anxious to fix on a line of argument that should have a chance of
standing up against that of Judge Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He
did not know which foot to put forward. About to deal with Judge
Curtis, the last of the strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could
risk no chances. In doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to
discuss, and Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day,
driving, dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.

  Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all,
more solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to treat Mr.
Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts himself expressed
for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like most young men, he was
much of a doctrinaire, and the question was, in any event, rather
historical or political than legal. He could easily maintain, by way of
argument, that the required power had never been given, and that no
sound constitutional reason could possibly exist for authorizing the
Government to overthrow the standard of value without necessity, in
time of peace. The dispute itself had not much value for him, even as
education, but it led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice
himself. Following up the subject for his letters to the Nation and his
articles in the North American Review, Adams grew to be intimate with
the Chief Justice, who, as one of the oldest and strongest leaders of
the Free Soil Party, had claims to his personal regard; for the old
Free Soilers were becoming few. Like all strong-willed and
self-asserting men, Mr. Chase had the faults of his qualities. He was
never easy to drive in harness, or light in hand. He saw vividly what
was wrong, and did not always allow for what was relatively right. He
loved power as though he were still a Senator. His position towards
Legal Tender was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury he had been its
author; as Chief Justice he became its enemy. Legal Tender caused no
great pleasure or pain in the sum of life to a newspaper correspondent,
but it served as a subject for letters, and the Chief Justice was very
willing to win an ally in the press who would tell his story as he
wished it to be read. The intimacy in Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly,
and the alliance was no small help to the comforts of a struggling
newspaper adventurer in Washington. No matter what one might think of
his politics or temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high
senatorial rank, if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable ally.

  As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him. As
though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise, dropped
back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams enjoyed
accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was fifty-seven;
he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever dreamed of, and he felt
a sort of amused curiosity to be treated once more as a child. At best,
the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter, and in this case
it bristled with thorns, for Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not
been the most delicate of his ruptured relations, and he was liable to
be sensitive in many ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in
constant mind; yet it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a new
study of political humanity. The younger man knew that the meeting
would have to come, and was ready for it, if only as a newspaper need;
but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a disagreeable one, as Adams
conceived. He learned something--a piece of practical education worth
the effort--by watching Sumner's behavior. He could see that many
thoughts--mostly unpleasant--were passing through his mind, since he
made no inquiry about any of Adams's family, or allusion to any of his
friends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present. To him,
Adams in Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic,
perhaps a spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of
others; a politician without party; a writer without principles; an
office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this was, for his
purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and would be likely to do
him all the harm in his power. Adams accepted it all; expected to be
kept at arm's length; admitted that the reasons were just. He was the
more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations.
He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked
to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La
Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study
and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes
even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience.

  On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a
pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his
solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society;
but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the
calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing
them; it contained nothing but itself. The images from without, the
objects mechanically perceived by the senses, existed by courtesy until
the mental surface was ruffled, but never became part of the thought.
Henry Adams roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he
would have ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected,
as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more
aggressively egoistic than other Senators--Conkling, for instance--but
that with him the disease had affected the whole mind; it was chronic
and absolute; while, with other Senators for the most part, it was
still acute.

  Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful; perhaps
quite the most useful of all these great authorities who were the
stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the accumulated capital of a
Silurian age. A few months or years more, and they were gone. In 1868,
they were like the town itself, changing but not changed. La Fayette
Square was society. Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's
nursery monument to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found
all one's acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and national
government. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or fashionable
stranger had yet discovered the town. No literary or scientific man, no
artist, no gentleman without office or employment, had ever lived
there. It was rural, and its society was primitive. Scarcely a person
in it had ever known life in a great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper,
of Boston, and perhaps one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed
in that sort of world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The
one-horse tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met to bid
good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The State
Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on Fourteenth Street
while Mr. Mullett was constructing his architectural infant asylum next
the White House. The value of real estate had not increased since 1800,
and the pavements were more impassable than the mud. All this favored a
young man who had come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he
could know everybody; in two days everybody knew him.

  After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered an easy
and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from the safe shelter
of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work with--or against--he
had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired education was useless,
and the other tenth harmful. He would have to begin again from the
beginning. He must learn to talk to the Western Congressman, and to
hide his own antecedents. The task was amusing. He could see nothing to
prevent him from enjoying it, with immoral unconcern for all that had
gone before and for anything that might follow. The lobby offered a
spectacle almost picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were more
entertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew more of life than
all the departments of the Government together, including the Senate
and the Smithsonian. Society had not much to give, but what it had, it
gave with an open hand. For the moment, politics had ceased to disturb
social relations. All parties were mixed up and jumbled together in a
sort of tidal slack-water. The Government resembled Adams himself in
the matter of education. All that had gone before was useless, and some
of it was worse.

CHAPTER XVII

PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)

  THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low
spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the
overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost
unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the
November grays and browns of northern Europe. Life could not go on so
beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else felt it or knew it. He bore
it as well as he could, and when he picked himself up, winter had come,
and he was settled in bachelor's quarters, as modest as those of a
clerk in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown,
where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the Russian
Minister Stoeckel long before, had bought or built a new house.
Congress had met. Two or three months remained to the old
administration, but all interest centred in the new one. The town began
to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost. He
drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of
the confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew
he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but he
picked up friends on the press--Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry
Watterson, Sam Bowles--all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled
together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for General Grant to
give orders. No one seemed to know much about it. Even Senators had
nothing to say. One could only make notes and study finance.

  In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements of
Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the amusements
proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions, interests,
thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington was a poor place for
education, and of course young diplomats avoided or disliked it, but,
as a rule, diplomats disliked every place except Paris, and the world
contained only one Paris. They abused London more violently than
Washington; they praised no post under the sun; and they were merely
describing three-fourths of their stations when they complained that
there were no theatres, no restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no
drives, no splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza.
This was all true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient
and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought for
there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men Washington was
in one way paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand. After
watching the abject unimportance of the young diplomat in London
society, Adams found himself a young duke in Washington. He had ten
years of youth to make up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the
easiest society he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple,
good-natured, almost genial, in the softness of a Washington spring.
Society went on excellently well without houses, or carriages, or
jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any sort;
and the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could not stay there
a month without loving the shabby town. Even the Washington girl, who
was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor clever, had
singular charm, and used it. According to Mr. Adams the father, this
charm dated back as far as Monroe's administration, to his personal
knowledge.

  Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial
or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken
for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing.
Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for it.
Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.
Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private secretary a young
man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerous example of
frivolity. The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from
Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey. Another
impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far down
in the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have spared a world
of superannuated history, science, or politics, to have reversed better
in waltzing.

