 22 Chicago, 1893 Drifting in the dead water of the Fendici Echel, and during this last decade everyone talked and seemed to feel Fendici Echel, were not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into society, for years he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier if a man wants it than rest, profound as the grave. His friends sometimes took pity on him and came to share a meal or pass a night on their passage south or northwards, but existence was on the whole exceedingly solitary, or seemed so to him. Of the society favourites who made the life of every dinner-table and of the halls of Congress, Tom Reed, Burke Cochran, Edward Wolcott, he knew no one. Although Calvin Bryce was his neighbour for six years, entertaining lavishly as no one had ever entertained before in Washington, Adams never entered his house. W. C. Whitney rivaled Senator Bryson hospitality, and was besides an old acquaintance of the reforming era, but Adams saw him as little as he saw his chief, President Cleveland, or President Harrison, or Secretary Bayard, or Blaine, or Olney. One has no choice but to go everywhere or nowhere. No one may pick and choose between houses or accept hospitality without returning it. He loved solitude as little as others did, but he was unfit for social work and he sank under the surface. Luckily for such helpless animals as solitary men the world is not only good-natured, but even friendly and generous. It loves to pardon if pardon is not demanded as a right. Adams's social offences were many, and no one was more sensitive to it than himself, but a few houses always remained which he could enter without being asked, and quit without being noticed. One was John Hayes, another was Cabot Lodges. A third led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of educating him in knowledge of the very class of American politician who had done most to block his intended path in life. Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania had married in 1880 a young niece of Senator John Sherman of Ohio, thus making an alliance of dynastic importance in politics, and in society a reign of sixteen years during which Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Lodge led a career without precedent and without succession as the dispensers of sunshine over Washington. Both of them had been kind to Adams, and a dozen years of this intimacy had made him one of their habitual household as he was of Hayes. In a small society such ties between houses become political and social force. Without intention or consciousness they fix one's status in the world. Whatever one's preferences and politics might be, one's house was bound to the Republican interest when sandwiched between Senator Cameron, John Haye, and Cabot Lodge, with Theodore Roosevelt equally at home and them all, and Cecil Spring-Rice to unite them by impartial variety. The relation was daily, and the alliance undisturbed by power or patronage, since Mr. Harrison in those respects showed little more taste than Mr. Cleveland for the society and interests of this particular band of followers, whose relations with the White House were sometimes comic but never intimate. In February 1893 Senator Cameron took his family to South Carolina, where he had bought an old plantation at Coffin's Point on St. Helena Island, and Adams, as one of the family, was taken with the rest to open this new experience. From there he went on to Havana and came back to Coffin's Point to linger till near April. In May the Senator took his family to Chicago to see the exposition, and Adams went with them. Early in June all sailed for England together, and at last, in the middle of July, all found themselves in Switzerland at Prangans, Shamonee, and Zermatt. On July 22 they drove across the Furka Pass and went down by rail to Lucerne. Months of close contact teach character, if character has interest, and to Adams the Cameron type had keen interest, ever since it had shipwrecked his career in the person of President Grant. Perhaps it owed life to Scotch blood, perhaps to the blood of Adam and Eve, the primitive strain of man, perhaps only to the blood of the cottager working against the blood of the townsmen. But whatever it was, one liked it for its simplicity. The Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was not complex. It reasoned little and never talked. But in practical matters it was the steadiest of all American types, perhaps the most efficient, certainly the safest. Adams had printed as much as this in his books, but had never been able to find a type to describe the two great historical Pennsylvanians having been, as everyone had so often heard, Benjamin Franklin of Boston and Albert Gallatin of Geneva. Of Albert Gallatin indeed he had made of luminous study and an elaborate picture only to show that he was, if American at all, a New Yorker, with a Calvinistic strain, rather Connecticut than Pennsylvania. The true Pennsylvania was a narrower type, as narrow as the Kirk, as shy of other people's narrowness as a Yankee, as self-limited as a Puritan farmer. To him none but Pennsylvanians were white. Chinaman, Negro, Dago, Italian, Englishman, Yankee, all was one in the depths of Pennsylvanian consciousness. The mental machine could run only on what it took for American lines. This was familiar ever since one study of President Grant in 1869, but in 1893, as then, the type was admirably strong and useful if one wanted only to run on the same lines. Practically the Pennsylvanian forgot his prejudices when he allied his interests. He then became supple in action and large in motive whatever he thought of his colleagues. When he happened to be right, which was of course whenever one agreed with him, he was the strongest American in America. As an ally he was worth all the rest, because he understood his own class, who were always a majority, and knew how to deal with them as no New Englander could. If one wanted work done in Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a New Englander to do it. A Pennsylvanian not only could do it, but did it willingly, practically, and intelligently. Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron believed in an Adams, or an Adams and a Cameron, but they had curiously enough almost always worked together. The Camerons had what the Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their objects without much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue of the Pennsylvania machine had never been its scrupulous purity or sparkling professions. The machine worked by course means on course interests, but its practical success had been the most curious subject of study in American history. When one summed up the results of Pennsylvanian influence, one inclined to think that Pennsylvania set up the government in 1789, saved it in 1861, created the American system, developed its iron and coal power, and invented its great railways. Following up the same line in his studies of American character, Adams reached the result, to him altogether paradoxical, that Cameron's qualities and defects united in equal share to make in the most useful member of the Senate. In the interest of studying it last a perfect and favorable specimen of this American type, which had so persistently suppressed his own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron strongly influenced him, but he could not see a trace of any influence which he exercised on Cameron. Not an opinion or a view of his on any subject was ever reflected back on him from Cameron's mind, not even an expression or a fact. Yet the difference in age was trifling and an education slight. On the other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams and in nothing so much as on the great subject of discussion that year, the question of silver. Adams had taken no interest in the matter and knew nothing about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend, Dana Horton, but inevitably from the moment he was forced to choose sides he was sure to choose silver. Every political idea and personal prejudice he ever dallied with held him to the silver standard, and made a barrier between him and gold. He knew well enough all that was to be said for the gold standard as economy, but he had never in his life taken politics for a pursuit of economy. One might have a political or an economical policy, one could not have both at the same time. This was heresy in the English school, but it had always been law in the American. Equally he knew all that was to be said on the moral side of the question, and he admitted that his interests were, as Boston maintained, wholly on the side of gold. But had they been ten times as great as they were he could not have helped his bankers or croupiers to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure his winning the stakes. At least he was bound to profess disapproval, or thought he was. From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others. Masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals. Morality is a private and costly luxury. The morality of the silver or gold standards was to be decided by popular vote, and the popular vote would be decided by interests. But on which side lay the larger interest? To him the interest was political. He thought it probably his last chance of standing up for his eighteenth-century principles, strict construction, limited powers, George Washington, John Adams, and the rest. He had in a half-hearted way struggled all his life against State Street, banks, capitalism altogether, as he knew it in Old England or New England, and he was fated to make his last resistance behind the silver standard. For him the result was clear, and if he aired he aired in company with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little difference on the merits. Adams was sure to lean backwards, but the case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian, a practical politician whom all the reformers, including all the Adamses, had abused for a lifetime for subservience to muddied interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go with the banks and corporations which had made and sustained him. On the contrary, he stood out obstinately as the leading champion of silver in the East. The reformers, represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose personal interests slay with the gold standard, at once assumed that Senator Cameron had a personal interest in silver, and denounced his corruption as hotly as though he had been convicted of taking a bribe. More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams. His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver. The Evening Posts and Godkin's interests were with gold, and they frankly said so, yet they avowedly pursued their interests even into politics. Cameron's interests had always been with the corporations, yet he supported silver. Thus, morality required that Adams should be condemned for going against his interests, that Godkin was virtuous in following his interests, and that Cameron was a scoundrel whatever he did. Saying that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it? Adams, or Godkin, or Cameron? Until a council, or a pope, or a congress, or the newspapers, or a popular election had decided a question of doubtful morality, individuals are apt to err, especially when putting money into their own pockets. But in democracies the majority alone gives law. To anyone who knew the relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a popular vote between them seemed excessively humorous. Yet the popular vote did, in the end, decide against Cameron for Godkin. The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr. Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his interests or his antipathies. But the true American, slow to grasp new and complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover where his greater interests lay. As usual the banks taught him. In the course of fifty years the banks taught one many wise lessons, for which an insect had to be grateful whether it liked them or not. But of all the lessons Adams learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that of July 22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameron on the top of their travelling carriage crossing the FERCA Pass, they reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because the community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar. If he wanted education he knew no quicker mode of learning a lesson than that of being struck on the head by it. And yet he was himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had struck him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia his first thought was of beggary of nerves and he made ready to face a sleepless night. But although his mind tried to wrestle with the problem how any man could be ruined who had months before paid off every dollar of debt he knew himself to owe, he gave up that insoluble riddle in order to fall back on the larger principle that beggary could be no more for him than it was for others who were more valuable members of society. And with that he went to sleep like a good citizen. And the next day started for Quincy, where he arrived August 7. As a starting point for a new education at fifty-five years old the shock of finding oneself suspended for several months over the edge of bankruptcy without knowing how one got there or how to get away is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him, among others, some money, thousands or millions were, as bankruptcy the same for which he, among others, was responsible, and for which he knew no more than they. The humor of this situation seemed to him so much more pointed than the terror as to make him laugh at himself with the sincerity he had been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend he had nothing to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose their existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power he could afford to laugh, and the whole community was in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks were going to do about it. To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it the less he understood of it. He was quite sure that nobody understood it much better. Blindly, some very powerful energy was at work doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit, the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Each wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he could find no answer to the question which was responsible for getting the other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same interest and socially the same person. Evidently the force was one, its operation was mechanical, its effect must be proportional to its power, but no one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as an emotion, a panic that meant nothing. Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education, interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it was worth finishing, if only it amused, but he seemed for the first time since 1870 to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the forces at work. The machine ran far behind its duty, somewhere, somehow it was bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely over one's head it gave the better chance for study. For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old, a strong writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions ever to suit that atmosphere, but the two brothers could talk to each other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for the Atlantic. Everything American as well as most things European and Asiatic became unstable by this law, seeking new equilibrium and compel to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the advantages of ten-year study, had swept away much rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability was greater than he calculated. The speed of acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid down the paradox that in the social disequilibrium between capital and labor the logical outcome was not collectivism but anarchism, and Henry made note of it for study. By the time he got back to Washington on September 19th, the storm having partially blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the exposition again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos. Indeed it seemed to him as though this year education went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell into relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it. And when one sought rest at Chicago, educational games started like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight among thousands of its kind before one could mark its borrow. The exposition itself defied philosophy. One might find fault to the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed explanation. As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it. But the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all. More surprising as it was than anything else on the continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway system thrown in, since there were all natural products in their place. While since Noah's Ark no such babel of loose and ill-joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts, and experimental outcries as the exposition had ever ruffled the surface of the lakes. The first astonishment became greater every day. That the exposition should be a natural growth and product of the North West offered a step in evolution to startle Darwin. But that it should be anything else seemed an idea more startling still, and even granting it were not, admitting it to be a sort of industrial, speculative growth and product of the Beaux Arts artistically induced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Michigan, could it be made to seem at home there? Was the American made to seem at home in it? Honestly, he had the air of enjoying it as though it were all his own. He felt it was good. He was proud of it. For the most part he acted as though he had passed his life in the landscape gardening and architectural decoration. If he had not done it himself, he had known how to get it done to suit him, as he knew how to get his wives and daughters dressed at worths or packwins. Perhaps he could not do it again, the next time he would want to do it himself and would show his own faults. But for the moment he seemed to have leapt directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago. Critics had no trouble in criticizing the classicism, but all trading cities had always shown traders' taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All traders' taste smelt of bric-a-brac. Chicago tried at least to give her taste a look of unity. One sat down to ponder on the steps beneath Richard Hunt's dome, almost as deeply as on the steps of Araquelli, and much to the same purpose. Here was a breach of continuity, a rupture in historical sequence. Was it real or only apparent? One's personal universe hung on the answer, for if the rupture was real and the new American world could take this sharp and conscious twist toward ideals, one's personal friends would come in at last as winners in the great American chariot race for fame. If the people of the North West actually knew what was good when they saw it, would they someday talk about Hunt and Richardson, Lafarge and St. Gauden, Burnham and McKim, and Stanford White, when their politicians and millionaires were otherwise forgotten? The artists and architects who had done the work offered little encouragement to hope it. They talked freely enough but not in terms that one cared to quote, and to them the North West refused to look artistic. They talked as though they worked only for themselves, as though art to the Western people was a stage decoration, a diamond shirt stud, a paper collar. But possibly the architects of Paestum and Yejenti had talked in the same way, and the Greek had said the same thing of Semitic Carthage two thousand years ago. Jostled by these hopes and doubts, one turned to the exhibits for help and found it. The industrial schools tried to teach so much and so quickly that the instruction ran to waste. Some millions of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam engine or a dynamo was natural as the sun, and expected to understand one as little as the other. For the historian alone the exposition made a serious effort. Those exhibits were common, but they never went far enough. None were thoroughly worked out. One of the best was that of the Cunard steamers, but still a student hungry for results found himself obliged to waste a pencil and several sheets of paper trying to calculate exactly when, according to the given increase of power, tonnage, and speed, the growth of the ocean steamer would reach its limits. His figures brought him, he thought, to the year 1927. Another generation to spare before force, space, and time should meet. The ocean steamer ran the surest line of triangulation into the future, because it was the nearest of man's products to a unity. Railroads taught less, because they seemed already finished, except for mere increase in number. Explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians to explain. The dynamo taught least, because it had barely reached infancy, and if its progress was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would result in infinite, costless energy within a generation. One lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase. Men of science could never understand the ignorance and naiveté of the historian, who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was. Did it pull, or did it push? Was it a screw, or a thrust? Did it flow, or vibrate? Was it a wire, or a mathematical line? And a score of such questions, to which he expected answers, and was astonished to get none. Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever, who had never run a steam engine, the simplest of forces, who had never put their hands on a lever, had never touched an electric battery, never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt, or an ampere, or an ergue, or any other term of measurement introduced within a hundred years, had no choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of Harvard College, either as a student or professor, aghast at what they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them say and do it. The historical mind can think only in historical processes, and probably this was the first time since historians existed that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical sequence. Before a metaphysical or a theological or a political sequence most historians had felt helpless, but the single clue to which they had hitherto trusted was the unity of natural force. Did he himself quite know what he meant? Certainly not. If he had known enough to state his problem, his education would have been complete at once. Chicago asked, in 1893, for the first time the question whether the American people knew what they were driving. Adams answered, for one, that he did not know, but would try to find out. On reflecting sufficiently, deeply, under the shadow of Richard Hunt's architecture, he decided that the American people probably knew no more than he did, but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting toward some point in space, and that possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity. One must start there. Washington was the second. When he got back there he fell headlong into the extra session of Congress called to repeal the Silver Act. The silver minority made an obstinate attempt to prevent it, and most of the majority had little heart in the creation of a single gold standard. The banks alone, and the dealers in exchange, insisted upon it. The political parties divided according to capitalistic geographical lines. Senator Cameron offering almost the only exception. But they mixed with unusual good temper, and made liberal allowance for each other's actions and motives. The struggle was rather less irritable than such struggles generally were, and it ended like a comedy. On the evening of the final vote, Senator Cameron came back from the capital with Senator Bryce, Senator Jones, Senator Lodge, and Morton Fruin, all in the gayest of humours as though they were rid of a heavy responsibility. Adams too, in a bystander's spirit, felt light in mind. He had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as anybody would stand up with him. He had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogether alone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic society, until he had become little better than a crank. He had known for years that he must accept the regime, but he had known a great many other disagreeable certainties, like age, senility, and death, against which one made what little resistance one could. The matter was settled at last by the people. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people that hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralising, and mechanical. In 1893 the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favour of the capitalistic system, with all its necessary machinery. All one's friends, all one's best citizens were former's, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism, a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the one he liked least. But his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of state's rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods, for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by southern and western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day labourers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple conditions. There education in domestic politics stopped. The rest was question of gear, of running machinery, of economy, and involved no disputed principle. Once admitted that the machine must be efficient, society might dispute in what social interest it should be run, but in any case it must work concentration. Such great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and the silver friends slipped across this chasm, and alighted on the single gold standard and the capitalistic system with its methods, the protective tariff, the corporations and trusts, the trade unions and socialistic paternalism, which necessarily made their complement, the whole mechanical consolidation of force which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class into which Adams was born, but created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored. Society rested after sweeping into the ash-sheep these cinders of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse nothing remained for a historian but to ask, how long, and how far? End of CHAPTER XXII. The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead water and closed much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such as no one had thought within its powers, the individual crawled as best he could through the wreck, and found many values of life upset. But for connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to 1897, had no value in the drama of education, and might be left out. Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been the fortunes of Clarence King. The lesson taught whatever the bystander chose to read in it, but to Adams it seemed singularly full of moral if he could but understand it. In 1871 he had thought King's education ideal and his personal fitness unrivaled. No other young American approached him for the combination of chances, physical energy, social standing, mental scope and training, wit, geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively American and irresistibly strong. His nearest rival was Alexander Agassiz, and as far as their friends knew no one else could be classed with them in the running. The result of twenty years' effort proved that the theory of scientific education failed where most theory fails, for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself as he thought quite outside of every possible financial risk, had been caught in the hogs and held for months over the gulf of bankruptcy, saved only by the chance that the whole class of millionaires were more or less bankrupt too, and the banks were forced to let the mice escape with the rats. But in some education without capital could always be taken by the throat and forced to discourage its gains, nor was it helped by the knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered. Whether voluntary or mechanical, the result for education was the same. The failure of the scientific scheme without money to back it was flagrant. The scientific