, or because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity. "Life is sogay and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely, butwhat he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the vast mass hewas 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 oldfriend was lost, and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by thecomplexities and multiplicities of his new world.

To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately seekingeducation, these small, or large, annoyances had no great value except asmeasures of mass and motion. For him the practical interest and the practicalman were such as looked forward to the next election, or perhaps, incorporations, five or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could benamed who were known to have looked a dozen years ahead; while any historianwho means to keep his alignment with past and future must cover a horizon oftwo generations at least. If he seeks to align himself with the future, he mustassume a condition of some sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Everyhistorian — sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably — musthave put to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn systemlast? He can never give himself less than one generation to show the fulleffects of a changed condition. His object is to triangulate from the widestpossible base to the furthest point he thinks he can see, which is always farbeyond the curvature of the horizon.

To the practical man, such an attempt is idiotic, and probably the practicalman is in the right to-day; but, whichever is right — if the question ofright or wrong enters at all into the matter — the historian has nochoice but to go on alone. Even in his own profession few companions offerhelp, and his walk soon becomes solitary, leading further and further into awilderness where twilight is short and the shadows are dense. Already Hayliterally staggered in his tracks for weariness. More worn than he, ClarenceKing dropped. One day in the spring he stopped an hour in Washington to bidgood-bye, cheerily and simply telling how his doctors had condemned him toArizona 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 ofreadiness for death is a stage rôle, and stoicism is a stupid resource,though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed of it even inthe acting.

The sunshine of life had not been so dazzling of late but that a share of itflickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared from their lives; but Hayhad still his family and ambition, while Adams could only blunder back alone,helplessly, wearily, his eyes rather dim with tears, to his vague trail acrossthe darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big or small, exceptcuriosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him afar look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of thepassage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were again to fall intoKing's arms at the door of the last and only log cabin left in life. Time hadbecome terribly short, and the sense of knowing so little when others knew somuch, crushed out hope.

He knew not in what new direction to turn, and sat at his desk, idly pullingthreads out of the tangled skein of science, to see whether or why they alignedthemselves. The commonest and oldest toy he knew was the child's magnet, withwhich he had played since babyhood, the most familiar of puzzles. He coveredhis desk with magnets, and mapped out their lines of force by compass. Then heread all the books he could find, and tried in vain to makes his lines of forceagree with theirs. The books confounded him. He could not credit his ownunderstanding. Here was literally the most concrete fact in nature, next togravitation which it defied; a force which must have radiated lines of energywithout stop, since time began, if not longer, and which might probably go onradiating after the sun should fall into the earth, since no one knew why— or how — or what it radiated — or even whether it radiatedat all. Perhaps the earliest known of all natural forces after the solarenergies, it seemed to have suggested no idea to any one until some marinerbethought himself that it might serve for a pointer. Another thousand yearspassed when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a pump,supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity, still withoutknowing how it worked or what it was. For a historian, the story of Faraday'sexperiments and the invention of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed acondition of human ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, suchas 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 faceof gravitation, phosphorescence, and odors; and he could imagine no reason whysociety should treat radium as revolutionary in science when every infant, forages past, had seen the magnet doing what radium did; for surely the kind ofradiation mattered nothing compared with the energy that radiated and thematter supplied for radiation. He dared not venture into the complexities ofchemistry, or microbes, so long as this child's toy offered complexities thatbefogged his mind beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless variety ofpumps 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 forcesthrough it, as Faraday did with a magnet. He figured the human mind itself asanother radiating matter through which man had always pumped a subtlerfluid.

In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the microbes thattroubled him, or even his helplessness before the forces. To that he was usedfrom childhood. The magnet in its new relation staggered his new education byits 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 inpolitics; he ran against it in science; he struck it in everyday life, asthough he were still Adam in the Garden of Eden between God who was unity, andSatan who was complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth. Theproblem 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. TheNational Government and the national unity had overcome every resistance, andthe Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over all the curates; yet thegreater the unity and the momentum, the worse became the complexity and thefriction. 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, wasincreasing, and threatened to increase beyond reason. He had surrendered allhis favorite prejudices, and foresworn even the forms of criticism —except for his pet amusem*nt, the Senate, which was a tonic or stimulantnecessary to healthy life; he had accepted uniformity and Pteraspisand ice age and tramways and telephones; and now — just when he was readyto 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 fullgeneration earlier, he had begun active life by writing a confession ofgeological faith at the bidding of Sir Charles Lyell, and that it might beworth looking at if only to steady his vision. He read it again, and thought itbetter than he could do at sixty-three; but elderly minds always work loose. Hesaw his doubts grown larger, and became curious to know what had been saidabout them since 1870. The Geological Survey supplied stacks of volumes, andreading for steady months; while, the longer he read, the more he wondered,pondered, doubted what his delightful old friend Sir Charles Lyell would havesaid about it.

Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young. Unityis vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. The olderthe mind, the older its complexities, and the further it looks, the more itsees, until even the stars resolve themselves into multiples; yet the childwill always see but one. Adams asked whether geology since 1867 had driftedtowards unity or multiplicity, and he felt that the drift would depend on theage of the man who drifted.

Seeking some impersonal point for measure, he turned to see what hadhappened to his oldest friend and cousin the ganoid fish, thePteraspis of Ludlow and Wenlock, with whom he had sported whengeological life was young; as though they had all remained together in time toact the Mask of Comus at Ludlow Castle, and repeat "how charming is divinephilosophy!" He felt almost aggrieved to find Walcott so vigorously acting thepart of Comus as to have flung the ganoid all the way off to Colorado and farback into the Lower Trenton limestone, making the Pteraspis as modernas a Mississippi gar-pike by spawning an ancestry for him, indefinitely moreremote, in the dawn of known organic life. A few thousand feet, more or less,of limestone were the liveliest amusem*nt to the ganoid, but they buried theuniformitarian alive, under the weight of his own uniformity. Not for all theganoid fish that ever swam, would a discreet historian dare to hazard even insecret an opinion about the value of Natural Selection by Minute Changes underUniform Conditions, for he could know no more about it than most of hisneighbors who knew nothing; but natural selection that did not select —evolution finished before it began — minute changes that refused tochange anything during the whole geological record - survival of the highestorder in a fauna which had no origin — uniformity under conditions whichhad disturbed everything else in creation — to an honest-meaning thoughignorant student who needed to prove Natural Selection and not assume it, suchsequence brought no peace. He wished to be shown that changes in form causedevolution in force; that chemical or mechanical energy had by natural selectionand minute changes, under uniform conditions, converted itself into thought.The ganoid fish seemed to prove — to him — that it had selectedneither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinkingthat force could be increased in volume or raised in intensity only by help ofoutside force. To him, the ganoid was a huge perplexity, none the less becauseneither he nor the ganoid troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helpedto reveal that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he askedwhat sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any doctrine seemedorthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere vital force acting on its ownlines 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 thetheologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to them; but to thehistorian who sought only the direction of thought and had begun as theconfident child of Darwin and Lyell in 1867, the matter of direction seemedvital. Then he had entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and hadsurveyed a universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a farvaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in every direction,overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, withside-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved. The activegeologists had mostly become specialists dealing with complexities far tootechnical for an amateur, but the old formulas still seemed to serve forbeginners, 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 chillsin recent geology and in the northern hemisphere alone, while no geologist hadventured to assert that the glaciation of the southern hemisphere couldpossibly be referred to a horizon more remote. Continents still rose wildly andwildly sank, though Professor Suess of Vienna had written an epoch-making work,showing that continents were anchored like crystals, and only oceans rose andsank. Lyell's genial uniformity seemed genial still, for nothing had taken itsplace, though, in the interval, granite had grown young, nothing had beenexplained, and a bewildering system of huge overthrusts had upset geologicalmechanics. The textbooks refused even to discuss theories, frankly throwing uptheir hands and avowing that progress depended on studying each rock as a lawto itself.

Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science than thegar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness in no way concernedhim, and only impertinence could lead him to dispute or discuss the principlesof any science; but the history of the mind concerned the historian alone, andthe historian had no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change torecord in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church, raised ignoranceto a faith and degraded dogma to heresy. Evolution survived like the trilobiteswithout evolving, and yet the evolutionists held the whole field, and had evenplucked up courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin forbiddingthem to ask more than twenty million years for their experiments. No doubt thegeologists had always submitted sadly to this last and utmost violenceinflicted on them by the Pontiff of Physical Religion in the effort to forceunification of the universe; they had protested with mild conviction that theycould not state the geological record in terms of time; they had murmuredIgnoramus under their breath; but they had never dared to assert theIgnorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.

Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change ofform broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affectingintelligence, 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 butimitate the Church, and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again.Historians have got into far too much trouble by following schools of theologyin their efforts to enlarge their synthesis, that they should willingly repeatthe process in science. For human purposes a point must always be soon reachedwhere larger synthesis is suicide.

Politics and geology pointed alike to the larger synthesis of rapidlyincreasing complexity; but still an elderly man knew that the change might beonly in himself. The admission cost nothing. Any student, of any age, thinkingonly of a thought and not of his thought, should delight in turning about andtrying the opposite motion, as he delights in the spring which brings even to atired and irritated statesman the larger synthesis of peach-blooms,cherry-blossoms, and dogwood, to prove the folly of fret. Every schoolboy knowsthat this sum of all knowledge never saved him from whipping; mere years helpnothing; King and Hay and Adams could neither of them escape flounderingthrough the corridors of chaos that opened as they passed to the end; but theycould at least float with the stream if they only knew which way the currentran. Adams would have liked to begin afresh with the Limulus andLepidosteus in the waters of Braintree, side by side with Adamses andQuincys 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.TEUFELSDRÖCKH (1901)

INEVITABLE Paris beckoned, and resistance became more andmore futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no otherspot than Paris where education can be pursued from every side. Even morevigorously than in the twelfth century, Paris taught in the twentieth, with noother school approaching it for variety of direction and energy of mind. Of theteaching in detail, a man who knew only what accident had taught him in thenineteenth century, could know next to nothing, since science had got quitebeyond his horizon, and mathematics had become the only necessary language ofthought; but one could play with the toys of childhood, including Mingporcelain, salons of painting, operas and theatres, beaux-arts and Gothicarchitecture, theology and anarchy, in any jumble of time; or totter about withJoe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry, or studying "Louise"at the Opéra Comique, or discussing the charm of youth and the Seine withBay Lodge and his exquisite young wife. Paris remained Parisian in spite ofchange, 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 atwork, a thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass and originalityof their product would have swamped any previous age, as it very nearly swampedits own; but the effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before itas before the chaos of New York. His single thought was to keep in front of themovement, and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall behind. Only theyoung have time to linger in the rear.

The amusem*nts of youth had to be abandoned, for not even pugilism needsmore staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced student of the LatinQuarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or Montmartre, where one must feel nofatigue at two o'clock in the morning in a beer- garden even after four hoursof Mounet Sully at the Théatre Français. In those branches, educationmight be called closed. Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything worthknowing to a man who, holding open the door into the next world, regardedhimself as merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The glance wasmore 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 asusual the woman helped. For thirty years or there-abouts, he had been repeatingthat he really must go to Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizonand bade him come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager andappreciative as ever, at the little old town of Rothenburg-on-the Taube, andthey went on to the Baireuth festival together.

Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an immense stridein 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. In1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfriedand Brünhilde, perhaps even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world,calm, contemplative, and remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed, andWagner had become a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. Therococo element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehanna — perhaps thePotomac itself — had often risen to drown out the gods of Walhalla, andone could hardly listen to the "Götterdämmerung" in New York, amongthrongs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous excitementthat toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as though the gods wereBavarian composers. New York or Paris might be whatever one pleased —venal, sordid, vulgar — but society nursed there, in the rottenness ofits decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and thought them proof of art. Perhapsthey were; and at all events, Wagner was chiefly responsible for them asartistic emotion. New York knew better than Baireuth what Wagner meant, and thefrivolities of Paris had more than once included the rising of the Seine todrown out the Étoile or Montmartre, as well as the sorcery of ambitionthat casts spells of enchantment on the hero. Paris still felt a subtileflattery in the thought that the last great tragedy of gods and men wouldsurely 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 anold mistress — faced it almost gaily as she had done so often, for theywere acquainted since Rome began to ravage Europe; while New York met it with aglow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard Terninaannounce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and thrill as they had longceased 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 Brünhilde had become a habitand 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 thePantheon, seemed hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest middle-class. Bay Lodge andJoe Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party ofConservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspirationof the "Götterdämmerung." Such a party saw no inspiration inBaireuth, where landscape, history, and audience were — relatively— stodgy, and where the only emotion was a musical dilettantism that themaster had abhorred.

Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian anarchist who caredas little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the singers sang false, and who cameonly to learn what Wagner had supposed himself to mean. This end attained aspleased Frau Wagner and the Heiliger Geist, he was ready to go on; and theSenator, yearning for sterner study, pointed to a haven at Moscow. For yearsAdams had taught American youth never to travel without a Senator who wasuseful 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, drewlife from Hegel and Schopenhauer rightly understood. By the necessity of theirphilosophical descent, each member of the fraternity denounced the other asunequal to his lofty task and inadequate to grasp it. Of course, no thirdmember could be so much as considered, since the great principle ofcontradiction could be expressed only by opposites; and no agreement could beconceived, because anarchy, by definition, must be chaos and collision, as inthe kinetic theory of a perfect gas. Doubtless this law of contradiction wasitself agreement, a restriction of personal liberty inconsistent with freedom;but the "larger synthesis" admitted a limited agreement provided it werestrictly confined to the end of larger contradiction. Thus the great end of allphilosophy — the "larger synthesis" — was attained, but the processwas arduous, and while Adams, as the older member, assumed to declare theprinciple, Bay Lodge necessarily denied both the assumption and the principlein order to assure its truth.

Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy were one, butthat the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and Christian, he had nomotive or duty but to attain the end; and, to hasten it, he was bound toaccelerate progress; to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiplyand intensify forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and magnifymomentum, partly because this was the mechanical law of the universe as scienceexplained it; but partly also in order to get done with the present whichartists 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 ultimatecontradiction.

Of course the untaught critic instantly objected that this scheme wasneither conservative, Christian, nor anarchic, but such objection meant onlythat the critic should begin his education in any infant school in order tolearn that anarchy which should be logical would cease to be anarchic. To theconservative Christian anarchist, the amiable doctrines of Kropotkin weresentimental ideas of Russian mental inertia covered with the name of anarchymerely to disguise their innocence; and the outpourings of ÉliséeReclus were ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe,resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence ofanarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither of themhad formed any other conception of the universe than what they had inheritedfrom the priestly class to which their minds obviously belonged. With them, aswith the socialist, communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed naturehad no relation; if anarchists needed order, they must go back to the twelfthcentury where their thought had enjoyed its thousand years of reign. Theconservative Christian anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faithexcept the nature of nature itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only thefault of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty couldscarcely oblige Bay Lodge to deny it in order to prove it. Only theself-evident truth that no philosophy of order — except the Church— had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the conservativeChristian anarchist to prove his own.

Naturally these ideas were so far in advance of the age that hardly morepeople could understand them than understood Wagner or Hegel; for that matter,since the time of Socrates, wise men have been mostly shy of claiming tounderstand anything; but such refinements were Greek or German, and affectedthe practical American but little. He admitted that, for the moment, thedarkness was dense. He could not affirm with confidence, even to himself, thathis "largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to be chaos, since he would beequally obliged to deny the chaos. The poet groped blindly for an emotion. Theplay of thought for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or ahundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already moredespotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they evercarried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equallyservants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservativeChristian anarchist saw light.

Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to Russia in order toenlarge his "synthesis" — and much he needed it! In America all wereconservative Christian anarchists; the faith was national, racial, geographic.The true American had never seen such supreme virtue in any of the innumerableshades between social anarchy and social order as to mark it for exclusivelyhuman and his own. He never had known a complete union either in Church orState or thought, and had never seen any need for it. The freedom gave himcourage to meet any contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it.Exactly the opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire wasa phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to history than allthe complex variety of American newspapers, schools, trusts, sects, frauds, andCongressmen. These were Nature — pure and anarchic as the conservativeChristian anarchist saw Nature — active, vibrating, mostly unconscious,and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one caught from thesleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the Polish Jew at the accidentalrailway station, in all his weird horror, to the last vision of the Russianpeasant, lighting his candle and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin inthe station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian andanarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world thathistory knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilization in Europe, andhad 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 wonderfulto the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth century, as to the studentof the dynamo in the twentieth. Studied in the dry light of conservativeChristian anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with anegative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies had beensucked 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 intheir wanderings — waiting for their winds or warriors to return and leadthem westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and hadlost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waitedand suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could never have beennormal. Their country acted as a sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and itssurface kept the uniformity of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing anikon on a saint's day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. Thestudent had no need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff orDostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis of humaninertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkin answered everypurpose.

The Russian people could never have changed — could they ever bechanged? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up, or take newform? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller scale, the question was old andunanswered. All the so-called primitive races, and some nearer survivals, hadraised doubts which persisted against the most obstinate convictions ofevolution. The Senator himself shook his head, and after surveying Warsaw andMoscow to his content, went on to St. Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. deWitte and Prince Khilkoff. Their conversation added new doubts; for theirefforts had been immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on thepeople seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or fifteen yearsof violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing, for, since 1898, Russialagged.

The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator whether heshould allow three generations, or more, to swing the Russian people into theWestern movement. The Senator seemed disposed to ask for more. The student hadnothing to say. For him, all opinion founded on fact must be error, because thefacts can never be complete, and their relations must be always infinite. Verylikely, Russia would instantly become the most brilliant constellation of humanprogress through all the ordered stages of good; but meanwhile one might give avalue as movement of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow acceleration thatwould, at the end of a generation, leave the gap between east and westrelatively the same.

This result reached, the Lodges thought their moral improvement required avisit to Berlin; but forty years of varied emotions had not deadened Adams'smemories of Berlin, and he preferred, at any cost, to escape new ones. When theLodges 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 gainslittle by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might doubt whether Mr. deWitte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any Grand Duke, or the Emperor, knew muchmore about it than their neighbors; and Adams was quite sure that, even inAmerica, he should listen with uncertain confidence to the views of anySecretary of the Treasury, or railway president, or President of the UnitedStates whom he had ever known, that should concern the America of the nextgeneration. The mere fact that any man should dare to offer them would provehis incompetence to judge. Yet Russia was too vast a force to be treated as anobject 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 thefuture, against the hasty and unsure acceleration of America. No one could yetknow what would best suit humanity, and the tourist who carried his La Fontainein mind, caught himself talking as bear or as monkey according to the mirror heheld 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 reproché;
Mais pour mon frère l'ours, on ne l'a qu'ébauché;
Jamais, s'il me veut croire, il ne se fera peindre."

Granting that his brother the bear lacked perfection in details, his ownfigure as monkey was not necessarily ideal or decorative, nor was he in theleast sure what form it might take even in one generation. He had himself neverventured to dream of three. No man could guess what the Daimler motor andX-rays would do to him; but so much was sure; the monkey and motor wereterribly afraid of the bear; how much,- only a man close to their foreigndepartments knew. As the monkey looked back across the Baltic from the safebattlements of Stockholm, Russia looked more portentous than from theKremlin.

The image was that of the retreating ice-cap — a wall of archaicglacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of archaic ice thatblocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the northward, and more likely toadvance. Scandinavia had been ever at its mercy. Europe had never changed. Theimaginary line that crossed the level continent from the Baltic to the BlackSea, merely extended the northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and Poles on oneside still struggled against the Russian inertia of race, and retained theirown energies under the same conditions that caused inertia across the frontier.Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no onecould 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 tomake 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 calledRussia, and trembled with terror whenever Russia moved. From Stockholm onelooked back on it as though it were an ice-sheet, and so had Stockholm watchedit for centuries. In contrast with the dreary forests of Russia and the sternstreets of St. Petersburg, Stockholm seemed a southern vision, and Sweden luredthe tourist on. Through a cheerful New England landscape and bright autumn, herambled northwards till he found himself at Trondhjem and discovered Norway.Education crowded upon him in immense masses as he triangulated these vastsurfaces of history about which he had lectured and read for a life-time. Whenthe historian fully realizes his ignorance — which sometimes happens toAmericans — he becomes even more tiresome to himself than to others,because his naïveté is irrepressible. Adams could not getover his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse doctrine all his lifeagainst the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who,to the despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norwaystarted voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he took the mailsteamer to the north, and on September 14, reached Hammerfest.

Frivolous amusem*nt was hardly what one saw, through the equinoctialtwilight, peering at the flying tourist, down the deep fiords, from dim patchesof snow, where the last Laps and reindeer were watching the mail-steamer threadthe intricate channels outside, as their ancestors had watched the first Norsefishermen learn them in the succession of time; but it was not the Laps, or thesnow, or the arctic gloom, that impressed the tourist, so much as the lights ofan electro-magnetic civilization and the stupefying contrast with Russia, whichmore 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 soeffectively redressed the balance of the ecliptic. As one approached the end— the spot where, seventy years before, a futile CarlyleanTeufelsdröckh 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 andtelephones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond the level of themagnetic pole; and there the newer Teufelsdröckh sat dumb with surprise,and glared at the permanent electric lights of Hammerfest.

He had good reason — better than the Teufelsdröckh of 1830, inhis liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever told. Atbest, a week in these dim Northern seas, without means of speech, within theArctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to gravity if not to gloom; but onlya week before, breakfasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught,across, the neighboring table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, announcing anattempt on the life of President McKinley, and from Stockholm to Trondhjem, andso up the coast to Hammerfest, day after day the news came, telling of thePresident's condition, and the doings and sayings of Hay and Roosevelt, untilat last a little journal was cried on reaching some dim haven, announcing thePresident's death a few hours before. To Adams the death of McKinley and theadvent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of personal emotion, but this waslittle in comparison with his depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports fromhis most intimate friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not toplease him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. Theelectro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.

No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before, and it upsetfor the moment his whole philosophy of conservative anarchy. The accelerationwas marvellous, and wholly in the lines of unity. To recover his grasp ofchaos, he must look back across the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to havesuddenly become an abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare ofthe 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 spectralislands without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward wouldbring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obligedtourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen had stopped solong ago that memory of their very origin was lost. Adams had never before meta ne plus ultra, and knew not what to make of it; but he felt at leastthe emotion of his Norwegian fishermen ancestors, doubtless numbering hundredsof thousands, jammed with their faces to the sea, the ice on the north, theice-cap of Russian inertia pressing from behind, and the ice a trifling dangercompared with the inertia. From the day they first followed the retreatingice-cap round the North Cape, down to the present moment, their problem was thesame.

The new Teufelsdröckh, though considerably older than the old one, sawno clearer into past or future, but he was fully as much perplexed. From thearchaic ice-barrier to the Caspian Sea, a long line of division, permanentsince ice and inertia first took possession, divided his lines of force, withno relation to climate or geography or soil.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will notexpect himself to explain ignorance. A century ago he carried letters andsought knowledge; to-day he knows that no one knows; he needs too much andignorance 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 tomankind. Hamburg was almost as American as St. Louis. In forty years, the greenrusticity of Düsseldorf had taken on the sooty grime of Birmingham. TheRhine in 1900 resembled the Rhine of 1858 much as it resembled the Rhine of theSalic Franks. Cologne was a railway centre that had completed its cathedralwhich bore an absent- minded air of a cathedral of Chicago. The thirteenthcentury, carefully strained-off, catalogued, and locked up, was visible totourists as a kind of Neanderthal, cave-dwelling, curiosity. The Rhine was moremodern than the Hudson, as might well be, since it produced far more coal; butall this counted for little beside the radical change in the lines offorce.

In 1858 the whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the Danube in thesouth, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric highway between Asiaand the ocean. The trade-route followed the old routes of invasion, and Colognewas 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. TheRhine 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 hadno hope of earning a living, these three months of education were the mostarduous he ever attempted, and Russia was the most indigestible morsel he evermet; but the sum of it, viewed from Cologne, seemed reasonable. From Hammerfestto Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean — from Halifax to Norfolk on theother — one great empire was ruled by one great emperor — Coal.Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or divide it, but the powerand the empire were one. Unity had gained that ground. Beyond lay Russia, andthere 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 moreinteresting every year; for the mass of Russian inertia was moving irresistiblyover China, and John Hay stood in its path. As long as de Witte ruled, Hay wassafe. Should de Witte fall, Hay would totter. One could only sit down and watchthe doings of Mr. de Witte and Mr. de Plehve.

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HEIGHT OFKNOWLEDGE (1902)

AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stopthe activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans ignoretragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the worldlearns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, tobe treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political murders, that would havefattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the WhiteHouse.

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 thetragedy of his son, followed that of his chief, "all the more hideous that wewere so sure of his recovery." The world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "Ihave acquired the funeral habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see himyesterday, and he did not know me." Among the letters of condolence showeredupon him was one from Clarence King at Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace andtenderness — the old King manner"; and King himself "simply waiting tillnature and the foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of King impressed himintensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said — "the best andbrightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably beyond any of hiscontemporaries; with industry that has often sickened me to witness it; witheverything 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, withnameless suffering alone and uncared-for, in a California tavern. Çavous amuse, la vie?"

The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on the pier atNew York, December 29, was to Clarence King's funeral, and from the funeralservice he had no gayer road to travel than that which led to Washington, wherea revolution had occurred that must in any case have made the men of his ageinstantly old, but which, besides hurrying to the front the generation thattill then he had regarded as boys, could not fail to break the social ties thathad till then held them all together.

Ça vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education werebecoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt half gladthat Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only to save himself thetrouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure loss. On that side, hiseducation had been finished at school. His friends in power were lost, and heknew life too well to risk total wreck by trying to save them.

As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them atsixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken seriously in his oldcharacter, and could not be recovered in his new one. Power when wielded byabnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends knowthat his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, morethan any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singularprimitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter — the quality thatmediæval theology assigned to God — he was pure act. With himwielding unmeasured power with immeasurable energy, in the White House, therelation of age to youth — of teacher to pupil — was altogether outof place; and no other was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, whileAdams's ceased of itself. History's truths are little valuable now; but humannature retains a few of its archaic, proverbial laws, and the wisest courtierthat ever lived — Lucius Seneca himself — must have remained insome shade of doubt what advantage he should get from the power of his friendand pupil Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he received Nero'sfilial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the vast circle of hisknowledge by learning that a friend in power was a friend lost — a factvery much worth insisting upon — while the gray-headed moth that hadfluttered through many moth-administrations and had singed his wings more orless in them all, though he now slept nine months out of the twelve, acquiredan instinct of self-preservation that kept him to the north side of La FayetteSquare, and, after a sufficient habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterredhim from hovering between them.

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by theillusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far asAdams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it aninvariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been alwaystragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reactionafterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strainof seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding itdisputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend onsnatching the carrion. Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honestintent, but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn outmost tempers in a month, and his first year of Presidency showed chronicexcitement that made a friend tremble. The effect of unlimited power on limitedmind is worth noting in Presidents because it must represent the same processin society, and the power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face ofthe control of the infinite.

Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but this is amatter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of history and ofscience; 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 belost, yet the result was mathematically certain. With Hay, it was only thesteady decline of strength, and the necessary economy of force; but with Lodgeit was law of politics. He could not help himself, for his position as thePresident's friend and independent statesman at once was false, and he must beunsure in both relations.

To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great — much greaterthan that of the usual Senator — but it hung on his position inMassachusetts rather than on his control of Executive patronage; and hisstanding in Massachusetts was highly insecure. Nowhere in America was societyso complex or change so rapid. No doubt the Bostonian had always been noted fora certain chronic irritability — a sort of Bostonitis — which, inits primitive Puritan forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors,and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M. Evarts hadpointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New England behind a NewEngland leader. The trait led to good ends — such as admiration ofAbraham Lincoln and George Washington — but the virtue was exacting; forNew England standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, andconstantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened tobecome impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough — StateStreet and the banks exacted one stamp; the old Congregational clergy another;Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in social influence, a third; theforeign element, especially the Irish, held aloof, and seldom consented toapprove any one; the new socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to becomemore exclusive than the Irish. New power was disintegrating society, andsetting independent centres of force to work, until money had all it could doto hold the machine together. No one could represent it faithfully as awhole.

Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the task ofappreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that of his chieffriend and scholar, the President. As a type for study, or a standard foreducation, Lodge was the more interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born andnever can be taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching — Bostonincarnate — the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition ledhim to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was — as Adams admitted inhis own case — restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a readywit, an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he couldnever feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimeswith painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertainwhether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriotin the still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar andhistorian 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 anyother Continental standards, but at home and happy among the vices andextravagances of Shakespeare — standing first on the social, then on thepolitical foot; now worshipping, now banning; shocked by the wanton display ofimmorality, but practicing the license of political usage; sometimes bitter,often genial, always intelligent — Lodge had the singular merit ofinteresting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black andmonotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back torace. He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if theydared 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 wasas natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can understand Bostonians andthoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences of the Boston mind. His theoryand practice were also at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust ofEnglish thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-à-brac, sometimesprecious but never sure. For him, only the Greek, the Italian or the Frenchstandards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of Shakespeare was asflagrant as to Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice. He knewthat his artistic standard was the illusion of his own mind; that Englishdisorder approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French measure orItalian line, or German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel ofconservative Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Christian,but stupendously anarchistic. He loved the atrocities of English art andsociety, as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss Austen, not because of theirexample, but because of their humor. He made no scruple of defying sequence anddenying consistency — but he was not a Senator.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to befatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care whether his standards werepopular or not, and no one else cared more than he; but Roosevelt and Lodgewere playing a game in which they were always liable to find the shifty sandsof American opinion yield suddenly under their feet. With this game an elderlyfriend had long before carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There wasnothing in it for him but the amusem*nt of the pugilist or acrobat. The largerstudy was lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-ratemen; but foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and made personalrelation possible with Hay which could not be maintained with Roosevelt orLodge. As an affair of pure education the point is worth notice from young menwho are drawn into politics. The work of domestic progress is done by masses ofmechanical power — steam, electric, furnace, or other — which haveto be controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity tomanage it. The work of internal government has become the task of controllingthese men, who are socially as remote as heathen gods, alone worth knowing, butnever known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one skinned themalive. Most of them have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as theirdynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power. They are trustees forthe public, and whenever society assumes the property, it must confer on themthat title; but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and willthen 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 menbecome every year more and more creatures of force, massed about centralpower-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motorsthat 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 inmediæval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while for ateacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that in domesticpolitics, every one works for an immediate object, commonly for some privatejob, and invariably in a near horizon, while in foreign affairs the outlook isfar ahead, over a field as wide as the world. There the merest scholar couldsee what he was doing. For history, international relations are the only surestandards of movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adamshad always insisted that international relation was the only sure base for achart of history.