  He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All were
profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children to
education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier without
style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier than he had ever
been before; happier than any one in the harsh world of strenuousness
could dream of. This must be taken as background for such little
education as he gained; but the life belonged to the eighteenth
century, and in no way concerned education for the twentieth.

  In such an atmosphere, one made no great pretence of hard work.
If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if it
will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus far, no one
had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams had done or could
do; if he worked at all, it was for social consideration, and social
pleasure was his pay. For this he was willing to go on working, as an
artist goes on painting when no one buys his pictures. Artists have
done it from the beginning of time, and will do it after time has
expired, since they cannot help themselves, and they find their return
in the pride of their social superiority as they feel it. Society
commonly abets them and encourages their attitude of contempt. The
society of Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel
anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists produced
elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it had the chance,
and respected itself the more for the frailty. Adams found even the
Government at his service, and every one willing to answer his
questions. He worked, after a fashion; not very hard, but as much as
the Government would have required of him for nine hundred dollars a
year; and his work defied frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing
than the world ever got from reading him, for his work was not amusing,
nor was he. One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and
this was the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months
to an article on the finances of the United States, just then a subject
greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it, he sent it to
London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous editor of the Edinburgh
Review. Reeve probably thought it good; at all events, he said so; and
he printed it in April. Of course it was reprinted in America, but in
England such articles were still anonymous, and the author remained
unknown.

  The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a place on
the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow of Lord
Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank seemed
colossal--the highest in the literary world--as it had been only
five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had flowed since then, but
the position still flattered vanity, though it brought no other
flattery or reward except the regular thirty pounds of pay--fifty
dollars a month, measured in time and labor.

  The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert Cecil had
invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of politics which he
called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and the name--he thought he
had been enough in Lord Robert's house, in days of his struggle with
adversity, to excuse the theft--and began what he meant for a permanent
series of annual political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a
political authority. With his sources of information, and his social
intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that would
command attention. He had the field to himself, and he meant to give
himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the newspapers liked it or
not, they would have to reckon with him; for such a power, once
established, was more effective than all the speeches in Congress or
reports to the President that could be crammed into the Government
presses.

  The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could
not be condensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in
October by another which bore the title of "Civil Service Reform," and
was really a part of the same review. A good deal of authentic history
slipped into these papers. Whether any one except his press associates
ever read them, he never knew and never greatly cared. The difference
is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five
hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five
hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870
was near at hand, which was to mark the close of the literary epoch,
when quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration;
volumes to pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and
Robert Louis Stevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling
brought up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found
himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers
kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or
illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, at longer and
longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within
hearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially
conservative. Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority, or the
quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could surely say
where the real authority, or the real law, lay. Science did not know.
Truths a priori held their own against truths surely relative.
According to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was
forever on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.
Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he could
still depend on a certain number of listeners--mostly respectable, and
some rich.

  Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if this
had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point where he
always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of ten make their
errors. One may be more or less certain of organized forces; one can
never be certain of men. He belonged to the eighteenth century, and the
eighteenth century upset all his plans. For the moment, America was
more eighteenth century than himself; it reverted to the stone age.

  As education--of a certain sort--the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see much
education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule.
The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal's way.
This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in
politics since 1860.

  At least four-fifths of the American people--Adams among the
rest--had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency,
and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the
parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more
obvious. Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the
soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he
pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million
or a million men in the field, must know how to administer. Even
Washington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller,
had known how to organize a government, and had found Jeffersons and
Hamiltons to organize his departments. The task of bringing the
Government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and
mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was
ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the
confusion, especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was
considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every one had
echoed that famous phrase: "Let us have peace."

  Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one
would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never
expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public
spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower
House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed,
one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and
tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke
out: "You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog!
You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too
little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he
thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average
Congressman of 1869--he saw little or nothing of later ones--but he
knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If a
Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question, put
in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a
week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief.
The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but
faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole
Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent
reason. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be
burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them;
even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their
account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter.
They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and
even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of
a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.

  Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians
would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by
reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood what the
world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more
serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with
eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The
newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his
person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one
sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote,
felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was
eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the Senate
and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did
he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect
the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920.

  With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of
Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness
of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his
intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed
of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements not much
weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him
blush, while Grant's nominations had the singular effect of making the
hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made
another total misconception of life--another inconceivable false start.
Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his
intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of
saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's nominations betrayed his
intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier
might be a baby politician.

  Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13,
1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, "the
incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without absolutely
saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams had laid out
for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no thought of
effectual reform could revive for at least one generation, and he had
no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could he sail next? He
had tried so many, and society had barred them all! For the moment, he
saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launched
himself. The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile.
Subsequently Grant made changes in the list which were mostly welcome
to a Bostonian--or should have been--although fatal to Adams. The name
of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism
and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as
Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious joke;
Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr. McCulloch,
and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction for any one
resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as
Secretary of the Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of
Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, the
personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful,
and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant
himself. No one doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform;
that his aim had been to place his administration above politics; and
until he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to
support him. One's little lantern must therefore be turned on Grant.
One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so little.

  By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the two
men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was exceedingly social,
though not in appearance imposing. He was stout; his face was red, and
his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very intelligent, a
good newspaper-man, and an excellent military historian. His life of
Grant was no ordinary book. Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a
friendly critic of Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the
General's staff. As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington
were unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard
tales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army
officers were no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow,
dull, and vindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a
consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey
for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious. He
talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for
analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do.
Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his
patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive
about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins
understood the General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent
energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in
repose. He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why
Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For
stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others would
systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but
by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would
announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the
discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the
energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his
character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a
mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.

  In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act on the
General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his
portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to
add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen
since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was rather delicate; infinitely
superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.

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

  In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the
greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil
to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy;
jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance;
always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest
stimulant--the instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature,
energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of
scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them
than in others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect
at once.

  Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow;
only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand
near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic habits.
Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he
resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to
commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Let us have peace!" or,
"The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or a score of such
reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness;
but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously
remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a
fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have
taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of
simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual
commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree, but quite
distinctly enough for one who knew the American. What worried Adams was
not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted
and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first
principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for
ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset
evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years
after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
called--and should actually and truly be--the highest product of the
most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as
commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant,
was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

  Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was
worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he
was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was
archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins. Darwinists
ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age, but the
theory of reversion was more absurd than that of evolution. Grant's
administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch a trait of the
past, still less of the future. It was not even sensibly American. Not
an official in it, except perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who
died in September, suggested an American idea.

  Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish was
almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values; he was
human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no prejudice
whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or person to attract
regard; his social gifts were not remarkable; he was not in the least
magnetic; he was far from young; but he won confidence from the start
and remained a friend to the finish. As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one
felt rather happily suited, and one was still better off in the
Interior Department with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the
Treasury and Boutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite
satisfied as far as personal relations went, while, in the
Attorney-General's Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible
ideal, both personal and political.