scheme in theory was a lone sound, for science should be equivalent to money. In practice science was helpless without money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to be frozen out. Education must fit the complex conditions for a new society, always accelerating its movement, and its fitness could only be known from success. One looked about for examples of success among the educated of one's time, the men born in the thirties and trained to professions. Within one's immediate acquaintance three were typical, John Hay, White Law Reed, and William C. Whitney, all of whom owed their free hand to marriage, education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in 1893, William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type. Newspapers might pray about wealth till commonplace print was exhausted, but as matter of habit few Americans envied the very rich for anything the most of them got out of their money. New York might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them and never showed them respect. Scarcely one of the very rich men held any position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been elected to an office or even into a good club. Setting aside the few, like Peer Point Morgan, whose social position had little to do with greater or less wealth, riches were in New York no object of envy on account of the joys they brought in their train, and Whitney was not even one of the very rich, yet in his case the envy was palpable. There was reason for it. Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having gratified every ambition and swung the country almost at his will. He had thrown away the usual objects for political ambition, like the ashes of smoked cigarettes. Had turned to other amusements, satiated every taste, gorged every appetite, won every object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had carried his field of activity abroad until New York no longer knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed. Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal, but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an American education ought to be in order to count a success. Even granting that it counted his money its value could not be called general. America contained scores of men worth five millions or upwards whose lives were no more worth living than those of their cooks, and to whom the task of making money equivalent to education offered more difficulties than to addons the task of making education equivalent to money. Social position seemed to have value still while education counted for nothing. A mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician engineer, if fortunate, might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open market. An administrator, organizer, manager, with medieval qualities of energy and will, but no education beyond his special branch, would probably be worth at least ten times as much. Why did he fail to discover what sort of education suited it best? Wealth valued social position and classical education as highly as either of these valued wealth, and the women still tended to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could see he was himself as contented as though he had been educated, while Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory, had failed, and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams, had achieved phenomenal success. But Adams, in 1894, had been starting in life as he did in 1854, he must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile use of the four old tools, mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With these he could still make his way to any object within his vision, and would have a decisive advantage over nine rivals in ten. Statesmen or lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest or professor, native or foreign, he would fear none. This breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the indirect gain to Adams that on recovering strength King induced him to go to Cuba, where in January 1894 they drifted into the little town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society which King knew well, was more amusing than any other that one had yet discovered in the whole broad world, but made no profession of teaching anything unless it were Cuban Spanish or the Danza, and neither on his own nor on King's account did the visitor ask any loftier study than that of the buzzards floating on the trade wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or the colours of sea and shore at sunrise from the height of the Grand Pietra. But as though they were still twenty years old and revolution were as young as they, the decaying fabric which had never been solid fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief. In the half-century between 1850 and 1900 the empires were always falling on one's head, and of all lessons these constant political convulsions taught least. Since the time of Ramses revolutions have raised more doubts than they solved, but they have sometimes the merit of changing one's point of view, and the Cuban rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams to a democratic administration. He thought that President Cleveland should have settled the Cuban question without war had he chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the Democratic Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and the gold standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave no choice between parties. The new American, whether consciously or not, had turned his back on the nineteenth century before he was done with it. The gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass could have no other outcome, and as so often before the movement, once accelerated by attempting to impede it, had the additional brutal consequence of crushing equally the good and the bad that stood in its way. The lesson was old, so old that it became tedious. One had studied nothing else since childhood and worried of it. For yet another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex among the picturesque primitive types of a world which had never been fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more amusing for their torpor. After passing the winter with King in the West Indies, he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and found their little study. The geysers were an old story. The Snake River posed no vital statistics except in its fordings. Even the Tetons were as calm as they were lovely. While the Wapiti and Bear, innocent of strikes and corners, laid no traps. In return the party treated them with affection. Never did a band less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the roof of the continent. Hay loved as little as Adams did, the labour of skinning and butchering big game. He had even outgrown the sedate middle-aged meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found the trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself, who managed the party, loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so much as a field-mouse. Ittings, the geologist, was reduced to shooting only for the table, and the guileous