He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his view, but asteacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he found it convenient. TheSecretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian. Required tolook far ahead and round hm, he measures forces unknown to party managers, andhas found Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. TheSecretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world whichCongress would rather ignore; of obligations which Congress repudiates wheneverit can; of bargains which Congress distrusts and tries to turn to its advantageor to reject. Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always intriguedagainst the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged toextend 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 Haythe best schoolmaster since 1865. Hay had become the most imposing figure everknown in the office. He had an influence that no other Secretary of State everpossessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had never imagined. Heneeded to write no state papers; he wanted no help, and he stood far abovecounsel or advice; but he could instruct an attentive scholar as no otherteacher in the world could do; and Adams sought only instruction — wantedonly to chart the international channel for fifty years to come; to triangulatethe future; to obtain his dimension, and fix the acceleration of movement inpolitics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy andphysics; in finance and force.

Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at last the streamof events favored him. With infinite effort he had achieved the astonishingdiplomatic feat of inducing the Senate, with only six negative votes, to permitGreat Britain to renounce, without equivalent, treaty rights which she had forfifty years defended tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph in hisnegotiations with the Senate enabled him to carry one step further his measuresfor general peace. About England the Senate could make no further effectiveopposition, for England was won, and Canada alone could give trouble. The nextdifficulty was with France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but Englandassumed the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected theobject — a combination which, as late as 1901, had been visionary. Thenext, 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 besatisfied and disarmed. This was the instinct of what might be namedMcKinleyism; the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized athome, and realizable abroad.

With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth century, hadnothing to do, and made not the least presence of meddling; but nothing forbadehim to study, and he noticed to his astonishment that this capitalistic schemeof combining governments, like railways or furnaces, was in effect preciselythe socialist scheme of Jaurès and Bebel. That John Hay, of all men,should adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservativeChristian anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy in politics as inscience. 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 thenext 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 ontheir merits; but, granting both to be feasible, Hay's and McKinley'sstatesmanship turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what mightbe called the Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possiblealternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in Russia. Thus Bebeland Jaurès, McKinley and Hay, were partners.

The problem was pretty — even fascinating — and, to an oldCivil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometricaldemonstration. As the last possible lesson in life, it had all sorts ofultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet — theory andpractice — it risks going astray; and Hay was probably the mostaccomplished master of both then living. He knew not only the forces but alsothe men, and he had no other thought than his policy.

Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a scholar could everreach. He had under his eyes the whole educational staff of the Government at atime when the Government had just reached the heights of highest activity andinfluence. Since 1860, education had done its worst, under the greatest mastersand at enormous expense to the world, to train these two minds to catch andcomprehend every spring of international action, not to speak of personalinfluence; and the entire machinery of politics in several great countries hadlittle to do but supply the last and best information. Education could becarried no further.

With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its effects on himselfwere grotesque. Never had the proportions of his ignorance looked so appalling.He seemed to know nothing — to be groping in darkness — to befalling forever in space; and the worst depth consisted in the assurance,incredible as it seemed, that no one knew more. He had, at least, themechanical assurance of certain values to guide him — like the relativeintensities of his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his Gun-powers —but he conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every relative valueof persons, as well as he knew the inmost thoughts of his own Government— had the Czar and the Kaiser and the Mikado turned schoolmasters, likeHay, and taught him all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knewnothing themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the studentmeasure his own.

CHAPTER XXIX. THE ABYSS OFIGNORANCE (1902)

THE years hurried past, and gave hardly time to note theirwork. Three or four months, though big with change, come to an end before themind can catch up with it. Winter vanished; spring burst into flower; and againParis opened its arms, though not for long. Mr. Cameron came over, and took thecastle of Inverlochy for three months, which he summoned his friends togarrison. Lochaber seldom laughs, except for its children, such as Camerons,McDonalds, Campbells and other products of the mist; but in the summer of 1902Scotland put on fewer airs of coquetry than usual. Since the terrible harvestof 1879 which one had watched sprouting on its stalks on the Shropshirehillsides, nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the victims fled toSwitzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much gayer, andCarlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last, in desperation, onedrifted 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. Reynoldsh*tt, transferred to Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for longsummers to come, he hid in ignorance and silence.

Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a workingarrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift, the drift foundthe seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progressoceanwards. Such lessons as summer taught, winter tested, and one had only towatch 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. Adamsnever knew why, knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trickof 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 imaginefigures — images — phantoms; one's mind is a watery mirror at best;but, once conceived, the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of forcepresented themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted only as battleof attractions. By this path, the mind stepped into the mechanical theory ofthe universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new phase ofeducation.

This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres. Like hismasters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the eternal mystery ofForce — the sink of all science. For thousands of years in history, hefound that Force had been felt as occult attraction — love of God andlust for power in a future life. After 1500, when this attraction began todecline, philosophers fell back on some vis a tergo — instinctof danger from behind, like Darwin's survival of the fittest; and one of thegreatest minds, between Descartes and Newton — Pascal — saw themaster-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific: "I have oftensaid 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 combatobstacles 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; andeven if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accordspring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature, and wouldfill 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 toaccount for direction of change. For that, an attractive force was essential; aforce from outside; a shaping influence. Pascal and all the old philosophiescalled this outside force God or Gods. Caring but little for the name, andfixed only on tracing the Force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin atChartres, 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 motherof 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 havelittle or nothing to do with God's other energies which are infinite, andconcern us the less because our interest is only in man, and the infinite isnot knowable to man. Yet if you are troubled by your ignorance, you see how Iam surrounded by the masters of the schools! Ask them!"

The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British science whichhad repeated since Bacon that one must not try to know the unknowable, thoughone was quite powerless to ignore it; but the Virgin carried more conviction,for her feminine lack of interest in all perfections except her own washonester than the formal phrase of science; since nothing was easier than tofollow her advice, and turn to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern physicists,answered at once and plainly: "To me," said St. Thomas, "Christ and the Motherare one Force — Love — simple, single, and sufficient for all humanwants; but Love is a human interest which acts even on man so partially thatyou and I, as philosophers, need expect no share in it. Therefore we turn toChrist and the Schools who represent all other Force. We deal with Multiplicityand call it God. After the Virgin has redeemed by her personal Force as Loveall 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, theearth, the other planets, and the sun, in order to clear the air; withoutaffecting mediæval science. The student felt warranted in doing what theChurch threatened — abolishing his solar system altogether — inorder to look at God as actual; continuous movement, universal cause, andinterchangeable force. This was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist; atleast as pantheistic as the Energetik of the Germans; and their deitywas the ultimate energy, whose thought and act were one.

Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas seemed rather morescientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach. Contradiction for contradiction,Attraction for attraction, Energy for energy, St. Thomas's idea of God hadmerits. Modern science offered not a vestige of proof, or a theory ofconnection between its forces, or any scheme of reconciliation between thoughtand mechanics; while St. Thomas at least linked together the joints of hismachine. As far as a superficial student could follow, the thirteenth centurysupposed mind to be a mode of force directly derived from the intelligent primemotor, and the cause of all form and sequence in the universe — thereforethe 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 allover the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he seemeddriven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed tofeel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in thiseternal drag-net of religion.

In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the first is thatof ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the Churchrejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with thepantheist at any price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance, onenecessarily 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 fromSocrates to distrust, above all other traps, the trap of logic — themirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of force led into catacombs ofthought where hundreds of thousands of educations had found their end.Generation after generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had beencontent to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, incompany with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had everfound a logical highroad of escape.

Adams cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear that hecould not stop there, even to enjoy the society of Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas.True, the Church alone had asserted unity with any conviction, and thehistorian 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 thedenial would require a new education. At sixty-five years old a new educationpromised hardly more than the old.

Possibly the modern legislator or magistrate might no longer know enough totreat as the Church did the man who denied unity, unless the denial took theform of a bomb; but no teacher would know how to explain what he thought hemeant by denying unity. Society would certainly punish the denial if ever anyone learned enough to understand it. Philosophers, as a rule, cared little whatprinciples society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher commonly held thatthough he might sometimes be right by good luck on some one point, no complexof individual opinions could possibly be anything but wrong; yet, supposingsociety to be ignored, the philosopher was no further forward. Nihilism had nobottom. For thousands of years every philosopher had stood on the shore of thissunless sea, diving for pearls and never finding them. All had seen that, sincethey could not find bottom, they must assume it. The Church claimed to havefound it, but, since 1450, motives for agreeing on some new assumption ofUnity, broader and deeper than that of the Church, had doubled in force untileven the universities and schools, like the Church and State, seemed about tobe 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 thenew unit was as good as found. It would not be an intelligence — probablynot even a consciousness — but it would serve. He passed sixty yearswaiting for it, and at the end of that time, on reviewing the ground, he wasled to think that the final synthesis of science and its ultimate triumph wasthe kinetic theory of gases; which seemed to cover all motion in space, and tofurnish the measure of time. So far as he understood it, the theory assertedthat any portion of space is occupied by molecules of gas, flying in rightlines at velocities varying up to a mile in a second, and colliding with eachother 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 astill deeper analysis would reduce the atom of gas to pure motion.

Thus, unless one mistook the meaning of motion, which might well be, thescientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the scientific analysis commonlycalled Multiplicity. The two things were the same, all forms being shiftingphases of motion. Granting this ocean of colliding atoms, the last hope ofhumanity, what happened if one dropped the sounder into the abyss — letit go — frankly gave up Unity altogether? What was Unity? Why was one tobe forced to affirm it?

Here everybody flatly refused help. Science seemed content with its oldphrase of "larger synthesis," which was well enough for science, but meantchaos for man. One would have been glad to stop and ask no more, but theanarchist bomb bade one go on, and the bomb is a powerful persuader. One couldnot stop, even to enjoy the charms of a perfect gas colliding seventeen milliontimes in a second, much like an automobile in Paris. Science itself had beencrowded so close to the edge of the abyss that its attempts to escape were asmetaphysical as the leap, while an ignorant old man felt no motive for tryingto escape, seeing that the only escape possible lay in the form of vis atergo commonly called Death. He got out his Descartes again; dipped intohis Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered solemnly over hisHegel 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 withthe assertion of two principles, and even these fitted into each other, likegood and evil, light and darkness. Pessimism itself, black as it might bepainted, had been content to turn the universe of contradictions into the humanthought as one Will, and treat it as representation. Metaphysics insisted ontreating the universe as one thought or treating thought as one universe; andphilosophers agreed, like a kinetic gas, that the universe could be known onlyas motion of mind, and therefore as unity. One could know it only as one'sself; it was psychology.

Of all forms of pessimism, the metaphysical form was, for a historian, theleast enticing. Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was thatof his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection, and themore, because — as Mephistopheles said of Marguerite — he was notthe first. Nearly all the highest intelligence known to history had drowneditself in the reflection of its own thought, and the bovine survivors hadrudely told the truth about it, without affecting the intelligent. One's owntime had not been exempt. Even since 1870 friends by scores had fallen victimsto it. Within five-and-twenty years, a new library had grown out of it. HarvardCollege was a focus of the study; France supported hospitals for it; Englandpublished magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to take one's mind in one'shand, and ask one's psychological friends what they made of it, and the morebecause it mattered so little to either party, since their minds, whatever theywere, had pretty nearly ceased to reflect, and let them do what they liked withthe small remnant, they could scarcely do anything very new with it. All oneasked was to learn what they hoped to do.

Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance in silence had, by this time, led theweary pilgrim into such mountains of ignorance that he could no longer see anypath whatever, and could not even understand a signpost. He failed to fathomthe depths of the new psychology, which proved to him that, on that side as onthe mathematical side, his power of thought was atrophied, if, indeed, it everexisted. Since he could not fathom the science, he could only ask the simplestof questions: Did the new psychology hold that the IvXn — soulor mind — was or was not a unit? He gathered from the books that thepsychologists had, in a few cases, distinguished several personalities in thesame mind, each conscious and constant, individual and exclusive. The factseemed scarcely surprising, since it had been a habit of mind from earliestrecorded time, and equally familiar to the last acquaintance who had taken adrug or caught a fever, or eaten a Welsh rarebit before bed; for surely no onecould follow the action of a vivid dream, and still need to be told that theactors evoked by his mind were not himself, but quite unknown to all he hadever recognized as self. The new psychology went further, and seemed convincedthat it had actually split personality not only into dualism, but also intocomplex groups, like telephonic centres and systems, that might be isolated andcalled up at will, and whose physical action might be occult in the sense ofstrangeness to any known form of force. Dualism seemed to have become as commonas binary stars. Alternating personalities turned up constantly, even amongone'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 inno way responsible for causes. To his mind, the compound IvXn took atonce the form of a bicycle-rider, mechanically balancing himself by inhibitingall his inferior personalities, and sure to fall into the sub-conscious chaosbelow, if one of his inferior personalities got on top. The only absolute truthwas the sub-conscious chaos below. which every one could feel when he soughtit.

Whether the psychologists admitted it or not, mattered little to the studentwho, by the law of his profession, was engaged in studying his own mind. Onhim, the effect was surprising. He woke up with a shudder as though he hadhimself fallen off his bicycle. If his mind were really this sort of magnet,mechanically dispersing its lines of force when it went to sleep, andmechanically orienting them when it woke up — which was normal, thedispersion or orientation? The mind, like the body, kept its unity unless ithappened to lose balance, but the professor of physics, who slipped on apavement and hurt himself, knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down,though he did know — what the idiot could hardly do — that hisnormal condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity wasunstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream,inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different thought-centres withoutcentral 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 commonlybreaking his neck.

By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead — nothing but adissolving mind — and the historian felt himself driven back on thoughtas one continuous Force, without Race, Sex, School, Country, or Church. Thishas been always the fate of rigorous thinkers, and has always succeeded inmaking them famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste Comte. Their methodmade what progress the science of history knew, which was little enough, butthey did at last fix the law that, if history ever meant to correct the errorsshe made in detail, she must agree on a scale for the whole. Every localhistorian might defy this law till history ended, but its necessity would bethe same for man as for space or time or force, and without it the historianwould always remain a child in science.

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, froma fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit — the point ofhistory when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unifieduniverse. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use thecentury 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of ThomasAquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time,without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movementmight be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to thetask, he began a volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel andChartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he proposed tofix a position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of HenryAdams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." With the help of these twopoints of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backwardindefinitely, 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, itschief interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of New York hadbecome planetary — beyond control — while the task of Washington,in 1900 as in 1800, was to control it. The success of Washington in the pastcentury promised ill for its success in the next.

To a student who had passed the best years of his life in pondering over thepolitical philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison, the problem thatRoosevelt took in hand seemed alive with historical interest, but it would needat least another half-century to show its results. As yet, one could notmeasure the forces or their arrangement; the forces had not even alignedthemselves except in foreign affairs; and there one turned to seek the channelof wisdom as naturally as though Washington did not exist. The President coulddo nothing effectual in foreign affairs, but at least he could see something ofthe field.

Hay had reached the summit of his career, and saw himself on the edge ofwreck. Committed to the task of keeping China "open," he saw China about to beshut. Almost alone in the world, he represented the "open door," and could notescape being crushed by it. Yet luck had been with him in full tide. Though SirJulian Pauncefote had died in May, 1902, after carrying out tasks that filledan ex-private secretary of 1861 with open-mouthed astonishment, Hay had beenhelped by the appointment of Michael Herbert as his successor, who counted fordouble the value of an ordinary diplomat. To reduce friction is the chief useof friendship, and in politics the loss by friction is outrageous. To Herbertand his wife, the small knot of houses that seemed to give a vague unity toforeign affairs opened their doors and their hearts, for the Herberts werealready at home there; and this personal sympathy prolonged Hay's life, for itnot only eased the effort of endurance, but it also led directly to arevolution in Germany. Down to that moment, the Kaiser, rightly or wrongly, hadcounted as the ally of the Czar in all matters relating to the East. Hollebenand Cassini were taken to be a single force in Eastern affairs, and thissupposed alliance gave Hay no little anxiety and some trouble. SuddenlyHolleben, who seemed to have had no thought but to obey with almost agonizedanxiety the least hint of the Kaiser's will, received a telegram ordering himto 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 sayruthless, towards its agents, and yet commonly some discontent had been shownas excuse; but, in this case, no cause was guessed for Holleben's disgraceexcept the Kaiser's wish to have a personal representative at Washington.Breaking down all precedent, he sent Speck von Sternburg to counterbalanceHerbert.

Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy, and valuable as hispresence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling compared with thepolitical. Of Hay's official tasks, one knew no more than any newspaperreporter did, but of one's own diplomatic education the successive steps hadbecome 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 thesteady movement which was to bring France back into an Atlantic system; and nowhe saw suddenly the dramatic swing of Germany towards the west — themovement of all others nearest mathematical certainty. Whether the Kaiser meantit 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 itseemed to isolate Cassini, and unmask the Russian movement which became morethreatening every month as the Manchurian scheme had to be revealed.

Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to him by theKaiser's coup d'état. Carefully as he had tried to follow theKaiser's career, he had never suspected such refinement of policy, which raisedhis opinion of the Kaiser's ability to the highest point, and altogether upsetthe centre of statesmanship. That Germany could be so quickly detached fromseparate objects and brought into an Atlantic system seemed a paradox moreparadoxical than any that one's education had yet offered, though it hadoffered little but paradox. If Germany could be held there, a century offriction 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 thathe saw his problems simplified to Russia alone.

Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The history of Europefor two hundred years had accomplished little but to state one or two sides ofthe Russian problem. One's year of Berlin in youth, though it taught no CivilLaw, had opened one's eyes to the Russian enigma, and both German and Frenchhistorians had labored over its proportions with a sort of fascinated horror.Germany, of all countries, was most vitally concerned in it; but even acave-dweller in La Fayette Square, seeking only a measure of motion since theCrusades, saw before his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a survey of future orderor anarchy that would exhaust the power of his telescopes and defy the accuracyof his theodolites.

The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every day moreByzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed clear signs of dislocation,and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte were reversed when applied inManchuria. Historians and students should have no sympathies or antipathies,but Adams had private reasons for wishing well to the Czar and his people. Atmuch length, in several labored chapters of history, he had told how thepersonal friendliness of the Czar Alexander I, in 1810, saved the fortunes ofJ. Q. Adams. and opened to him the brilliant diplomatic career that ended inthe White House. Even in his own effaced existence he had reasons, notaltogether trivial, for gratitude to the Czar Alexander II, whose firmneutrality had saved him some terribly anxious days and nights in 1862; whilehe had seen enough of Russia to sympathize warmly with Prince Khilkoff'srailways and de Witte's industries. The last and highest triumph of historywould, to his mind, be the bringing of Russia into the Atlantic combine, andthe just and fair allotment of the whole world among the regulated activitiesof the universe. At the rate of unification since 1840, this end should bepossible within another sixty years; and, in foresight of that point, Adamscould already finish — provisionally — his chart of internationalunity; but, for the moment, the gravest doubts and ignorance covered the wholefield. No one — Czar or diplomat, Kaiser or Mikado — seemed to knowanything. Through individual Russians one could always see with ease, for theirdiplomacy never suggested depth; and perhaps Hay protected Cassini for the veryreason that Cassini could not disguise an emotion, and never failed to betraythat, in setting the enormous bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, heregretted infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too. He wouldalmost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf. His politicalphilosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in the single idea thatRussia must fatally roll — must, by her irresistible inertia, crushwhatever stood in her way.

For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the fatalism ofRussian inertia meant the failure of American intensity. When Russia rolledover a neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement ofcustom and race which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished toconvert, into any Western equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia knocking away thelast blocks that held back the launch of this huge mass into the China Sea. Thevast force of inertia known as China was to be united with the huge bulk ofRussia in a single mass which no amount of new force could henceforwarddeflect. Had the Russian Government, with the sharpest sense of enlightenment,employed scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs, and borrowed all the resources ofEurope, 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 insectin Washington in the spring of 1903; and they seemed to him fixed. Russia heldEurope and America in her grasp, and Cassini held Hay in his. The SiberianRailway offered checkmate to all possible opposition. Japan must make the bestterms she could; England must go on receding; America and Germany would look onat the avalanche. The wall of Russian inertia that barred Europe across theBaltic, would bar America across the Pacific; and Hay's policy of the open doorwould infallibly fail.

Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant stroke, andthe movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany after it by its mere mass. Tothe humble student, the loss of Hay's game affected only Hay; for himself, thegame — not the stakes — was the chief interest; and though want ofhabit made him object to read his newspapers blackened — since he likedto blacken them himself — he was in any case condemned to pass but ashort space of time either in Siberia or in Paris, and could balance hisendless columns of calculation equally in either place. The figures, not thefacts, concerned his chart, and he mused deeply over his next equation. TheAtlantic would have to deal with a vast continental mass of inert motion, likea 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 dothan measure, if he could, the mass. Was volume or intensity the stronger? Whatand where was the vis nova that could hold its own before thisprodigious ice-cap of vis inertiae? What was movement of inertia, andwhat its laws?

Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he took forgranted that he could learn, and went to his books to ask. He found that theforce of inertia had troubled wiser men than he. The dictionary said thatinertia was a property of matter, by which matter tends, when at rest, toremain so, and, when in motion, to move on in a straight line. Finding that hismind refused to imagine itself at rest or in a straight line, he was forced, asusual, to let it imagine something else; and since the question concerned themind, and not matter, he decided from personal experience that his mind wasnever at rest, but moved — when normal — about something it calleda motive, and never moved without motives to move it. So long as these motiveswere habitual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result might, forconvenience, be called movement of inertia, to distinguish it from movementcaused by newer or higher attraction; but the greater the bulk to move, thegreater must be the force to accelerate or deflect it.

This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most deceitfulmistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student and the professor hadgone on complaining that minds were unequally inert. The inequalities amountedto contrasts. One class of minds responded only to habit; another only tonovelty. Race classified thought. Class-lists classified mind. No two menthought alike, and no woman thought like a man.

Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief trouble in theRussian future. History looked doubtful when asked whether race-inertia hadever been overcome without destroying the race in order to reconstruct it; butsurely 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 movingin a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbrokenand unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go onreproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vitalcondition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be soughtanywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American alwaysostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned hardly the name of awoman, while English history handled them as timidly as though they were a newand undescribed species; but if the problem of inertia summed up thedifficulties of the race question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, andto Americans vitally. The task of accelerating or deflecting the movement ofthe American woman had interest infinitely greater than that of any racewhatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or African.

On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was conscious ofhaving been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As he grew older, he foundthat Early Institutions lost their interest, but that Early Women became apassion. Without understanding movement of sex, history seemed to him merepedantry. So insistent had he become on this side of his subject that withwomen he talked of little else, and — because women's thought is mostlysubconscious and particularly sensitive to suggestion — he tried tricksand devices to disclose it. The woman seldom knows her own thought; she is ascurious to understand herself as the man to understand her, and responds farmore quickly than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes, at dinner, one mightwait till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as possible, ask one's liveliestneighbor whether she could explain why the American woman was a failure.Without an instant's hesitation, she was sure to answer: "Because the Americanman is a failure!" She meant it.

Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he everheard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able totake care of themselves; but from the point of view of sex he felt muchcuriosity 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 fromtruth, he owed her at least that compliment. The habit led sometimes toperilous 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 hissister-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 hislovely young wife sent word to the same effect; Mrs. Roosevelt joined theparty; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped down to escape the solitude of hiswife's absence. The party were too intimate for reserve, and they soon fell onAdams's hobby with derision which stung him to pungent rejoinder: "The Americanman is a failure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here moresense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we allelect Mrs. Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of achance 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 hisown wife as an unusually superior woman. Some one afterwards remarked thatthese half-dozen women were not a fair average. Adams replied that thehalf-dozen men were above all possible average; he could not lay his hands onanother half-dozen their equals.

Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The cleverer thewoman, the less she denied the failure. She was bitter at heart about it. Shehad failed even to hold the family together, and her children ran away likechickens with their first feathers; the family was extinct like chivalry. Shehad failed not only to create a new society that satisfied her, but even tohold her own in the old society of Church or State; and was left, for the mostpart, with no place but the theatre or streets to decorate. She might glitterwith historical diamonds and sparkle with wit as brilliant as the gems, inrooms as splendid as any in Rome at its best; but she saw no one except her ownsex who knew enough to be worth dazzling, or was competent to pay herintelligent homage. She might have her own way, without restraint or limit, butshe knew not what to do with herself when free. Never had the world known amore capable or devoted mother, but at forty her task was over, and she wasleft with no stage except that of her old duties, or of Washington societywhere she had enjoyed for a hundred years every advantage, but had created onlya medley where nine men out of ten refused her request to be civilized, and thetenth bored her.

On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on this, theopinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a State Central Committee ora Railway President, is worth less than that of any woman on Fifth Avenue. Theinferiority of man on this, the most important of all social subjects, ismanifest. Adams had here no occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since nowoman in the world would have paid the smallest respect to the opinions of allprofessors since the serpent. His own object had little to do with theirs. Hewas studying the laws of motion, and had struck two large questions of vitalimportance to America — inertia of race and inertia of sex. He had seenMr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the value of threethousand million dollars, more or less, upon Russian inertia, in the lasttwenty years, and he needed to get some idea of the effects. He had seenartificial energy to the amount of twenty or five-and-twenty million steamhorse-power created in America since 1840, and as much more economized, whichhad been socially turned over to the American woman, she being the chief objectof social expenditure, and the household the only considerable object ofAmerican 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 inAmerica the results were evident and undisputed. The woman had been set free— volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's perfect gas; almost brought to thepoint of explosion, like steam. One had but to pass a week in Florida, or onany of a hundred huge ocean steamers, or walk through the Place Vendôme,or join a party of Cook's tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the woman had beenset 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, takingthemselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all theseshifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true problem slightly andsuperficially. Behind them, in every city, town, and farmhouse, were myriads ofnew 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 wereinarticulate. All these new women had been created since 1840; all were to showtheir meaning before 1940.

Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera proved; and theywere hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth century of the Church; but thiswas probably survival, and gave no hint of the future. The problem remained— to find out whether movement of inertia, inherent in function, couldtake direction except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be solved inone generation of American women, and was the most vital of all problems offorce.

The American woman at her best — like most other women — exertedgreat charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive type. She appeared asthe result of a long series of discards, and her chief interest lay in what shehad discarded. When closely watched, she seemed making a violent effort tofollow the man, who had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typicalAmerican man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; hisliving depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tendingalways to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotionsor anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey ordrugs, 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 worldsaw 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 ofphysical strength and it was as physical perfection of force that her Venus hadgoverned nature. The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and heraxis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weakrevolted all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that even anEocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if herforce were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and thefamily must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless likethe 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 hadmade a fortress of religion — had buried themselves in the cloister, inself-sacrifice, in good works — or even in bad. One's studies in thetwelfth century, like one's studies in the fourth, as in Homeric and archaictime, showed her always busy in the illusions of heaven or of hell —ambition, intrigue, jealousy, magic — but the American woman had noillusions or ambitions or new resources, and nothing to rebel against, excepther own maternity; yet the rebels increased by millions from year to year tillthey blocked the path of rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrowerthan in the twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophicalanarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the fewavenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw beforeher 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 thehistorian who studied the sources of Christianity felt sometimes convinced thatthe Church had been made by the woman chiefly as her protest against man. Attimes, the historian would have been almost willing to maintain that the manhad overthrown the Church chiefly because it was feminine. After the overthrowof the Church, the woman had no refuge except such as the man created forhimself. She was free; she had no illusions; she was sexless; she had discardedall that the male disliked; and although she secretly regretted the discard,she knew that she could not go backward. She must, like the man, marrymachinery. Already the American man sometimes felt surprise at finding himselfregarded as sexless; the American woman was oftener surprised at findingherself regarded as sexual.

No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forceshe has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merelya fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. No doubt every one in societydiscussed the subject, impelled by President Roosevelt if by nothing else, andthe surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one directionas the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the other; but the truth laysomewhere unconscious in the woman's breast. An elderly man, trying only tolearn the law of social inertia and the limits of social divergence could notcompel the Superintendent of the Census to ask every young woman whether shewanted children, and how many; he could not even require of an octogenarianSenate the passage of a law obliging every woman, married or not, to bear onebaby — at the expense of the Treasury — before she was thirty yearsold, under penalty of solitary confinement for life; yet these were vitalstatistics in more senses than all that bore the name, and tended more directlyto the foundation of a serious society in the future. He could draw noconclusions whatever except from the birth-rate. He could not frankly discussthe matter with the young women themselves, although they would have gladlydiscussed it, because Faust was helpless in the tragedy of woman. He couldsuggest nothing. The Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether shewere better off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would rather bevictim 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 somewhateasier of treatment than the American. Inertia of race and bulk would requirean immense force to overcome it, but in time it might perhaps be partiallyovercome. Inertia of sex could not be overcome without extinguishing the race,yet an immense force, doubling every few years, was working irresistibly toovercome it. One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest ignorance that hadalready engulfed society. Few centres of great energy lived in illusion morecomplete or archaic than Washington with its simple-minded standards of thefield and farm, its Southern and Western habits of life and manners, itsassumptions of ethics and history; but even in Washington, society was uneasyenough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act the part ofhorseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was uniform — thatnothing ever changed — and that the woman would swim about the ocean offuture time, as she had swum in the past, with the gar-fish and the shark,unable to change.

CHAPTER XXXI. THE GRAMMAR OFSCIENCE (1903)

OF all the travels made by man since the voyages of Dante,this new exploration along the shores of Multiplicity and Complexity promisedto be the longest, though as yet it had barely touched two familiar regions— race and sex. Even within these narrow seas the navigator lost hisbearings and followed the winds as they blew. By chance it happened thatRaphael Pumpelly helped the winds; for, being in Washington on his way toCentral Asia he fell to talking with Adams about these matters, and said thatWillard Gibbs thought he got most help from a book called the "Grammar ofScience," by Karl Pearson. To Adams's vision, Willard Gibbs stood on the sameplane with the three or four greatest minds of his century, and the idea that aman 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 andreached his den on the Avenue du Bois until he took his return steamer atCherbourg on December 26, he did little but try to kind out what Karl Pearsoncould have taught Willard Gibbs.

Here came in, more than ever, the fatal handicap of ignorance inmathematics. Not so much the actual tool was needed, as the right to judge theproduct of the tool. Ignorant as one was of the finer values of French orGerman, and often deceived by the intricacies of thought hidden in themuddiness of the medium, one could sometimes catch a tendency to intelligiblemeaning even in Kant or Hegel; but one had not the right to a suspicion oferror where the tool of thought was algebra. Adams could see in such parts ofthe "Grammar" as he could understand, little more than an enlargement ofStallo's book already twenty years old. He never found out what it could havetaught a master like Willard Gibbs. Yet the book had a historical value out ofall proportion to its science. No such stride had any Englishman before takenin the lines of English thought. The progress of science was measured by thesuccess of the "Grammar," when, for twenty years past, Stallo had beendeliberately ignored under the usual conspiracy of silence inevitable to allthought which demands new thought-machinery. Science needs time to reconstructit* instruments, to follow a revolution in space; a certain lag is inevitable;the most active mind cannot instantly swerve from its path; but suchrevolutions are portentous, and the fall or rise of half-a-dozen empiresinterested a student of history less than the rise of the "Grammar of Science,"the more pressingly because, under the silent influence of Langley, he wasprepared to expect it.