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

  No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to
support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest. He was for
sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively cheap, for he
did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Government, but
on New York. All he wanted was something to support; something that
would let itself be supported. Luck went dead against him. For once, he
was fifty years in advance of his time.

CHAPTER XVIII

FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)

  THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the
young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his son Sam
to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the
charm of Washington spring. Education for education, none ever compared
with the delight of this. The Potomac and its tributaries squandered
beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a
negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the
azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of
struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the
landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The
brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the
running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the
deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No
European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace
and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too
much, as though it were Greek and half human. He could not leave it,
but loitered on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer
village about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance
could not be questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to question them.

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

  Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every tree.
Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him by
mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining
perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would have been a
success. One of these errors was the inclination of the ecliptic; the
other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddest thought
about the last was that it should have been so modern. Adams, in his
splenetic temper, held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked
their worst on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and sex
was a species of crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond
recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in
the wrong. The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a
story of education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his
time. Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except in
Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object. Every one
complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there were
no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better than its
neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove it, even to
Adams's confusion.

  Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over,
and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's character
showed themselves. They were startling--astounding--terrifying. The
mystery that shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to
corner gold in September, 1869, has never been cleared up--at least so
far as to make it intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by the change
at Washington, into the belief that he could safely corner gold without
interference from the Government. He took a number of precautions,
which he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also
testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have
satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any criminal
lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously, that no
such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead that he had
taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances which did satisfy
him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.

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

  The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most efficient
District Attorney, with all his official tools to work with. Charles
took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold Conspiracy; and
they went to New York to work it up. The surface was in full view. They
had no trouble in Wall Street, and they paid their respects in person
to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House Palace; but the New York side
of the story helped Henry little. He needed to penetrate the political
mystery, and for this purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At
first he feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the
Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew
all that was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by
the Government.

  Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery, and
as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any
mystery existed. All Adams's great friends--Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts,
Sumner, and their surroundings--were precisely the persons most
mystified. They knew less than Adams did; they sought information, and
frankly admitted that their relations with the White House and the
Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one
offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although
press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.
Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie
nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the point where
any member of the Administration became visible. Every one dreaded to
press inquiry. Adams himself feared finding out too much. He found out
too much already, when he saw in evidence that Jay Gould had actually
succeeded in stretching his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and
that Boutwell's incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation.
With the conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
assured every one else that the President himself was the savior of the
situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had
not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the
ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this was wildly exciting
to Adams. That Grant should have fallen, within six months, into such a
morass--or should have let Boutwell drop him into it--rendered the
outlook for the next four years--probably eight--possibly
twelve--mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched
his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth
century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched
executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and
people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool
of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man,
fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an
honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new
Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping
the stables of American society clear of the endless corruption which
his second Washington was quite certain to breed.

  By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar Wall
Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view Grant had
been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled by Grant. One
could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished and disgusted by
the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute American
mind--still less the complex Jew--could ever have accustomed itself to
the incredible and inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and
perhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if
victims they both were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap
which might easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States
Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confusion,
cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scandalous in a
boarding-school of girls. For satirists or comedians, the study was
rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with happy results,
but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity of London noticed with
horror that the grossest satires on the American Senator and politician
never failed to excite the laughter and applause of every audience.
Rich and poor joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives.
Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.
Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except to
laugh too.

  Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford
to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot
be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead;
but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it. Any
one in power above him can extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the
mercy of fools and cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive
out every active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every
intelligent man about the Government prepared to go. The people would
have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some
laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to content
themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on
their railroads and foundries. They were strong enough to carry even
their politics. Only the helpless remained stranded in Washington.

  The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one
who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in it,
alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues asked him in
vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in the Cabinet or out
of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital interest.
The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell
waited with confidence for society to drag his department out of the
mire, as it was sure to do if he waited long enough.

  Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive
none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments left to serve.
He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition was his horror; pure
waste of energy; a union with Northern Democrats and Southern rebels
who never had much in common with any Adams, and had never shown any
warm interest about them except to drive them from public life. If Mr.
Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or
contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State
Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any
newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this last
plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized champion of
Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once thought of his disaster
between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an accident could not occur
again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable, and their policy was sure to
be safe enough for support. No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be
caught a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both
his friends.

  This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he approved; he
saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and he was delighted;
but when he renewed his relations with Sumner in the winter of 1869-70,
he began slowly to grasp the idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of
his own which he proposed also to force on the Department. This was not
all. Secretary Fish seemed to have vanished. Besides the Department of
State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on
Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations
over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a policy
of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man ever
approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place himself
among all these forces. Officially he would have followed the
responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the Secretary.
Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant,
but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As for Grant's policy,
Adams never had a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he
did know, he was ready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came
only when he heard Sumner's views, which, as he had reason to know,
were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.

  Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed. To
his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto on all
extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St. Thomas to
the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an alternative, and
ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with incredulous stupor while
Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible
American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession
of Canada to the United States.

  Adams did not then know--in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him--what was going on behind the doors of the
White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis knew much
more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as impenetrable in Foreign
Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy. President Grant let every one go on,
but whom he supported, Adams could not be expected to divine. One point
alone seemed clear to a man--no longer so very young--who had lately
come from a seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as
much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the gravest
doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and Canada were worth
it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams was ready to treat it
seriously; but if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as a
voluntary set-off to the Alabama Claims, he drivelled. On the point of
fact, Adams was as peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he
could only wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr.
Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad
as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and
Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel
with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as
far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a
man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner,
whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican
Party, if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party
manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were
unknown to him.

  Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then it was
not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcerting than the
complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards told Adams, with the
rather grim humor he sometimes indulged in, that Grant took a dislike
to Motley because he parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated the
story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was
denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as good
a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a
part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less
material than hair--on clothes, for example, according to Mr. Carlyle,
or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz--and nine men in ten could
hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes or dislikes. In
truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in
common; and for the same reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason
he would be sure to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish
could not be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which
wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.

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

  Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an article
on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a volume just then
published by Spaulding, the putative father of the legal-tender clause
in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who alone sympathized with reform,
saved from Boutwell's decree of banishment such reformers as he could
find place for, and he saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census
of 1870. Walker was obliged to abandon his article for the North
American in order to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his
notes, and Adams completed the article.

  He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks and
bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic" value,
gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was paid half the
wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of attacking or
defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice and
the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the
necessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time
the Act was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections,
Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number of the
North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to
abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and
the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams's
restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this
treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had serious
historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of Spaulding's
contention that legal tender was necessary at the time; and the Chief
Justice told his part of the story with conviction. The Chief Justice
seemed to be pleased. The Attorney General, pleased or not, made no
sign. The article had enough historical interest to induce Adams to
reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its
historical value was not its point in education. The point was that, in
spite of the best intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the
strongest wish to escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into
opposition. Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.

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

  That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success at
Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule, must have
had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could only have
understood what it was. He studied, but failed. Sympathy with him was
not their weakness. Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could
hope as little from them as from Boutwell. So far from inviting
attachment they, like other New Englanders, blushed to own a friend.
Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to
help Adams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although they
would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics was the
earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to learn
from its study; but the situation struck him as curious--so curious
that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four most powerful
friends had matched themselves, two and two, and were fighting in pairs
to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the
judiciary as prizes! What value had the fight in education?

  Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or
Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The statesmen of the
old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars or Lamars, were
personally as honest as human nature could produce. They trod with
lofty contempt on other people's jobs, especially when there was good
in them. Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling cost the
country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just
as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, who were also honest in
money-matters, cost the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt
worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it
affected the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield,
and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs,
and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence
by their insistence on points of morals. Society hesitated, wavered,
oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the
weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite of all such
criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the
Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the
question; until young men were forced to see that either some new
standard must be created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had
expired--like the Constitution.

  Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare,
were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency. What it
wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who
could work it; but it found neither. Adams had tried his own little
hands on it, and had failed. His friends had been driven out of
Washington or had taken to fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared
helplessly into the future.

  The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he
had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good history then,
and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even
good enough to reprint. As it happened, in the process of his devious
education, this "Session" of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in
current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of
the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he
gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The
political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970.
The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century
fabric of a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given
it up. Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's
political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece
out--to patch--or, in vulgar language, to tinker--the political machine
as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might last
centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as
a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world--the
clumsiest--the most inefficient.

  Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics--to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even
Mr. Sumner--he could not honestly say that such an education, even when
it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything.
There were men, as yet standing on lower levels--clever and amusing men
like Garfield and Blaine--who took no little pleasure in making fun of
the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself
which the North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn. What
kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive
political education?

  Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it.
If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working, new
morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An eternity of
Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds, refused
to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans laughed, and went
their way. Society paid them to be practical. Whenever society cared to
pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and hold his
tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with Democratic
Congressmen and educate them. He served David Wells as an active
assistant professor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a
college. The Administration drove him, and thousands of other young
men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want
of system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the
blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.

  All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew Congressmen
by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote for his various
organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He enjoyed the life
enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much
happier than his friends Fish or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or
Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to
the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what
Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms
more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree.
They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by
remarking what a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest
possible distance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of
forest foliage. At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of
St. Peter's and the steps of Ara Coeli.

  Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to
London for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy,"
which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review. It
was the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for
publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of
revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well as among some who were
not so respectable; and the attack on Erie was beginning to promise
success. London was a sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it
was thought well to strike them there, where they were socially and
financially exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
expression about America in an English review attracted ten times the
attention in America that the same article would attract in the North
American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in
full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest
ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any
case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase he was
becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.

CHAPTER XIX

CHAOS (1870)

  ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Adams drove again up St. James's
Street wondering more than ever at the marvels of life. Nine years had
passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861. Outwardly London was
the same. Outwardly Europe showed no great change. Palmerston and
Russell were forgotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much
alive. One's friends were more than ever prominent. John Bright was in
the Cabinet; W. E. Forster was about to enter it; reform ran riot.
Never had the sun of progress shone so fair. Evolution from lower to
higher raged like an epidemic. Darwin was the greatest of prophets in
the most evolutionary of worlds. Gladstone had overthrown the Irish
Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass an
Education Act. Improvement, prosperity, power, were leaping and
bounding over every country road. Even America, with her Erie scandals
and Alabama Claims, hardly made a discordant note.

  At the Legation, Motley ruled; the long Adams reign was
forgotten; the rebellion had passed into history. In society no one
cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales. The smart set had
come to their own. Half the houses that Adams had frequented, from 1861
to 1865, were closed or closing in 1870. Death had ravaged one's circle
of friends. Mrs. Milnes Gaskell and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were
both dead, and Mr. James Milnes Gaskell was no longer in Parliament.
That field of education seemed closed too.

  One found one's self in a singular frame of mind--more
eighteenth-century than ever--almost rococo--and unable to catch
anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution. Experience ceased to educate.
London taught less freely than of old. That one bad style was leading
to another--that the older men were more amusing than the younger--that
Lord Houghton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill--that there
were fewer men one wanted to meet--these, and a hundred more such
remarks, helped little towards a quicker and more intelligent activity.
For English reforms Adams cared nothing. The reforms were themselves
mediaeval. The Education Bill of his friend W. E. Forster seemed to him
a guaranty against all education he had use for. He resented change. He
would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle
as historical monuments. He did not care to Americanize Europe. The
Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if
preserved; and so was a Bishop; so was Napoleon III. The tourist was
the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. Adams came
back to London without a thought of revolution or restlessness or
reform. He wanted amusement, quiet, and gaiety.

  Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State
House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have
cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in
partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker. Common-sense
dictated it; but Adams and his friends were unfashionable by some law
of Anglo-Saxon custom--some innate atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as
already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no
idea of making a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw
nothing ahead of him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk
with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the
Claims as his own special creation, discussed between him and his
father long before they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to
make notes for his next year's articles; but he had not a thought that,
within three months, his world was to be upset, and he under it. Frank
Palgrave came one day, more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical
than ever, because Napoleon III seemed to be threatening war with
Germany. Palgrave said that "Germany would beat France into scraps" if
there was war. Adams thought not. The chances were always against
catastrophes. No one else expected great changes in Europe. Palgrave
was always extreme; his language was incautious--violent!

  In this year of all years, Adams lost sight of education.
Things began smoothly, and London glowed with the pleasant sense of
familiarity and dinners. He sniffed with voluptuous delight the
coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Oxford
Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as it did to
the returned American. The country never smiled its velvet smile of
trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as to be asked
on a country visit. He loved it all--everything--had always loved it!
He felt almost attached to the Royal Exchange. He thought he owned the
St. James's Club. He patronized the Legation.

  The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams had
become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies, and that
his writing would be printed of course; but he was stunned by the
reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring half-a-dozen libel suits
on him. One knew that the power of Erie was almost as great in England
as in America, but one was hardly prepared to find it controlling the
Quarterlies. The English press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the
Erie scandal, as it had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal
of slavery, but when invited to support those who were trying to abate
these scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North American
Review were running greater risks every day, and no one thought of
fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an official document,
should scare the Edinburgh Review into silence for fear of Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's experience of English eccentricity,
though it was large.