For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian Reports therevolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of nineteenth-century dogma,and among the first was the famous address of Sir William Crookes on psychicalresearch, followed by a series of papers on Roentgen and Curie, which hadsteadily driven the scientific lawgivers of Unity into the open; but KarlPearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the schools. The phraseis not stronger than that with which the "Grammar of Science" challenged thefight: "Anything more hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard toForce and Matter current in elementary textbooks of science, it is difficult toimagine," opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author of the "elementarytextbook," as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson shut outof science everything which the nineteenth century had brought into it. He toldhis scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe, and a verysmall fraction at that — the circle reached by the senses, where sequencecould be taken for granted — much as the deep-sea fish takes for grantedthe circle of light which he generates. "Order and reason, beauty andbenevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solelyassociated with the mind of man." The assertion, as a broad truth, left one'smind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty seemed to be associatedalso 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 orKelvin'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 chaosbeyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically project them." We cannot eveninfer them: "In the chaos behind sensations, in the 'beyond' ofsense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these areconcepts formed by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions"; but wemust infer chaos: "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert ofthe supersensuous." The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimatechaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream ofman.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words areslippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon and Newton, English thoughthad gone on impatiently protesting that no one must try to know the unknowableat the same time that every one went on thinking about it. The result was aschaotic as kinetic gas; but with the thought a historian had nothing to do. Hesought only its direction. For himself he knew, that, in spite of all theEnglishmen that ever lived, he would be forced to enter supersensual chaos ifhe meant to find out what became of British science — or indeed of anyother science. From Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, every one had done it,although commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred to regard asUnity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who taught that every notionincluded its own negation, used the negation only to reach a "largersynthesis," till he reached the universal which thinks itself, contradictionand 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 Unitycould not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to agree with theChurch, but every one else, including Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, hadsailed 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, butsequence could scarcely be denied by one who had watched its steady approach,thinking the change far more interesting to history than the thought. When hereflected about it, he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at leasttwenty years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893; and that theman of science must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump from his chairlike a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysicalbomb she called radium. There remained no hole to hide in. Even metaphysicsswept back over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no onecould longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the unknowable was known.

The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth had woundabout their universe a tangle of contradictions meant only for temporarysupport to be merged in "larger synthesis," and had waited for the largersynthesis in silence and in vain. They had refused to hear Stallo. They hadbetrayed little interest in Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked byrays, and Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an axe, leavingscience adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a supersensual chaos. Theconfusion seemed, to a mere passenger, worse than that of 1600 when theastronomers upset the world; it resembled rather the convulsion of 310 when theCivitas Dei cut itself loose from the Civitas Romae, and theCross 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 onthe raft, personally and economically concerned in its drift.

English thought had always been chaos and multiplicity itself, in which thenew step of Karl Pearson marked only a consistent progress; but German thoughthad affected system, unity, and abstract truth, to a point that fretted themost patient foreigner, and to Germany the voyager in strange seas of thoughtalone might resort with confident hope of renewing his youth. Turning his backon Karl Pearson and England, he plunged into Germany, and had scarcely crossedthe Rhine when he fell into libraries of new works bearing the names ofOstwald, Ernst Mach, Ernst Haeckel, and others less familiar, among whomHaeckel was easiest to approach, not only because of being the oldest andclearest and steadiest spokesman of nineteenth-century mechanical convictions,but also because in 1902 he had published a vehement renewal of his faith. Thevolume contained only one paragraph that concerned a historian; it was that inwhich Haeckel sank his voice almost to a religious whisper in avowing withevident effort, that the "proper essence of substance appeared to him more andmore marvellous and enigmatic as he penetrated further into the knowledge ofits attributes — matter and energy — and as he learned to knowtheir innumerable phenomena and their evolution." Since Haeckel seemed to havebegun the voyage into multiplicity that Pearson had forbidden to Englishmen, heshould have been a safe pilot to the point, at least, of a "proper essence ofsubstance" in its attributes of matter and energy: but Ernst Mach seemed to goyet one step further, for he rejected matter altogether, and admitted but twoprocesses 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 ofvery great men; he sought only the relation with the ideas of theirgrandfathers, and their common direction towards the ideas of their grandsons.He had long ago reached, with Hegel, the limits of contradiction; and ErnstMach scarcely added a shade of variety to the identity of opposites; but bothof them seemed to be in agreement with Karl Pearson on the facts of thesupersensual universe which could be known only as unknowable.

With a deep sigh of relief, the traveller turned back to France. There hefelt safe. No Frenchman except Rabelais and Montaigne had ever taught anarchyother than as path to order. Chaos would be unity in Paris even if child of theguillotine. To make this assurance mathematically sure, the highest scientificauthority in France was a great mathematician, M. Poincaré of theInstitut, who published in 1902 a small volume called "La Science etl'Hypothèse," which purported to be relatively readable. Trusting to itsexternal appearance, the traveller timidly bought it, and greedily devoured it,without understanding a single consecutive page, but catching here and there aperiod that startled him to the depths of his ignorance, for they seemed toshow that M. Poincaré was troubled by the same historical landmarks whichguided or deluded Adams himself: "[In science] we are led," said M.Poincaré, " 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 franklyconfessed it, and proclaimed that nature loves simplicity. She has since givenus too often the lie. To-day this tendency is no longer avowed, and only asmuch of it is preserved as is indispensable so that science shall not becomeimpossible."

Here at last was a fixed point beyond the chance of confusion withself-suggestion. History and mathematics agreed. Had M. Poincaré shownanarchistic tastes, his evidence would have weighed less heavily; but he seemedto 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 madesome approach towards unity. We have not gone as fast as we hoped fifty yearsago; we have not always taken the intended road; but definitely we have gainedmuch ground." This was the most clear and convincing evidence of progress yetoffered to the navigator of ignorance; but suddenly he fell on another viewwhich seemed to him quite irreconcilable with the first: "Doubtless if ourmeans of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we shoulddiscover the simple under the complex; then the complex under the simple; thenanew the simple under the complex; and so on without ever being able to foreseethe last term."

A mathematical paradise of endless displacement promised eternal bliss tothe mathematician, but turned the historian green with horror. Made miserableby the thought that he knew no mathematics, he burned to ask whether M.Poincaré knew any history, since he began by begging the historicalquestion altogether, and assuming that the past showed alternating phases ofsimple and complex — the precise point that Adams, after fifty years ofeffort, found himself forced to surrender; and then going on to assumealternating phases for the future which, for the weary Titan of Unity, differedin nothing essential from the kinetic theory of a perfect gas.

Since monkeys first began to chatter in trees, neither man nor beast hadever denied or doubted Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos.Always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the Contradiction had beencertain. Thought started by it. Mathematics itself began by counting one— two — three; then imagining their continuity, which M.Poincaré was still exhausting his wits to explain or defend; and this washis explanation: "In short, the mind has the faculty of creating symbols, andit is thus that it has constructed mathematical continuity which is only aparticular system of symbols." With the same light touch, more destructive inits artistic measure than the heaviest-handed brutality of Englishmen orGermans, he went on to upset relative truth itself: "How should I answer thequestion whether Euclidian Geometry is true? It has no sense! . . . EuclidianGeometry 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 ofit had exhausted thought in the effort to prove Unity, Continuity, Purpose,Order, Law, Truth, the Universe, God, after having begun by taking it forgranted, and discovering, to their profound dismay, that some minds denied it.The direction of mind, as a single force of nature, had been constant sincehistory began. Its own unity had created a universe the essence of which wasabstract Truth; the Absolute; God! To Thomas Aquinas, the universe was still aperson; to Spinoza, a substance; to Kant, Truth was the essence of the "I"; aninnate conviction; a categorical imperative; to Poincaré, it was aconvenience; and to Karl Pearson, a medium of exchange.

The historian never stopped repeating to himself that he knew nothing aboutit; that he was a mere instrument of measure, a barometer, pedometer,radiometer; and that his whole share in the matter was restricted to themeasurement of thought-motion as marked by the accepted thinkers. He took theirfacts for granted. He knew no more than a firefly about rays — or aboutrace — or sex — or ennui — or a bar of music — or apang of love — or a grain of musk — or of phosphorus — orconscience — or duty — or the force of Euclidian geometry —or non-Euclidian — or heat — or light — or osmosis — orelectrolysis — or the magnet — or ether — or visinertiae — or gravitation — or cohesion — or elasticity— or surface tension — or capillary attraction — or Brownianmotion — or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemicalattractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and withouthim; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore somedozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as he wasassured, beyond his intelligence; but summed up in the dictum of the last andhighest 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 noneed to ask what either might be; all it needed to know was the admission ofignorance; the mere fact of multiplicity baffling science. Even as to the fact,science disputed, but radium happened to radiate something that seemed toexplode the scientific magazine, bringing thought, for the time, to astandstill; though, in the line of thought-movement in history, radium wasmerely the next position, familiar and inexplicable since Zeno and his arrow:continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each successivepoint. History set it down on the record — pricked its position on thechart — 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 lawsof history only repeat the lines of force or thought. Yet though his will beiron, he cannot help now and then resuming his humanity or simianity in face ofa fear. The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannon-ballseen approaching the observer on a direct line through the air. One could watchits curve for five thousand years. Its first violent acceleration in historicaltimes had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of directionoccurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, whichaltered 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, ArthurBalfour announced on the part of British science that the human race withoutexception had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of thecentury. The date was convenient, and convenience was truth.

The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would notbe a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education thatwould fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetratedbefore; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificialcompulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universerevolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchyat last. He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained muchthat had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment ofman by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetualrevolt of society against the law it had established; the perpetual building upof authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it; theperpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one;the perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and their perpetualconversion into principles of power; but the staggering problem was the outlookahead into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. Thephysicists had a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that we winis a battle — lost in advance — with the irreversible phenomena inthe background of nature."

All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw his educationcomplete; and was sorry he ever began it. As a matter of taste, he greatlypreferred his eighteenth-century education when God was a father and nature amother, and all was for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated allshare in the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point wherehis responsibility began or ended.

As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had behaved like ayoung pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit its conditions until it hadbuilt up a shell of nacre that embodied all its notions of theperfect. Man knew it was true because he made it, and he loved it for the samereason. He sacrificed millions of lives to acquire his unity, but he achievedit, 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'spart in his Universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there, andsacrificed herself without limit to make it habitable, when man permitted it,as sometimes happened for brief intervals of war and famine; but she could notprovide protection against forces of nature. She did not think of her universeas a raft to which the limpets stuck for life in the surge of a supersensualchaos; she conceived herself and her family as the centre and flower of anordered universe which she knew to be unity because she had made it after theimage of her own fecundity; and this creation of hers was surrounded bybeauties and perfections which she knew to be real because she herself hadimagined 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 couldquit its shell; but although the oyster might perhaps assimilate or embalm agrain of sand forced into its aperture, it could only perish in face of thecyclonic hurricane or the volcanic upheaval of its bed. Her supersensual chaoskilled her.

Such seemed the theory of history to be imposed by science on the generationborn 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 ofeverything that had ever been thought respectable — except an occasionalstatesman; but he had submitted to force all his life, and he meant to acceptit for the future as for the past. All his efforts had been turned only to thesearch for its channel. He never invented his facts; they were furnished him bythe only authorities he could find. As for himself, according to Helmholz,Ernst Mach, and Arthur Balfour, he was henceforth to be a conscious ball ofvibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotationor vibration, rolling at the feet of the Virgin at Chartres or of M.Poincaré in an attic at Paris, a centre of supersensual chaos. Thediscovery 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 littleabout a few illusions more or less. He should have learned his lesson fiftyyears earlier; the times had long passed when a student could stop before chaosor order; he had no choice but to march with his world.

Nevertheless, he could not pretend that his mind felt flattered by thisscientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human mind has alwaysstruggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it; how— appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown andunimaginable 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, toexternal suggestion, to nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, inthe last resort, trusting only to instruments and averages — after sixtyor seventy years of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find itself lookingblankly into the void of death. That it should profess itself pleased by thisperformance was all that the highest rules of good breeding could ask; but thatit should actually be satisfied would prove that it existed only as idiocy.

Satisfied, the future generation could scarcely think itself, for even whenthe mind existed in a universe of its own creation, it had never been quite atease. As far as one ventured to interpret actual science, the mind had thus faradjusted itself by an infinite series of infinitely delicate adjustments forcedon it by the infinite motion of an infinite chaos of motion; dragged at onemoment into the unknowable and unthinkable, then trying to scramble back withinits senses and to bar the chaos out, but always assimilating bits of it, untilat last, in 1900, a new avalanche of unknown forces had fallen on it, whichrequired new mental powers to control. If this view was correct, the mind couldgain nothing by flight or by fight; it must merge in its supersensualmultiverse, or succumb to it.

CHAPTER XXXII. VIS NOVA(1903-1904)

PARIS after midsummer is a place where only the industriouspoor remain, unless they can get away; but Adams knew no spot where historywould be better off, and the calm of the Champs Élysées was so deepthat when Mr. de Witte was promoted to a powerless dignity, no one whisperedthat the promotion was disgrace, while one might have supposed, from thesilence, that the Viceroy Alexeieff had reoccupied Manchuria as a fulfilment oftreaty-obligation. For once, the conspiracy of silence became crime. Never hadso modern and so vital a riddle been put before Western society, but societyshut its eyes. Manchuria knew every step into war; Japan had completed everypreparation; Alexeieff had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur,mounting his siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the expectedattack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war conditions; butEurope knew nothing. The banks would allow no disturbance; the press said not aword, and even the embassies were silent. Every anarchist in Europe buzzedexcitement and began to collect in groups, but the Hotel Ritz was calm, and theGrand Dukes who swarmed there professed to know directly from the Winter Palacethat there would be no war.

As usual, Adams felt as ignorant as the best-informed statesman, and thoughthe 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 comedycould be so well acted. Even as late as November, diplomats were gravely askingevery passer-by for his opinion, and avowed none of their own except what wasdirectly authorized at St. Petersburg. He could make nothing of it. He foundhimself in face of his new problem — the workings of Russian inertia— and he could conceive no way of forming an opinion how much was realand how much was comedy had he been in the Winter Palace himself. At times hedoubted whether the Grand Dukes or the Czar knew, but old diplomatic trainingforbade 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 hehad never before seen his country think as a world-power. No doubt, Japanesediplomacy had much to do with this alertness, but the immense superiority ofJapanese diplomacy should have been more evident in Europe than in America, andin any case, could not account for the total disappearance of Russiandiplomacy. A government by inertia greatly disconcerted study. One was led tosuspect that Cassini never heard from his Government, and that Lamsdorf knewnothing of his own department; yet no such suspicion could be admitted. Cassiniresorted to transparent blague: "Japan seemed infatuated even to thepoint of war! But what can the Japanese do? As usual, sit on their heels andpray to Buddha!" One of the oldest and most accomplished diplomatists in theservice 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 inentering Manchuria, they will never get out of it alive." The inertia ofCassini, who was naturally the most energetic of diplomatists, deeplyinterested a student of race-inertia, whose mind had lost itself in the attemptto invent scales of force.