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

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

  The last lesson--the sum and term of education--began then.
He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without
having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen
Nature--only her surface--the sugar-coating that she shows to youth.
Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the
terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition
made it more than the will could struggle with; more than he could call
on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and
brilliant in the terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun
of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that
had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the
mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died
in convulsion.

  One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen
a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion
and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror.
Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being
mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to
him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played
with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and
smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning.
The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the
picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting
with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy
of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft
shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer,
the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of
Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even
gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence,
as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these
hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.

  Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the
mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels
them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought of a
different power and a different person. The first serious consciousness
of Nature's gesture--her attitude towards life--took form then as a
phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time, the
stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself
stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with
resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what
these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
Society became fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical
motion; and its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine became
evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; religion was the most
human; but the idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or
profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty
known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be
held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a
Person.

  With nerves strained for the first time beyond their power of
tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his friends, and stopped
for a few days at Ouchy to recover his balance in a new world; for the
fantastic mystery of coincidences had made the world, which he thought
real, mimic and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his personal
horror. He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years in finding it
out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake below and of the
Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the first time in
his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was--a chaos of
anarchic and purposeless forces--and he needed days of repose to see it
clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity
of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its
heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond
itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but man became
chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were wholly restored, the
illusions of Europe suddenly vanished, leaving a new world to learn.

  On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14, Europe was
in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and ignorant, but one might
have been king or kaiser without feeling stronger to deal with the
chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as much astounded as Adams; the Emperor
Napoleon was nearly as stupefied as either, and Bismarck: himself
hardly knew how he did it. As education, the out-break of the war was
wholly lost on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand, who could not
throw it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only when he got up to
Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe. Providence set up
no affiches to announce the tragedy. Under one's eyes France cut
herself adrift, and floated off, on an unknown stream, towards a less
known ocean. Standing on the curb of the Boulevard, one could see as
much as though one stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an
army corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the war,
as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I, as a branch of
decorative art. The French, like true artists, always regarded war as
one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it;
and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with
singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like
an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a supernumerary hired to
fill the scene. Every evening at the theatre the comedy was interrupted
by order, and one stood up by order, to join in singing the
Marseillaise to order. For nearly twenty years one had been forbidden
to sing the Marseillaise under any circumstances, but at last regiment
after regiment marched through the streets shouting "Marchons!" while
the bystanders cared not enough to join. Patriotism seemed to have been
brought out of the Government stores, and distributed by grammes per
capita. One had seen one's own people dragged unwillingly into a war,
and had watched one's own regiments march to the front without sign of
enthusiasm; on the contrary, most serious, anxious, and conscious of
the whole weight of the crisis; but in Paris every one conspired to
ignore the crisis, which every one felt at hand. Here was education for
the million, but the lesson was intricate. Superficially Napoleon and
his Ministers and marshals were playing a game against Thiers and
Gambetta. A bystander knew almost as little as they did about the
result. How could Adams prophesy that in another year or two, when he
spoke of his Paris and its tastes, people would smile at his dotage?

  As soon as he could, he fled to England and once more took
refuge in the profound peace of Wenlock Abbey. Only the few remaining
monks, undisturbed by the brutalities of Henry VIII--three or four
young Englishmen--survived there, with Milnes Gaskell acting as Prior.
The August sun was warm; the calm of the Abbey was ten times secular;
not a discordant sound--hardly a sound of any sort except the cawing of
the ancient rookery at sunset--broke the stillness; and, after the
excitement of the last month, one felt a palpable haze of peace
brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of
Pteraspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying
on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, the monks studied the
war correspondence. In one respect Adams had succeeded in educating
himself; he had learned to follow a campaign.

  While at Wenlock, he received a letter from President Eliot
inviting him to take an Assistant Professorship of History, to be
created shortly at Harvard College. After waiting ten or a dozen years
for some one to show consciousness of his existence, even a Terebratula
would be pleased and grateful for a compliment which implied that the
new President of Harvard College wanted his help; but Adams knew
nothing about history, and much less about teaching, while he knew more
than enough about Harvard College; and wrote at once to thank President
Eliot, with much regret that the honor should be above his powers. His
mind was full of other matters. The summer, from which he had expected
only amusement and social relations with new people, had ended in the
most intimate personal tragedy, and the most terrific political
convulsion he had ever known or was likely to know. He had failed in
every object of his trip. The Quarterlies had refused his best essay.
He had made no acquaintances and hardly picked up the old ones. He
sailed from Liverpool, on September 1, to begin again where he had
started two years before, but with no longer a hope of attaching
himself to a President or a party or a press. He was a free lance and
no other career stood in sight or mind. To that point education had
brought him.

  Yet he found, on reaching home, that he had not done quite so
badly as he feared. His article on the Session in the July North
American had made a success. Though he could not quite see what
partisan object it served, he heard with flattered astonishment that it
had been reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and circulated
as a campaign document by the hundred thousand copies. He was
henceforth in opposition, do what he might; and a Massachusetts
Democrat, say what he pleased; while his only reward or return for this
partisan service consisted in being formally answered by Senator
Timothy Howe, of Wisconsin, in a Republican campaign document, presumed
to be also freely circulated, in which the Senator, besides refuting
his opinions, did him the honor--most unusual and picturesque in a
Senator's rhetoric--of likening him to a begonia.

  The begonia is, or then was, a plant of such senatorial
qualities as to make the simile, in intention, most flattering. Far
from charming in its refinement, the begonia was remarkable for curious
and showy foliage; it was conspicuous; it seemed to have no useful
purpose; and it insisted on standing always in the most prominent
positions. Adams would have greatly liked to be a begonia in
Washington, for this was rather his ideal of the successful statesman,
and he thought about it still more when the Westminster Review for
October brought him his article on the Gold Conspiracy, which was also
instantly pirated on a great scale. Piratical he was himself henceforth
driven to be, and he asked only to be pirated, for he was sure not to
be paid; but the honors of piracy resemble the colors of the begonia;
they are showy but not useful. Here was a tour de force he had never
dreamed himself equal to performing: two long, dry, quarterly, thirty
or forty page articles, appearing in quick succession, and pirated for
audiences running well into the hundred thousands; and not one person,
man or woman, offering him so much as a congratulation, except to call
him a begonia.

  Had this been all, life might have gone on very happily as
before, but the ways of America to a young person of literary and
political tastes were such as the so-called evolution of civilized man
had not before evolved. No sooner had Adams made at Washington what he
modestly hoped was a sufficient success, than his whole family set on
him to drag him away. For the first time since 1861 his father
interposed; his mother entreated; and his brother Charles argued and
urged that he should come to Harvard College. Charles had views of
further joint operations in a new field. He said that Henry had done at
Washington all he could possibly do; that his position there wanted
solidity; that he was, after all, an adventurer; that a few years in
Cambridge would give him personal weight; that his chief function was
not to be that of teacher, but that of editing the North American
Review which was to be coupled with the professorship, and would lead
to the daily press. In short, that he needed the university more than
the university needed him.

  Henry knew the university well enough to know that the
department of history was controlled by one of the most astute and
ideal administrators in the world--Professor Gurney--and that it was
Gurney who had established the new professorship, and had cast his net
over Adams to carry the double load of mediaeval history and the
Review. He could see no relation whatever between himself and a
professorship. He sought education; he did not sell it. He knew no
history; he knew only a few historians; his ignorance was mischievous
because it was literary, accidental, indifferent. On the other hand he
knew Gurney, and felt much influenced by his advice. One cannot take
one's self quite seriously in such matters; it could not much affect
the sum of solar energies whether one went on dancing with girls in
Washington, or began talking to boys at Cambridge. The good people who
thought it did matter had a sort of right to guide. One could not
reject their advice; still less disregard their wishes.

  The sum of the matter was that Henry went out to Cambridge and
had a few words with President Eliot which seemed to him almost as
American as the talk about diplomacy with his father ten years before.
"But, Mr. President," urged Adams, "I know nothing about Mediaeval
History." With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the
next generation of Americans Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, "If
you will point out to me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will
appoint him." The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams
could not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not say
that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all
seemed to him unnecessary.

  So, at twenty-four hours' notice, he broke his life in halves
again in order to begin a new education, on lines he had not chosen, in
subjects for which he cared less than nothing; in a place he did not
love, and before a future which repelled. Thousands of men have to do
the same thing, but his case was peculiar because he had no need to do
it. He did it because his best and wisest friends urged it, and he
never could make up his mind whether they were right or not. To him
this kind of education was always false. For himself he had no doubts.
He thought it a mistake; but his opinion did not prove that it was one,
since, in all probability, whatever he did would be more or less a
mistake. He had reached cross-roads of education which all led astray.
What he could gain at Harvard College he did not know, but in any case
it was nothing he wanted. What he lost at Washington he could partly
see, but in any case it was not fortune. Grant's administration wrecked
men by thousands, but profited few. Perhaps Mr. Fish was the solitary
exception. One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and
Executive during the twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little
but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in
results.

  Henry Adams, if not the rose, lived as near it as any
politician, and knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent at
Washington, or knew all about them. Among them, in his opinion, the
best equipped, the most active-minded, and most industrious was Abram
Hewitt, who sat in Congress for a dozen years, between 1874 and 1886,
sometimes leading the House and always wielding influence second to
none. With nobody did Adams form closer or longer relations than with
Mr. Hewitt, whom he regarded as the most useful public man in
Washington; and he was the more struck by Hewitt's saying, at the end
of his laborious career as legislator, that he left behind him no
permanent result except the Act consolidating the Surveys. Adams knew
no other man who had done so much, unless Mr. Sherman's legislation is
accepted as an instance of success. Hewitt's nearest rival would
probably have been Senator Pendleton who stood father to civil service
reform in 1882, an attempt to correct a vice that should never have
been allowed to be born. These were the men who succeeded.

  The press stood in much the same light. No editor, no political
writer, and no public administrator achieved enough good reputation to
preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them achieved bad
reputations, or damaged good ones that had been gained in the Civil
War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplomats, and Cabinet officers,
the period was wearisome and stale.

  None of Adams's generation profited by public activity unless
it were William C. Whitney, and even he could not be induced to return
to it. Such ambitions as these were out of one's reach, but supposing
one tried for what was feasible, attached one's self closely to the
Garfields, Arthurs, Frelinghuysens, Blaines, Bayards, or Whitneys, who
happened to hold office; and supposing one asked for the mission to
Belgium or Portugal, and obtained it; supposing one served a term as
Assistant Secretary or Chief of Bureau; or, finally, supposing one had
gone as sub-editor on the New York Tribune or Times--how much more
education would one have gained than by going to Harvard College? These
questions seemed better worth an answer than most of the questions on
examination papers at college or in the civil service; all the more
because one never found an answer to them, then or afterwards, and
because, to his mind, the value of American society altogether was
mixed up with the value of Washington.

  At first, the simple beginner, struggling with principles,
wanted to throw off responsibility on the American people, whose bare and
toiling shoulders had to carry the load of every social or political
stupidity; but the American people had no more to do with it than with
the customs of Peking. American character might perhaps account for it,
but what accounted for American character? All Boston, all New England,
and all respectable New York, including Charles Francis Adams the
father and Charles Francis Adams the son, agreed that Washington was no
place for a respectable young man. All Washington, including
Presidents, Cabinet officers, Judiciary, Senators, Congressmen, and
clerks, expressed the same opinion, and conspired to drive away every
young man who happened to be there or tried to approach. Not one young
man of promise remained in the Government service. All drifted into
opposition. The Government did not want them in Washington. Adams's
case was perhaps the strongest because he thought he had done well. He
was forced to guess it, since he knew no one who would have risked so
extravagant a step as that of encouraging a young man in a literary
career, or even in a political one; society forbade it, as well as
residence in a political capital; but Harvard College must have seen
some hope for him, since it made him professor against his will; even
the publishers and editors of the North American Review must have felt
a certain amount of confidence in him, since they put the Review in his
hands. After all, the Review was the first literary power in America,
even though it paid almost as little in gold as the United States
Treasury. The degree of Harvard College might bear a value as ephemeral
as the commission of a President of the United States; but the
government of the college, measured by money alone, and patronage, was
a matter of more importance than that of some branches of the national
service. In social position, the college was the superior of them all
put together. In knowledge, she could assert no superiority, since the
Government made no claims, and prided itself on ignorance. The service
of Harvard College was distinctly honorable; perhaps the most honorable
in America; and if Harvard College thought Henry Adams worth employing
at four dollars a day, why should Washington decline his services when
he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a career he liked in a
place he loved, into a career he detested, in a place and climate he
shunned? Was it enough to satisfy him, that all America should call
Washington barren and dangerous? What made Washington more dangerous
than New York?