The air of official Russia seemed most dramatic in the air of the WhiteHouse, by contrast with the outspoken candor of the President. Reticence had noplace there. Every one in America saw that, whether Russia or Japan werevictim, one of the decisive struggles in American history was pending, and anypresence of secrecy or indifference was absurd. Interest was acute, andcuriosity 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 gravelydoubted 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 ofmeasure. By chance it happened that Adams was obliged to take the place of hisbrother Brooks at the Diplomatic Reception immediately after his return home,and the part of proxy included his supping at the President's table, withSecretary Root on one side, the President opposite, and Miss Chamberlainbetween them. Naturally the President talked and the guests listened; whichseemed, to one who had just escaped from the European conspiracy of silence,like drawing a free breath after stifling. Roosevelt, as every one knew, wasalways an amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond anyother 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 hespared none. With the usual abuse of the quos ego, common to vigorousstatesmen, he said all that he thought about Russians and Japanese, as well asabout Boers and British, without restraint, in full hearing of twenty people,to the entire satisfaction of his listener; and concluded by declaring that warwas imminent; that it ought to be stopped; that it could be stopped: " I coulddo it myself; I could stop it to-morrow!" and he went on to explain his reasonsfor restraint.

That he was right, and that, within another generation, his successor woulddo what he would have liked to do, made no shadow of doubt in the mind of hishearer, though it would have been folly when he last supped at the White Housein the dynasty of President Hayes; but the listener cared less for theassertion 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, norwas 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 butRussians it would have lost its opening. Each day counted as a measure ofrelative energy on the historical scale, and the whole story made a Grammar ofnew Science quite as instructive as that of Pearson.

The forces thus launched were bound to reach some new equilibrium whichwould prove the problem in one sense or another, and the war had no personalvalue for Adams except that it gave Hay his last great triumph. He had carriedon his long contest with Cassini so skillfully that no one knew enough tounderstand the diplomatic perfection of his work, which contained no error; butsuch success is complete only when it is invisible, and his victory at last wasvictory of judgment, not of act. He could do nothing, and the whole countrywould 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, andAdams set his heart on getting the peace quickly in hand, for Hay's sake aswell as for that of Russia. He thought then that it could be done in onecampaign, for he knew that, in a military sense, the fall of Port Arthur mustlead 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'sstrength every day declined.

St. Gaudens came on to model his head, and Sargent painted his portrait, twosteps essential to immortality which he bore with a certain degree ofresignation, but he grumbled when the President made him go to St. Louis toaddress 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 religionof 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 twoeducations in one; but theory and practice were put to equally severe test atSt. Louis. Ten years had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and hefound everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through Ohio andIndiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys reeked smoke onevery horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with scrap-iron, scrap-paper andcinders, formed the setting of every town. Evidently, cleanliness was not to bethe birthmark of the new American, but this matter of discards concerned themeasure of force little, while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so muchthat Adams thought the Secretary of State should have rushed to the platform atevery station to ask who were the people; for the American of the prime seemedto be extinct with the Shawnee and the buffalo.

The subject grew quickly delicate. History told little about these millionsof Germans and Slavs, or whatever their race-names, who had overflowed theseregions as though the Rhine and the Danube had turned their floods into theOhio. John Hay was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had notbeen bred on its shores, and the city of St. Louis had turned its back on thenoblest work of nature, leaving it bankrupt between its own banks. The newAmerican showed his parentage proudly; he was the child of steam and thebrother of the dynamo, and already, within less than thirty years, this mass ofmixed humanities, brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded intoapproach to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing nodistinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American, like the newEuropean, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfthcentury was the servant of the Church, and the features would follow theparentage.

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 ofhalf-a-million people without history, education, unity, or art, and withlittle capital — without even an element of natural interest except theriver which it studiously ignored — but doing what London, Paris, or NewYork would have shrunk from attempting. This new social conglomerate, with notie but its steam-power and not much of that, threw away thirty or fortymillion dollars on a pageant as ephemeral as a stage flat. The world had neverwitnessed so marvellous a phantasm by night Arabia's crimson sands had neverreturned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long lines of whitepalaces, 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. Oneenjoyed it with iniquitous rapture, not because of exhibits but rather becauseof their want. Here was a paradox like the stellar universe that fitted one'smental faults. Had there been no exhibits at all, and no visitors, one wouldhave enjoyed it only the more.

Here education found new forage. That the power was wasted, the artindiflerent, the economic failure complete, added just so much to the interest.The chaos of education approached a dream. One asked one's self whether thisextravagance reflected the past or imaged the future; whether it was a creationof 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 tohope. The prospect from the Exposition was pleasant; one seemed to see almostan adequate motive for power; almost a scheme for progress. In anotherhalf-century, the people of the central valleys should have hundreds ofmillions to throw away more easily than in 1900 they could throw away tens; andby that time they might know what they wanted. Possibly they might even havelearned 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, beyondmeasure, to an optimistic dream of future strength in American expression. Theparty got back to Washington on May 24, and before sailing for Europe, Adamswent over, one warm evening, to bid good-bye on the garden-porch of the WhiteHouse. He found himself the first person who urged Mrs. Roosevelt to visit theExposition 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 againin the town of Coutances, where the people of Normandy had built, towards theyear 1250, an Exposition which architects still admired and tourists visited,for it was thought singularly expressive of force as well as of grace in theVirgin. On this Sunday, the Norman world was celebrating a pretty church-feast— the Fête Dieu — and the streets were filled with altars tothe Virgin, covered with flowers and foliage; the pavements strewn with pathsof leaves and the spring handiwork of nature; the cathedral densely thronged atmass. The scene was graceful. The Virgin did not shut her costly Exposition onSunday, or any other day, even to American senators who had shut the St. LouisExposition to her — or for her; and a historical tramp would gladly haveoffered a candle, or even a candle-stick in her honor, if she would have taughthim her relation with the deity of the Senators. The power of the Virgin hadbeen plainly One, embracing all human activity; while the power of the Senate,or its deity, seemed — might one say — to be more or less ashamedof man and his work. The matter had no great interest as far as it concernedthe somewhat obscure mental processes of Senators who could probably have givenno 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 atWashington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an automobile, whichwas a supreme demonstration because this was the form of force which Adams mostabominated. He had set aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as asentiment but as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered andnot easily reached. The automobile alone could unite them in any reasonablesequence, and although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of acommercial traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force thatinspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would haveguided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the seekerof history. In his mind the problem offered itself as to Newton; it was amatter of mutual attraction, and he knew it, in his own case, to be a formulaas precise as s = gt² /2, if he could but experimentally prove it.Of the attraction he needed no proof on his own account; the costs of hisautomobile were more than sufficient: but as teacher he needed to speak forothers than himself. For him, the Virgin was an adorable mistress, who led theautomobile and its owner where she would, to her wonderful palaces andchâteaux, from Chartres to Rouen, and thence to Amiens and Laon, and ascore of others, kindly receiving, amusing, charming and dazzling her lover, asthough she were Aphrodite herself, worth all else that man ever dreamed. Henever doubted her force, since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, andcould not more dispute its mastery than he could dispute the force ofgravitation of which he knew nothing but the formula. He was only too glad toyield 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 theseWorld's Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and St. Louispale.

"Both were faiths and both are gone," said Matthew Arnold of the Greek andNorse 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 excessivelyslow. Her adorer had pursued her too long, too far, and into too manymanifestations of her power, to admit that she had any equivalent either ofquantity or kind, in the actual world, but he could still less admit herannihilation as energy.

So he went on wooing, happy in the thought that at last he had found amistress who could see no difference in the age of her lovers. Her own age hadno time-measure. For years past, incited by John La Farge, Adams had devotedhis summer schooling to the study of her glass at Chartres and elsewhere, andif the automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it wasthat of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to another withoutbreak. The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one's road, and one was notfined for running over them too fast. When the thirteenth lost breath, thefourteenth caught on, and the sixteenth ran close ahead. The hunt for theVirgin's glass opened rich preserves. Especially the sixteenth century ran riotin sensuous worship. Then the ocean of religion, which had flooded France,broke into Shelley's light dissolved in star-showers thrown, which had leftevery remote village strewn with fragments that flashed like jewels, and weretossed into hidden clefts of peace and forgetfulness. One dared not pass aparish church in Champagne or Touraine without stopping to look for its windowof 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 longears from the balustrade of a Venetian palace, guarded by a legless Flemishleibwache, standing on his head with a broken halbert; all invoked inprayer by remnants of the donors and their children that might have been drawnby Fouquet or Pinturicchio, in colors as fresh and living as the day they wereburned in, and with feeling that still consoled the faithful for the paradisethey had paid for and lost. France abounds in sixteenth-century glass. Parisalone contains acres of it, and the neighborhood within fifty miles containsscores of churches where the student may still imagine himself three hundredyears old, kneeling before the Virgin's window in the silent solitude of anempty faith, crying his culp, beating his breast, confessing his historicalsins, weighed down by the rubbish of sixty-six years' education, and stilldesperately hoping to understand.

He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century had a valueof its own, as though the ONE had become several, and Unity had counted morethan Three, though the Multiple still showed modest numbers. The glass had goneback to the Roman Empire and forward to the American continent; it betrayedsympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still supreme. AtBeauvais in the Church of St. Stephen was a superb tree of Jesse, famous as thework of Engrand le Prince, about 1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among thefourteen ancestors of the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the Kings ofFrance, among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly more edifying thanKings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine purity. Comparedwith the still more famous Tree of Jesse at Chartres, dating from 1150 orthereabouts, must one declare that Engrand le Prince proved progress? and inwhat direction? Complexity, Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it mightsuggest, but what step towards perfection?

One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was wandering throughthe streets of Troyes in close and intimate conversation with Thibaut ofChampagne and his highly intelligent seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when henoticed 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 theRenaissance, drove him for refuge into the fascinating Church of St. Pantaleonnear by. Martyrs, murderers, Cæsars, saints and assassins — half inglass 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 AraCœli 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; thecharming Church with its delightful windows, in its exquisite absence of othertourists, took a keener expression of celestial peace than could have beengiven it by any contrast short of explosive murder; the conservative Christiananarchist had come to his own, but which was he — the murderer or themurdered ?

The Virgin herself never looked so winning — so One — as in thisscandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she existed, if, afternineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she was born? Thestupendous failure of Christianity tortured history. The effort for Unity couldnot be a partial success; even alternating Unity resolved itself intomeaningless motion at last. To the tired student, the idea that he must give itup seemed sheer senility. As long as he could whisper, he would go on as he hadbegun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator with the admission that thecreation had taught him nothing except that the square of the hypothenuse of aright-angled triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to somethingelse. Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as amachine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent aformula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There,whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made, could bebut verified.

The effort must begin at once, for time pressed. The old formulas hadfailed, and a new one had to be made, but, after all, the object was notextravagant or eccentric. One sought no absolute truth. One sought only a spoolon which to wind the thread of history without breaking it. Among indefinitepossible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observedmovement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams. Asterm of a nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certaindefinite historical fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if hewere 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 boyat school to shape after his own needs the values of a Dynamic Theory ofHistory.

CHAPTER XXXIII. A DYNAMICTHEORY OF HISTORY (1904)

A DYNAMIC theory, like most theories, begins by begging thequestion: 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 aforce; so is the sun; so is a mathematical point, though without dimensions orknown existence.

Man commonly begs the question again taking for granted that he captures theforces. A dynamic theory, assigning attractive force to opposing bodies inproportion to the law of mass, takes for granted that the forces of naturecapture man. The sum of force attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called manis attracted; he suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the forces thatattract him; his body and his thought are alike their product; the movement ofthe forces controls the progress of his mind, since he can know nothing but themotions which impinge on his senses, whose sum makes education.

For convenience as an image, the theory may liken man to a spider in itsweb, watching for chance prey. Forces of nature dance like flies before thenet, and the spider pounces on them when it can; but it makes many fatalmistakes, though its theory of force is sound. The spider-mind acquires afaculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis,taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of itstrap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approachingthat of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to thehigher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn;running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons ofmechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into hishands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplyinghis clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study. With little or noeffort 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 couldnot have been started until he had been taught to record. The universe that hadformed him took shape in his mind as a reflection of his own unity, containingall 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 enlargedthe surface foliage of a vegetable, and the mind needed only to respond, as theforests did, to these attractions. Susceptibility to the highest forces is thehighest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their mass isthe highest educator. Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders inselecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he nevermade a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unityand 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 heassimilated 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 ofpower, as he sough fetish or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little toknow its immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which hecould conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He waitedfor 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 totell him her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has taughtno more than at their start; but certain lines of force were capable of actingon individual apes, and mechanically selecting types of race or sources ofvariation. The individual that responded or reacted to lines of new force thenwas possibly the same individual that reacts on it now, and his conception ofthe unity seems never to have changed in spite of the increasing diversity offorces; 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 educatedon the same lines of illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had notessentially varied down to the year 1900.

To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine, and for itscontrol he invented the science called Religion, a word which meant, and stillmeans, cultivation of occult force whether in detail or mass. Unable to defineForce as a unity, man symbolized it and pursued it, both in himself, and in theinfinite, as philosophy and theology; the mind is itself the subtlest of allknown forces, and its self-introspection necessarily created a science whichhad the singular value of lifting his education, at the start, to the finest,subtlest, and broadest training both in analysis and synthesis, so that, iflanguage is a test, he must have reached his highest powers early in hishistory; while the mere motive remained as simple an appetite for power as thetribal greed which led him to trap an elephant. Hunger, whether for food or forthe infinite, sets in motion multiplicity and infinity of thought, and the surehope of gaining a share of infinite power in eternal life would lift most mindsto effort.

He had reached this completeness five thousand years ago, and added nothingto his stock of known forces for a very long time. The mass of nature exercisedon him so feeble an attraction that one can scarcely account for his apparentmotion. Only a historian of very exceptional knowledge would venture to say atwhat 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 ratherthan in its development; it was proved in mathematics, measured by names likeArchimedes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Euclid; or in Civil Law, measured by anumber 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 ofmetals, instruments, and writing; all of them economies of force, sometimesmore forceful than the forces they helped; but the roads were still travelledby the horse, the ass, the camel, or the slave; the ships were still propelledby sails or oars; the lever, the spring, and the screw bounded the region ofapplied mechanics. Even the metals were old.

Much the same thing could be said of religious or supernatural forces. Downto the year 300 of the Christian era they were little changed, and in spite ofPlato and the sceptics were more apparently chaotic than ever. The experienceof three thousand years had educated society to feel the vastness of Nature,and the infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase ofattraction had not yet caused economies in its methods of pursuit.

There the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the EmperorDiocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke down on the steps ofAra Cœli, his path blocked by the scandalous failure of civilization atthe moment it had achieved complete success. In the year 305 the empire hadsolved the problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been solvedsince. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade should, in four hundredyears, have put Europe far in advance of the point reached by modern society inthe 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 exchangesand exhaustion of minerals; but nations are not ruined beyond a certain pointby adverse exchanges, and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On thecontrary, the empire developed resources and energies quite astounding. Noother four hundred years of history before A.D. 1800 knew anything like it; andalthough some of these developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts,and harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe alonethe empire had developed three energies — France, England, and Germany— competent to master the world. The trouble seemed rather to be that theempire developed too much energy, and too fast.

A dynamic law requires that two masses — nature and man — mustgo on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun and a comet react oneach other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive. The theory seemsto exact excess, rather than deficiency, of action and reaction to account forthe 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 theexperiment of framing a dynamic law, he must assign values to the forces ofattraction that caused the trouble; and in this case he has them in plainevidence. With the relentless logic that stamped Roman thought, the empire,which had established unity on earth, could not help establishing unity inheaven. It was induced by its dynamic necessities to economize the gods.