  The American character showed singular limitations which
sometimes drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his
own ignorance--lost in the darkness of his own gropings--the scholar
finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to him
ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have forgotten how
to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that they are bored.
The American thought of himself as a restless, pushing, energetic,
ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his
neighbors. Perhaps this idea of the national character might be correct
for New York or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the
American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy
figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes
pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain,
distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by
money. That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true;
work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he
never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement
of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it; he had no use for
wealth. Jim Fisk alone seemed to know what he wanted; Jay Gould never
did. At Washington one met mostly such true Americans, but if one
wanted to know them better, one went to study them in Europe. Bored,
patient, helpless; pathetically dependent on his wife and daughters;
indulgent to excess; mostly a modest, decent, excellent, valuable
citizen; the American was to be met at every railway station in Europe,
carefully explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his
life would be the day he should land on the pier at New York. He was
ashamed to be amused; his mind no longer answered to the stimulus of
variety; he could not face a new thought. All his immense strength, his
intense nervous energy, his keen analytic perceptions, were oriented in
one direction, and he could not change it. Congress was full of such
men; in the Senate, Sumner was almost the only exception; in the
Executive, Grant and Boutwell were varieties of the type--political
specimens--pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power
when it came to them. They knew not how to amuse themselves; they could
not conceive how other people were amused. Work, whiskey, and cards
were life. The atmosphere of political Washington was theirs--or was
supposed by the outside world to be in their control--and this was the
reason why the outside world judged that Washington was fatal even for
a young man of thirty-two, who had passed through the whole variety of
temptations, in every capital of Europe, for a dozen years; who never
played cards, and who loathed whiskey.

CHAPTER XX

FAILURE (1871)

FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams could
recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have been nine years
old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter afternoons which
beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out to visit his aunt,
Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then President of the college and
lived in the old President's House on Harvard Square. The boy
remembered the drawing-room, on the left of the hall door, in which
Mrs. Everett received them. He remembered a marble greyhound in the
corner. The house had an air of colonial self-respect that impressed
even a nine-year-old child.

  When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had been
turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen adjacent to it
were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother Brooks, then a law
student, had rooms, with a private staircase. Opposite was J. R.
Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary as Adams himself, and
more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry revealed a boarding-table,
somewhere in the neighborhood, also supposed to be superior in its
class. Chauncey Wright, Francis Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their
equivalents in learning and lecture, were seen there, among three or
four law students like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements,
all of them had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of
Washington, but it was, for the moment, the best.

  For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on,
till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he
were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him,
rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

  The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great
effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot
in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the
leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of
History. The two full Professors of History--Torrey and Gurney,
charming men both--could not cover the ground. Between Gurney's
classical courses and Torrey's modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand
years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already
elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be
taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea
was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the
moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had
given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the
Middle Ages.

  Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had
tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but
even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as
parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence
stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter
himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the
multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat
with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more
complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies
evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes
of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists,
judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent
and immoral, history had either to be taught as such--or falsified.

  Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order to
publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less compel his
students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Venerable Bede by
heart. He saw no relation whatever between his students and the Middle
Ages unless it were the Church, and there the ground was particularly
dangerous. He knew better than though he were a professional historian
that the man who should solve the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring
them into the line of evolution from past to present, would be a
greater man than Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken
down so pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there.
Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had lost even
the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental
sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter
Scott and Alexandre Dumas.

  All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from
time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous. No
doubt, a teacher might make some use of these writers or their
theories; but Adams could fit them into no theory of his own. The
college expected him to pass at least half his time teaching the boys a
few elementary dates and relations, that they might not be a disgrace
to the university. This was formal; and he could frankly tell the boys
that, provided they passed their examinations, they might get their
facts where they liked, and use the teacher only for questions. The
only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of
talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it.
His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had
to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce
them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students
stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen
students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in
money.

  The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds were
of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in
ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a teacher
could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven years of contact,
Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in ten take
polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.

  Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a teacher,
who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach his
scholars what he did not know, but should join them in trying to find
the best way of learning it. The rather pretentious name of historical
method was sometimes given to this process of instruction, but the name
smacked of German pedagogy, and a young professor who respected neither
history nor method, and whose sole object of interest was his students'
minds, fell into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.

  The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when
learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that one may
take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough; but
complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins horribly from the
closed entrance. One may not begin at the beginning, and one has but
the loosest relative truths to follow up. Adams found himself obliged
to force his material into some shape to which a method could be
applied. He could think only of law as subject; the Law School as end;
and he took, as victims of his experiment, half-a-dozen highly
intelligent young men who seemed willing to work. The course began with
the beginning, as far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man,
and came down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no more
than his students, and the students read what they pleased and compared
their results. As pedagogy, nothing could be more triumphant. The boys
worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic
society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown languages yielded before
their attack, and customary law became familiar as the police court;
undoubtedly they learned, after a fashion, to chase an idea, like a
hare, through as dense a thicket of obscure facts as they were likely
to meet at the bar; but their teacher knew from his own experience that
his wonderful method led nowhere, and they would have to exert
themselves to get rid of it in the Law School even more than they
exerted themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science had no
system, and could have none, since its subject was merely antiquarian.
Try as hard as he might, the professor could not make it actual.

  What was the use of training an active mind to waste its
energy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor, but
this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help the boys to
a career, but not one of his many devices to stimulate the intellectual
reaction of the student's mind satisfied either him or the students.
For himself he was clear that the fault lay in the system, which could
lead only to inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he possessed
warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He too
wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the system would
have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He would have seated a
rival assistant professor opposite him, whose business should be
strictly limited to expressing opposite views. Nothing short of this
would ever interest either the professor or the student; but of all
university freaks, no irregularity shocked the intellectual atmosphere
so much as contradiction or competition between teachers. In that
respect the thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole
teaching of the modern school.

  All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of instruction.
In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his steady, generous, liberal
support, the system remained costly, clumsy and futile. The
university--as far as it was represented by Henry Adams--produced at
great waste of time and money results not worth reaching.

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

  The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false modesty he
thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great many experiments,
and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed to the weight of the
system. He had accomplished nothing that he tried to do. He regarded
the system as wrong; more mischievous to the teachers than to the
students; fallacious from the beginning to end. He quitted the
university at last, in 1877, with a feeling, that, if it had not been
for the invariable courtesy and kindness shown by every one in it, from
the President to the injured students, he should be sore at his failure.

  These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so much
disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college insisted on
expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far in his notice of
the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say that Henry had left a
great reputation at Harvard College; which was a proof of John Fiske's
personal regard that Adams heartily returned; and set the kind
expression down to camaraderie. The case was different when President
Eliot himself hinted that Adams's services merited recognition. Adams
could have wept on his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for
the rare good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow
the college to think that he esteemed himself entitled to distinction.
He knew better, and his was among the failures which were respectable
enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in the vanity of life
struck him as more humiliating than that Harvard College, which he had
persistently criticised, abused, abandoned, and neglected, should alone
have offered him a dollar, an office, an encouragement, or a kindness.
Harvard College might have its faults, but at least it redeemed
America, since it was true to its own.