The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that Christianityruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has pointed out that its reformsalone saved the State. Any dynamic theory gladly admits it. All it asks is tofind and follow the force that attracts. The Church points out this force inthe Cross, and history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly asserted itsmotive. Good taste forbids saying that Constantine the Great speculated asaudaciously as a modern stock-broker on values of which he knew at the utmostonly 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 thesubstance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of Milan in the year313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust of State Religions. Regarded asan Act of Congress, it runs: "We have resolved to grant to Christians as wellas all others the liberty to practice the religion they prefer, in order thatwhatever exists of divinity or celestial power may help and favor us and allwho are under our government." The empire pursued power — not merelyspiritual but physical — in the sense in which Constantine issued hisarmy order the year before, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge: In hocsigno 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 physicalchampion; 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, todecide a final test of force between the divine powers. The Church waspowerless to raise the ideal. What is now known as religion affected the mindof 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 wasalmost 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 orfetish-power. The symbol represented the sum of nature - the Energy of modernscience - and society believed it to be as real as X-rays; perhaps it was! Theemperors used it like gunpowder in politics; the physicians used it like raysin medicine; the dying clung to it as the quintessence of force, to protectthem from the forces of evil on their road to the next life.

Throughout these four centuries the empire knew that religion disturbedeconomy, for even the cost of heathen incense affected the exchanges; but noone could afford to buy or construct a costly and complicated machine when hecould hire an occult force at trifling expense. Fetish-power was cheap andsatisfactory, down to a certain point. Turgot and Auguste Comte long ago fixedthis stage of economy as a necessary phase of social education, and historiansseem now to accept it as the only gain yet made towards scientific history.Great numbers of educated people — perhaps a majority — cling tothe method still, and practice it more or less strictly; but, until quiterecently, no other was known. The only occult power at man's disposal wasfetish. Against it, no mechanical force could compete except within narrowlimits.

Outside of occult or fetish-power, the Roman world was incredibly poor. Itknew but one productive energy resembling a modern machine — the slave.No artificial force of serious value was applied to production ortransportation, and when society developed itself so rapidly in political andsocial lines, it had no other means of keeping its economy on the same levelthan 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 thetime of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome fell. The economic needs of aviolently centralizing society forced the empire to enlarge its slave-systemuntil the slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society noresource but further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensatefor the losses and horrors of the failure. For a vicious circle, itsmathematical completeness approached perfection. The dynamic law of attractionand 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 ofAlaric's storm, felt still more deeply the disappointment in its new power, theCross, which had failed to protect its Church. The outcry against the Crossbecame so loud among Christians that its literary champion, Bishop Augustine ofHippo — a town between Algiers and Tunis — was led to write afamous treatise in defence of the Cross, familiar still to every scholar, inwhich he defended feebly the mechanical value of the symbol — arguingonly that pagan symbols equally failed — but insisted on its spiritualvalue in the Civitas Dei which had taken the place of the CivitasRomae in human interest. "Granted that we have lost all we had! Have welost faith? Have we lost piety? Have we lost the wealth of the inner man who isrich 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 alsoshowed the same weakness in mechanics that had wrecked the CivitasRomae. St. Augustine and his people perished at Hippo towards 430, leavingsociety in appearance dull to new attraction.

Yet the attraction remained constant. The delight of experimenting on occultforce of every kind is such as to absorb all the free thought of the humanrace. The gods did their work; history has no quarrel with them; they led,educated, enlarged the mind; taught knowledge; betrayed ignorance; stimulatedeffort. So little is known about the mind — whether social, racial,sexual or heritable; whether material or spiritual; whether animal, vegetableor mineral — that history is inclined to avoid it altogether; but nothingforbids one to admit, for convenience, that it may assimilate food like thebody, storing new force and growing, like a forest, with the storage. The brainhas not yet revealed its mysterious mechanism of gray matter. Never has Natureoffered it so violent a stimulant as when she opened to it the possibility ofsharing infinite power in eternal life, and it might well need a thousand yearsof prolonged and intense experiment to prove the value of the motive. Duringthese so-called Middle Ages, the Western mind reacted in many forms, on manysides, expressing its motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothicarchitecture, glass windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war andlove, which still affect some people as the noblest work of man, so that, evento-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far countries tolook at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova, Chartres,with vague notions about the force that created them, but with a certainsurprise that a social mind of such singular energy and unity should still lurkin their shadows.

The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the architecture ofSancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly conscious of forces not quitethe same. Justinian has not the simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empireshowed an activity and variety of forces that classical Europe had neverpossessed. The navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would haveannihilated in half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or Rome ever setafloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting rather recklessly that betweenthe Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the Cross (A.D. 300), no new force affectedWestern progress, and antiquarians may easily dispute the fact; but in any casethe motive influence, old or new, which raised both Pyramids and Cross was thesame attraction of power in a future life that raised the dome of Sancta Sofiaand the Cathedral at Amiens, however much it was altered, enlarged, or removedto distance in space. Therefore, no single event has more puzzled historiansthan the sudden, unexplained appearance of at least two new natural forces ofthe highest educational value in mechanics, for the first time within record ofhistory. Literally, these two forces seemed to drop from the sky at the precisemoment when the Cross on one side and the Crescent on the other, proclaimed thecomplete triumph of the Civitas Dei . Had the Manichean doctrine ofGood and Evil as rival deities been orthodox, it would alone have accounted forthis simultaneous victory of hostile powers.

Of the compass, as a step towards demonstration of the dynamic law, one mayconfidently say that it proved, better than any other force, the widening scopeof the mind, since it widened immensely the range of contact between nature andthought. The compass educated. This must prove itself as needing no proof.

Of Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be said, forthey have the air of accidents due to the attraction of religious motives. Theybelong to the spiritual world; or to the doubtful ground of Magic which laybetween Good and Evil. They were chemical forces, mostly explosives, whichacted and still act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but theywere justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may have riskedtowards the milder teachers of his infancy, he was an abject pupil towardsexplosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a record of the energy with which therelatively harmless Greek fire educated and enlarged the French mind in asingle night in the year 1249, when the crusaders were trying to advance onCairo. The good king St. Louis and all his staff dropped on their knees atevery fiery flame that flew by, praying — "God have pity on us!" andnever had man more reason to call on his gods than they, for the battle ofreligion between Christian and Saracen was trifling compared with that ofeducation 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 willthrough frightful bogs of learning. At first, the apparent lag for want ofvolume in the new energies lasted one or two centuries, which closed the greatepochs of emotion by the Gothic cathedrals and scholastic theology. The momenthad Greek beauty and more than Greek unity, but it was brief; and for anothercentury or two, Western society seemed to float in space without apparentmotion. Yet the attractive mass of nature's energy continued to attract, andeducation became more rapid than ever before. Society began to resist, but theindividual showed greater and greater insistence, without realizing what he wasdoing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in ignominy from Constantinople in1453, Gutenberg and Fust were printing their first Bible at Mainz under theimpression that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the WestIndies in 1492, the Church looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Lutherand Calvin upset Europe half a century later, they were trying, like St.Augustine, to substitute the Civitas Dei for the CivitasRomae. When the Puritans set out for New England in 1620, they too werelooking to found a Civitas Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan madehis Pilgrimage in 1678, he repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries oflicense, the Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned GiordanoBruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 — as science goes onrepeating to us every day — it condemned anarchists, not atheists. Noneof the astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of magnifyingGod through his works; a form of science which did their religion no credit.Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz norNewton, any more than Constantine the Great — if so much — doubtedUnity. 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 theuniverse, or an ultimate substance, or a prime-motor. The a prioriinsistence on this unity ended by fatiguing the more active — or reactive— minds; and Lord Bacon tried to stop it. He urged society to lay asidethe idea of evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thoughtfrom the universe. The mind should observe and register forces — takethem apart and put them together — without assuming unity at all."Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "The imagination must be given notwings but weights." As Galileo reversed the action of earth and sun, Baconreversed the relation of thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to followthe movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.

The revolution in attitude seemed voluntary, but in fact was as mechanicalas the fall of a feather. Man created nothing. After 1500, the speed ofprogress so rapidly surpassed man's gait as to alarm every one, as though itwere the acceleration of a falling body which the dynamic theory takes it tobe. Lord Bacon was as much astonished by it as the Church was, and with reason.Suddenly society felt itself dragged into situations altogether new andanarchic — situations which it could not affect, but which painfullyaffected it. Instinct taught it that the universe in its thought must be indanger when its reflection lost itself in space. The danger was all the greaterbecause men of science covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets called theundevout astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it rigidlystanding on its head; the microscope revealed a universe that defied thesenses; gunpowder killed whole races that lagged behind; the compass coercedthe most imbruted mariner to act on the impossible idea that the earth wasround; the press drenched Europe with anarchism. Europe saw itself, violentlyresisting, wrenched into false positions, drawn along new lines as a fish thatis caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force it was controlled.The resistance was often bloody, sometimes humorous, always constant. Itscontortions in the eighteenth century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire,but all history and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauerand Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all, theBaconian law held good; thought did not evolve nature, but nature evolvedthought. Not one considerable man of science dared face the stream of thought;and the whole number of those who acted, like Franklin, as electric conductorsof the new forces from nature to man, down to the year 1800, did not exceed afew score, confined to a few towns in western Europe. Asia refused to betouched by the stream, and America, except for Franklin, stood outside.

Very slowly the accretion of these new forces, chemical and mechanical, grewin volume until they acquired sufficient mass to take the place of the oldreligious science, substituting their attraction for the attractions of theCivitas Dei, but the process remained the same. Nature, not mind, didthe work that the sun does on the planets. Man depended more and moreabsolutely on forces other than his own, and on instruments which supersededhis 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 workis done." Once done, the mind resumed its illusion, and society forgot itsimpotence; but no one better than Bacon knew its tricks, and for his truefollowers science always meant self-restraint, obedience, sensitiveness toimpulse from without. "Non fingendum aut excogitandum sed inveniendum quidNatura faciat aut ferat."

The success of this method staggers belief, and even to-day can be treatedby history only as a miracle of growth, like the sports of nature. Evidently anew 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 asthough she were playing ball. Governments did almost nothing but resist. Evengunpowder and ordnance, the great weapon of government, showed littledevelopment between 1400 and 1800. Society was hostile or indifferent, asPriestley and Jenner, and even Fulton, with reason complained in the mostadvanced societies in the world, while its resistance became acute wherever theChurch held control; until all mankind seemed to draw itself out in a longseries of groups, dragged on by an attractive power in advance, which even theleaders obeyed without understanding, as the planets obeyed gravity, or thetrees obeyed heat and light.

The influx of new force was nearly spontaneous. The reaction of mind on themass of nature seemed not greater than that of a comet on the sun; and had thespontaneous influx of force stopped in Europe, society must have stood still,or gone backward, as in Asia or Africa. Then only economies of process wouldhave counted as new force, and society would have been better pleased; for theidea that new force must be in itself a good is only an animal or vegetableinstinct. As Nature developed her hidden energies, they tended to becomedestructive. Thought itself became tortured, suffering reluctantly,impatiently, painfully, the coercion of new method. Easy thought had alwaysbeen movement of inertia, and mostly mere sentiment; but even the processes ofmathematics measured feebly the needs of force.

The stupendous acceleration after 1800 ended in 1900 with the appearance ofthe new class of supersensual forces, before which the man of science stood atfirst as bewildered and helpless as, in the fourth century, a priest of Isisbefore 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 mostuniversal of all theories. Church and State, theology and philosophy, havealways preached it, differing only in the allotment of energy between natureand man. Whether the attractive energy has been called God or Nature, themechanism has been always the same, and history is not obliged to decidewhether the Ultimate tends to a purpose or not, or whether ultimate energy isone or many. Every one admits that the will is a free force, habitually decidedby motives. No one denies that motives exist adequate to decide the will; eventhough 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 areconscious of few, and only in a partial degree; but that, from the beginning oforganic existence, his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in thelines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties from a lowerpower to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may be due to thefunction of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. There is nothingunscientific in the idea that, beyond the lines of force felt by the senses,the universe may be — as it has always been — either asupersensuous chaos or a divine unity, which irresistibly attracts, and iseither life or death to penetrate. Thus far, religion, philosophy, and scienceseem to go hand in hand. The schools begin their vital battle only there. Inthe earlier stages of progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple andeasy to absorb, but, as the mind of man enlarged its range, it enlarged thefield of complexity, and must continue to do so, even into chaos, until thereservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are exhausted, or cease toaffect him, or until he succumbs to their excess.

For past history, this way of grouping its sequences may answer for a chartof relations, although any serious student would need to invent another, tocompare or correct its errors; but past history is only a value of relation tothe future, and this value is wholly one of convenience, which can be testedonly by experiment. Any law of movement must include, to make it a convenience,some mechanical formula of acceleration.

CHAPTER XXXIV. A LAW OFACCELERATION (1904)

IMAGES are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, butthe mind craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest experimentersfind twenty images better than one, especially if contradictory; since thehuman 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 forcesthat previously made their own equilibrium, and constantly induced toaccelerate its motion till it shall establish a new equilibrium. A dynamictheory would begin by assuming that all history, terrestrial or cosmic,mechanical or intellectual, would be reducible to this formula if we knew thefacts.

For convenience, the most familiar image should come first; and this isprobably that of the comet, or meteoric streams, like the Leonids and Perseids;a complex of minute mechanical agencies, reacting within and without, andguided by the sum of forces attracting or deflecting it. Nothing forbids one toassume that the man-meteorite might grow, as an acorn does, absorbing light,heat, electricity — or thought; for, in recent times, such transferenceof energy has become a familiar idea; but the simplest figure, at first, isthat of a perfect comet — say that of 1843 — which drops fromspace, in a straight line, at the regular acceleration of speed, directly intothe sun, and after wheeling sharply about it, in heat that ought to dissipateany known substance, turns back unharmed, in defiance of law, by the path onwhich it came. The mind, by analogy, may figure as such a comet, the betterbecause 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 astronomicsense — the sum or difference of attractive forces. Science has quiteenough trouble in measuring its material motions without volunteering help tothe historian, but the historian needs not much help to measure some kinds ofsocial movement; and especially in the nineteenth century, society by commonaccord agreed in measuring its progress by the coal-output. The ratio ofincrease in the volume of coal-power may serve as dynamometer.

The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every ten yearsbetween 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power, for the ton of coalyielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as in 1840. Rapid as thisrate of acceleration in volume seems, it may be tested in a thousand wayswithout greatly reducing it. Perhaps the ocean steamer is nearest unity andeasiest 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 thisfigure every ten years, he got back to 234 horse-power for 1835, which wasaccuracy enough for his purposes. In truth, his chief trouble came not from theratio in volume of heat, but from the intensity, since he could get no basisfor a ratio there. All ages of history have known high intensities, like theiron-furnace, the burning-glass, the blow-pipe; but no society has ever usedhigh intensities on any large scale till now, nor can a mere bystander decidewhat range of temperature is now in common use. Loosely guessing that sciencecontrols habitually the whole range from absolute zero to 3000ºCentigrade, one might assume, for convenience, that the ten-year ratio forvolume could be used temporarily for intensity; and still there remained aratio to be guessed for other forces than heat. Since 1800 scores of new forceshad been discovered; old forces had been raised to higher powers, as could bemeasured in the navy-gun; great regions of chemistry had been opened up, andconnected with other regions of physics. Within ten years a new universe offorce had been revealed in radiation. Complexity had extended itself on immensehorizons, and arithmetical ratios were useless for any attempt at accuracy. Theforce evolved seemed more like explosion than gravitation, and followed closelythe curve of steam; but, at all events, the ten-year ratio seemed carefullyconservative. Unless the calculator was prepared to be instantly overwhelmed byphysical force and mental complexity, he must stop there.