  The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or less in
the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment, and, except for
the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all that man had ever
thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight
of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and
incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos
that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with
education when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of them,
and was surprised at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is
worth money to me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the
degree of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young man in
Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was good, and
settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had given
twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no nearer a result
than they. He still had to take for granted many things that they need
not--among the rest, that his teaching did them more good than harm. In
his own opinion the greatest good he could do them was to hold his
tongue. They needed much faith then; they were likely to need more if
they lived long.

  He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical atom
whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend that
mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics smiled at
evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of the Church and the
triumphs of its art: the Professor of Political Economy had to treat
them as waste of force. They knew what they had to teach; he did not.
They might perhaps be frauds without knowing it; but he knew certainly
nothing else of himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was
only educating himself at their cost.

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

  The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for help
to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen and
professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked the
society of a college. Several score of the best-educated, most
agreeable, and personally the most sociable people in America united in
Cambridge to make a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.
The liveliest and most agreeable of men--James Russell Lowell, Francis
J. Child, Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William
James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London or
Paris--tried their best to break out and be like other men in Cambridge
and Boston, but society called them professors, and professors they had
to be. While all these brilliant men were greedy for companionship, all
were famished for want of it. Society was a faculty-meeting without
business. The elements were there; but society cannot be made up of
elements--people who are expected to be silent unless they have
observations to make--and all the elements are bound to remain apart if
required to make observations.

  Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to admit
that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner still. The
editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write. If copy fell
short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on the virtues of the
Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he knew more about Edward
the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did about President Grant. For
seven years he wrote nothing; the Review lived on his brother Charles's
railway articles. The editor could help others, but could do nothing
for himself. As a writer, he was totally forgotten by the time he had
been an editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to
take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The Review
became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank Palgrave helped him
to keep it literary. The editor was a helpless drudge whose successes,
if he made any, belonged to his writers; but whose failures might
easily bankrupt himself. Such a Review may be made a sink of money with
captivating ease. The secrets of success as an editor were easily
learned; the highest was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of
advertising made an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The
merits or demerits of his literature had little to do with his results
except when they led to adversity.

  A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to let any
one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking, it was a dog's
life when it did not succeed, and little better when it did. A
professor had at least the pleasure of associating with his students;
an editor lived the life of an owl. A professor commonly became a
pedagogue or a pedant; an editor became an authority on advertising. On
the whole, Adams preferred his attic in Washington. He was educated
enough. Ignorance paid better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a
month.

  With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he best
could, with such accidental education as luck had given him; but he
held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin again, he would
do it on a better system. He thought he knew nearly what system to
pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had not yet got his head above
water so far as to serve for a model, as he did twenty or thirty years
afterwards; but the editorship of the North American Review had one
solitary merit; it made the editor acquainted at a distance with almost
every one in the country who could write or who could be the cause of
writing. Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever
people as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at
their treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type and
model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the American,
as he conceived, should have been and was not.

  Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered much
less to them than the extent of his friendship, for geologists were as
a class not much better off than himself, and friends were sorely few.
One of his friends from earliest childhood, and nearest neighbor in
Quincy, Frank Emmons, had become a geologist and joined the Fortieth
Parallel Survey under Government. At Washington in the winter of
1869-70, Emmons had invited Adams to go out with him on one of the
field-parties in summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he put it
at the service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not do
more. When the first year of professing and editing was at last over,
and his July North American appeared, he drew a long breath of relief,
and took the next train for the West. Of his year's work he was no
judge. He had become a small spring in a large mechanism, and his work
counted only in the sum; but he had been treated civilly by everybody,
and he felt at home even in Boston. Putting in his pocket the July
number of the North American, with a notice of the Fortieth Parallel
Survey by Professor J. D. Whitney, he started for the plains and the
Rocky Mountains.

  In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere
of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of an old
education, worth studying if one would; but it was not that which Adams
sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land of the future. The
Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the nearest station in case
of happening on hostile Indians, but otherwise the topographers and
geologists thought more about minerals than about Sioux. They held
under their hammers a thousand miles of mineral country with all its
riddles to solve, and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt
the future in their hands.

  Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge of
Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter nothing to the
story of education. They were all hardened mountaineers and surveyors
who took everything for granted, and spared each other the most
wearisome bore of English and Scotch life, the stories of the big game
they killed. A bear was an occasional amusement; a wapiti was a
constant necessity; but the only wild animal dangerous to man was a
rattlesnake or a skunk. One shot for amusement, but one had other
matters to talk about.

  Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he was in a
manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to wander off
alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain stream or
exploring a valley. One morning when the party was camped high above
Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he borrowed a rod, and rode
down over a rough trail into Estes Park, for some trout. The day was
fine, and hazy with the smoke of forest fires a thousand miles away;
the park stretched its English beauties off to the base of its
bordering mountains in natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream
was just fishy enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour after
hour the sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared
altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule, sunset
was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he could catch
his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot hole, he "allowed"
he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour he was out of the hills,
and under the stars of Estes Park, but he saw no prospect of supper or
of bed.

  Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its entrance,
and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he thought his mule
cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of mountain crest against the
stars fenced his range of error. The patient mule plodded on without
other road than the gentle slope of the ground, and some two hours must
have passed before a light showed in the distance. As the mule came up
to the cabin door, two or three men came out to see the stranger.

  One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never a
matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic horizons; they
were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they have nothing to do with
the accident of space. King had come up that day from Greeley in a
light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail hardly fit for a commissariat
mule, as Adams had reason to know since he went back in the buggy. In
the cabin, luxury provided a room and one bed for guests. They shared
the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.

  King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of
the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by
heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He
knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman,
which is saying much. Incidentally he knew more practical geology than
was good for him, and saw ahead at least one generation further than
the text-books. That he saw right was a different matter. Since the
beginning of time no man has lived who is known to have seen right; the
charm of King was that he saw what others did and a great deal more.
His wit and humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the
current of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in thought
or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him almost alone
among Americans. He had in him something of the Greek--a touch of
Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King only existed in the world.

  A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar.
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their
generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his
career. The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of
the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the
fogs of London, and both had the same problems to handle--the same
stock of implements--the same field to work in; above all, the same
obstacles to overcome.

As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality
that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry
on this ground. Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he
always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a witticism, unless by
accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel influenced him in a way far
more vital. The lines of their lives converged, but King had moulded
and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought
American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of
a piece, yet broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their
paths at last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's life,
past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or waves, with no
base at all. King's abnormal energy had already won him great success.
None of his contemporaries had done so much, single-handed, or were
likely to leave so deep a trail. He had managed to induce Congress to
adopt almost its first modern act of legislation. He had organized, as
a civil--not military--measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled
the Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper or
coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize he wanted
lay ready for him--scientific social, literary, political--and he knew
how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the
richest and most many-sided genius of his day.

  So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that
women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many
and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the
ideal American they all wanted to be. The women were jealous because,
at heart, King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more
robust.