Thus, taking the year 1900 as the starting point for carrying back theseries, nothing was easier than to assume a ten-year period of retardation asfar back as 1820, but beyond that point the statistician failed, and only themathematician could help. Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix aratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz,Newton, and himself. Watt could have given in pounds the increase of powerbetween Newcomen's engines and his own. Volta and Benjamin Franklin would havestated their progress as absolute creation of power. Dalton could have measuredminutely his advance on Boerhaave. Napoleon I must have had a distinct notionof his own numerical relation to Louis XIV. No one in 1789 doubted the progressof 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 forthe eighteenth century, for the period matters little until the accelerationitself is admitted. The subject is even more amusing in the seventeenth than inthe eighteenth century, because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, andIsaac Newton took vast pains to fix the laws of acceleration for moving bodies,while Lord Bacon and William Harvey were content with showing experimentallythe fact of acceleration in knowledge; but from their combined results ahistorian 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 thefourteenth century when algebra seems to have become for the first time thestandard measure of mechanical progress in western Europe; for not onlyCopernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even artists like Leonardo, Michael Angelo, andAlbert Dürer worked by mathematical processes, and their testimony wouldprobably give results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, tosave trouble, one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of acceleration,or retardation, to the year 1400, with the help of Columbus and Gutenberg, sotaking a uniform rate during the whole four centuries (1400-1800), and leavingto statisticians the task of correcting it.

Or better, one might, for convenience, use the formula of squares to servefor a law of mind. Any other formula would do as well, either of chemicalexplosion, or electrolysis, or vegetable growth, or of expansion or contractionin innumerable forms; but this happens to be simple and convenient. Its forceincreases in the direct ratio of its squares. As the human meteoroid approachedthe sun or centre of attractive force, the attraction of one century squareditself to give the measure of attraction in the next.

Behind the year 1400, the process certainly went on, but the progress becameso 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 intouse in the west in the thirteenth century, as well as instruments like thecompass, the blow-pipe, clocks and spectacles, and materials like paper; Arabicnotation and algebra were introduced, while metaphysics and theology acted asviolent stimulants to mind. An architect might detect a sequence between theChurch of St. Peter's at Rome, the Amiens Cathedral, the Duomo at Pisa, SanMarco at Venice, Sancta Sofia at Constantinople and the churches at Ravenna.All the historian dares affirm is that a sequence is manifestly there, and hehas a right to carry back his ratio, to represent the fact, without assumingits numerical correctness. On the human mind as a moving body, the break inacceleration in the Middle Ages is only apparent; the attraction worked throughshifting forms of force, as the sun works by light or heat, electricity,gravitation, or what not, on different organs with different sensibilities, butwith invariable law.

The science of prehistoric man has no value except to prove that the lawwent back into indefinite antiquity. A stone arrowhead is as convincing as asteam-engine. The values were as clear a hundred thousand years ago as now, andextended equally over the whole world. The motion at last became infinitelyslight, but cannot be proved to have stopped. The motion of Newton's comet ataphelion may be equally slight. To evolutionists may be left the processes ofevolution; to historians the single interest is the law of reaction betweenforce and force — between mind and nature — the law ofprogress.

The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte first affirmedthis law in its outlines by asserting the unity of progress, for a mere phaseinterrupts no growth, and nature shows innumerable such phases. The developmentof coal-power in the nineteenth century furnished the first means of assigningcloser values to the elements; and the appearance of supersensual forcestowards 1900 made this calculation a pressing necessity; since the next stepbecame infinitely serious.

A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of mechanics, cannotbe supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man. No one islikely to suggest a theory that man's convenience had been consulted by Natureat any time, or that Nature has consulted the convenience of any of hercreations, except perhaps the Terebratula. In every age man hasbitterly and justly complained that Nature hurried and hustled him, for inertiaalmost invariably has ended in tragedy. Resistance is its law, and resistanceto superior mass is futile and fatal.

Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of accelerationcould not last. The world forgets quickly, but even today the habit remains offounding statistics on the faith that consumption will continue nearlystationary. Two generations, with John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationaryperiod, which was to follow the explosion of new power. All the men who wereelderly in the forties died in this faith, and other men grew old nursing thesame conviction, and happy in it; while science, for fifty years, permitted, orencouraged, society to think that force would prove to be limited in supply.This mental inertia of science lasted through the eighties before showing signsof breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly wakened men to the fact,long since evident, that force was inexhaustible. Even then the scientificauthorities vehemently resisted.

Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300. Thought had morethan once been upset, but never caught and whirled about in the vortex ofinfinite forces. Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply thestellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Mancould no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about asthough he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was verynearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid singlegentleman in Paris, who never drove down the Champs Élysées withoutexpecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in theneighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So longas the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force andnumber every ten years.

Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One's life had fattened onimpossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen fourimpossibilities made actual — the ocean-steamer, the railway, theelectric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he ever learn which of thefour had most hurried others to come. He had seen the coal-output of the UnitedStates grow from nothing to three hundred million tons or more. What was farmore serious, he had seen the number of minds, engaged in pursuing force— the truest measure of its attraction — increase from a few scoresor hundreds, in 1838, to many thousands in 1905, trained to sharpness neverbefore reached, and armed with instruments amounting to new senses ofindefinite power and accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places whereNature herself had never known it to be, making analyses that contradictedbeing, and syntheses that endangered the elements. No one could say that thesocial mind now failed to respond to new force, even when the new force annoyedit horribly. Every day Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidentswith enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man,who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a singleinstant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war;automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost anervous relaxation. An immense volume of force had detached itself from theunknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to beinfinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with more compulsivecourse than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that ever existed, and feelingstill 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, itseemed in their minds a toss-up between anarchy and order. Unless they shouldbe 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 sciencebefore 1700, supposing them to have been honest in the religious convictionsthey expressed. In 1900 they were plainly forced back; on faith in a unityunproved and an order they had themselves disproved. They had reduced theiruniverse to a series of relations to themselves. They had reduced themselves tomotion in a universe of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case ofvertiginous violence. With the correctness of their science, history had noright to meddle, since their science now lay in a plane where scarcely one ortwo hundred minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes; butbombs educate vigorously, and even wireless telegraphy or airships mightrequire the reconstruction of society. If any analogy whatever existed betweenthe human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind hadalready entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately passbeyond, into new equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipationaltogether, like meteoroids in the earth's atmosphere. If it behaved like anexplosive, 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 earliercreations of energy — the saurians and sharks — it must have nearlyreached the limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling orquadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soonsuccumb. An average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could no longerunderstand the problem in 1900.

Fortunately, a student of history had no responsibility for the problem; hetook it as science gave it, and waited only to be taught. With science or withsociety, he had no quarrel and claimed no share of authority. He had never beenable 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 feltnone with the American of the twentieth. For this new creation, born since1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked onlyto be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden underfoot; for he could see that the new American — the child of incalculablecoal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as ofnew forces yet undetermined — must be a sort of God compared with anyformer creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every Americanwho lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. Hewould think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal withproblems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenthcentury would stand on the same plane with the fourth — equally childlike— and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and soweak in force, should have done so much. Perhaps even he might go back, in1964, to sit with Gibbon on the steps of Ara Cœli.

Meanwhile he was getting education. With that, a teacher who had failed toeducate even the generation of 1870, dared not interfere. The new forces wouldeducate. History saw few lessons in the past that would be useful in thefuture; but one, at least, it did see. The attempt of the American of 1800 toeducate the American of 1900 had not often been surpassed for folly; and since1800 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 beeven blinder than that of the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he hadlearned his ignorance. During a million or two of years, every generation inturn had toiled with endless agony to attain and apply power, all the whilebetraying the deepest alarm and horror at the power they created. The teacherof 1900, if foolhardy, might stimulate; if foolish, might resist; ifintelligent, might balance, as wise and foolish have often tried to do from thebeginning; but the forces would continue to educate, and the mind wouldcontinue to react. All the teacher could hope was to teach it reaction.

Even there his difficulty was extreme. The most elementary books of sciencebetrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought. Chapter after chapterclosed with phrases such as one never met in older literature: "The cause ofthis phenomenon is not understood"; "science no longer ventures to explaincauses"; "the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to betaken"; "opinions are very much divided"; "in spite of the contradictionsinvolved"; "science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimescontradictory." Evidently the new American would need to think incontradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universewould know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law.

To educate — one's self to begin with — had been the effort ofone's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had gone ondoubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of waiting another ten years,in order to face a seventh doubling of complexities, allured one's imaginationbut slightly. The law of acceleration was definite, and did not require tenyears more study except to show whether it held good. No scheme could besuggested to the new American, and no fault needed to be found, or complaintmade; but the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and itsstyle of education promised to be violently coercive. The movement from unityinto multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapidin acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new socialmind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution it must enter anew phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, themind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail toreact — but it would need to jump.

CHAPTER XXXV. NUNC AGE(1905)

NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-privatesecretary landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when theysaw American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the plains. As hecame up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than either his father orMotley in 1868, he found the approach more striking than ever — wonderful— unlike anything man had ever seen — and like nothing he had evermuch cared to see. The outline of the city became frantic in its effort toexplain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown itsservitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, andthrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the airand movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent ofanger 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 neverreached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous,querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and allthe 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 oldtype — for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one joltedover the pavements or read the last week's newspapers, the new man seemed closeat hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and hisfailure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal electionshrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the clubwindow on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, underDiocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for thesolution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how itwas to act. The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward fromBroadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.

Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington to wait theend. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and battling Trusts. With theBattle of Trusts, a student of mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as amatter of politics or society, but also as a measure of motion. The Trusts andCorporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been createdsince 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulousenergy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values,as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They toresociety 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 heknew that, under the laws of mechanics, any change, within the range of theforces, must make his situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curiousto see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man, since no otherenergies seemed left on earth to breed. The new man could be only a child bornof contact between the new and the old energies.

Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown, and neitherhad warped the umpire's judgment by its favors. If ever judge had reason to beimpartial, it was he. The sole object of his interest and sympathy was the newman, and the longer one watched, the less could be seen of him. Of the forcesbehind the Trusts, one could see something; they owned a complete organization,with schools, training, wealth and purpose; but of the forces behind Rooseveltone knew little; their cohesion was slight; their training irregular; theirobjects vague. The public had no idea what practical system it could aim at, orwhat sort of men could manage it. The single problem before it was not so muchto 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 sportof nature. The attraction of mechanical power had already wrenched the Americanmind into a crab-like process which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts torestore to even action, and he had every right to active support and sympathyfrom all the world, especially from the Trusts themselves so far as they werehuman; but the doubt persisted whether the force that educated was really manor nature — mind or motion. The mechanical theory, mostly accepted byscience, 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 ormisleading 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 ofhistory he cared no more than for the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were anapproach to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove itself withinthirty years. At the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-streammust very soon pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion wasfutile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If theacceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces, were tocontinue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should be able toplot the past and future orbit of the human race as accurately as that of theNovember meteoroids.

Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as the attitudeof the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators. Above all, it was profoundlyunmoral, and tended to discourage effort. On the other hand, it tended toencourage foresight and to economize waste of mind. If it was not itselfeducation, it pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the newAmerican. There, the duty stopped.

There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a singular sympathyfor death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly five thousand feet above sea-level,Captain Scott found carcasses of seals, where the animals had laboriouslyflopped up, to die in peace. "Unless we had actually found these remains, itwould have been past believing that a dying seal could have transported itselfover fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface," but "the seal seems oftento crawl to the shore or the ice to die, probably from its instinctive dread ofits marine enemies." In India, Purun Dass, at the end of statesmanship, soughtsolitude, and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys, rather than remainwith man. Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunnyand 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 seemedsometimes nearer nature than John Hay's exposure. To the normal animal theinstinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves were not exempt from thepassion of baiting their bears; but in its turn even the seal dislikes to beworried to death in age by creatures that have not the strength or the teeth tokill him outright.

On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a glance that Haymust have rest. Already Mrs. Hay had bade him prepare to help in taking herhusband to Europe as soon as the Session should be over, and although Hayprotested that the idea could not even be discussed, his strength failed sorapidly that he could not effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding withoutstruggle. He would equally have resigned office and retired, like Purun Dass,had not the President and the press protested; but he often debated thesubject, and his friends could throw no light on it. Adams himself, who had sethis heart on seeing Hay close his career by making peace in the East, couldonly urge that vanity for vanity, the crown of peacemaker was worth the crossof martyrdom; but the cross was full in sight, while the crown was stilluncertain. Adams found his formula for Russian inertia exasperatingly correct.He thought that Russia should have negotiated instantly on the fall of PortArthur, January 1, 1905; he found that she had not the energy, but meant towait till her navy should be destroyed. The delay measured precisely the timethat Hay had to spare.

The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the strength to crawl onboard ship, March 18, and before his steamer had reached half her course, hehad revived, almost as gay as when he first lighted on the Markoe house in IStreet forty-four years earlier. The clouds that gather round the setting sundo not always take a sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch onmortality; or, at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely sad. One walks withone's friends squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye with asmile. One has done it so often! Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourishedno illusions; he was convinced that he should never return to his work, and hetalked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day expect, but he threwoff the coloring of office and mortality together, and the malaria of powerleft its only trace in the sense of tasks incomplete.

One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his dozen treatieshung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in a butcher's shop, one couldstill remind him of what was solidly completed. In his eight years of office hehad solved nearly every old problem of American statesmanship, and had leftlittle or nothing to annoy his successor. He had brought the great Atlanticpowers into a working system, and even Russia seemed about to be dragged into acombine of intelligent equilibrium based on an intelligent allotment ofactivities. For the first time in fifteen hundred years a true Romanpax 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 worstshould happen, setting continent against continent in arms — the onlyapparent alternative to his scheme — he need not repine at missing thecatastrophe.

This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting statesmanfeels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to get out one's notebook inorder to jot down the exact figures on either side. Why add up the elements ofresistance and anarchy? The Kaiser supplied him with these figures, just as theCretic approached Morocco. Every one was doing it, and seemed in a panic aboutit. The chaos waited only for his landing.

Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at Nervi, and hegained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and heard no call foraction. Then they all went on to Nanheim without relapse. There, after a fewdays, Adams left him for the regular treatment, and came up to Paris. Themedical reports promised well, and Hay's letters were as humorous andlight-handed as ever. To the last he wrote cheerfully of his progress, andamusingly with his usual light scepticism, of his various doctors; but when thetreatment ended, three weeks later, and he came on to Paris, he showed, at thefirst glance, that he had lost strength, and the return to affairs andinterviews wore him rapidly out. He was conscious of it, and in his last talkbefore starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his activity forgranted. "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. Eachwas correct.

There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than the commonplaceto express what is incapable of expression. "The rest is silence!" The fewfamiliar words, among the simplest in the language, conveying an idea tritebeyond rivalry, served Shakespeare, and, as yet, no one has said more. A fewweeks afterwards, one warm evening in early July, as Adams was strolling downto dine under the trees at Armenonville, he learned that Hay was dead. Heexpected it; on Hay's account, he was even satisfied to have his friend die, aswe would all die if we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universallyregretted, and wielding his power to the last. One had seen scores of emperorsand heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when alive; and now, at least, onehad not that to fear for one's friend. It was not even the suddenness of theshock, or the sense of void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet'sShakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its favoritehaunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile climax in human history; itwas only the quiet summons to follow — the assent to dismissal. It wastime to go. The three friends had begun life together; and the last of thethree had no motive — no attraction — to carry it on after theothers had gone. Education had ended for all three, and only beyond someremoter horizon could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day —say 1938, their centenary — they might be allowed to return together fora holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light ofthe mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time sinceman began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world thatsensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.

THE END

This site is full of FREE ebooks - Project Gutenberg Australia