prattle of Billy Hoffer alone taught the simple life. But with the Rockies of 1871 the sense of wildness had vanished. One saw no possible adventures except to break one's neck as in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent ponies sent it an occasional friendly and sociable bear. When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway systems yet untried. They too offered little new learning, and no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography than with desperate thirst for exhausting the American field he set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean, and cleaning up in these six or eight months at least twenty thousand miles of American land and water. He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in April 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life, tropical islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types. Only more amusing and incomparably more picturesque than civilization, they educated only artists, and as once sixtieth year approached, the artist began to die. Only a certain intense cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensual stimulants. One was driven from beauty to beauty as though art were a trotting match. For this one was in some degrees prepared, for the old man had been a stage type since drama began, but one felt some perplexity to account for failure on the opposite or mechanical side where nothing but cerebral action was needed. Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic he plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find the surest bottom there, and the study proved the easiest he had ever approached. Even the government volunteered unlimited statistics, endless columns of figures, bottomless averages merely for the asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Ford supplied any material that curiosity could imagine fulfilling the vast gaps of ignorance and methods for applying the plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be winning ground, and one's averages projected themselves as laws into the future. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the study lay in the attitude of the statisticians who showed no enthusiastic confidence in their own figures. They should have reached certainty, but they talked like other men who knew less. The method did not result in faith. Indeed every increase of mass, of volume and velocity, seemed to bring in new elements, and at last a scholar, fresh and arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came out as it should. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx, or to the anarchistic implications of Elie Serre Clue. One reveled at will in the ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the future. But meanwhile these societies which violated every law, moral, arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated each other, but produced also fresh complexities with every propagation, and developed mass with every complexity. The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying discovery of Teraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as the conduct of mankind in the Fin de Siackel. No one seemed very much concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind march on like a train of packhorses on the Snake River, tumbling from one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason but temper, falling to butchery like cane. Since 1850 massacres had become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed up hundreds of thousands as in Armenia, wars had been almost continuous and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South Africa, and possible in Manchuria. Yet impartial judges thought them all not merely unnecessary but foolish, induced by greed of the coarsest class, as though the pharaohs or the Romans were still robbing their neighbours. The robbery might be natural and inevitable, but the murder seemed altogether archaic. At one moment of perplexity to account for the trait of teraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press. Possibly growth in human nature might show itself there. He found no need to speak unkindly of it, but as an agent of motion he preferred on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of betterment, and he very gravely doubted from his aching consciousness of religious void whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not an act, or an expression, or an image, showed depths of faith or hope. The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care for. If it were to begin again it must try to find out what the mass of mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics, travel had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair had only confused the roads. Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of chance images stored away without order in the memory. One might as well try to educate a gravel pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student less than the discovery that in pursuing it he was becoming himself ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue. For the moment he was rescued as often before by a woman. Toward Midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to Europe with the senator and her two sons. The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women, and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The woman who was known only through a man is known wrong, but accepting one or two, like Madame Le Sevignier, no woman has pictured herself. The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the men saw her. Probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth. None of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can be ever nearly so familiar as her letters have made her. And all this is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much better company than the American man. She was probably much better company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge and her husband, senator since 1893, Adams's relations had been those of elder brother or uncle since 1871, when Cabot Lodge had left his examination papers on assistant professor Adams's desk, and crossed the street to Christchurch in Cambridge to get married. With Lodge himself as scholar, fellow instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately. But with him afterwards as politician he had not much relation. And since Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not only a senator, but a senator from Massachusetts, a singular social relation which Adams had known only as fatal to friends. A superstitious student, intimate with the laws of historical fatality, would rather have recognized him only as an enemy. But apart from this accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the waste places of average humanity had been greatly dependent on his house. Senators can never be approached with safety, but a senator who has a very superior wife and several superior children, who feel no deference for senators as such, may be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep him under restraint. Where Mrs. Lodge summoned one followed with gratitude, and so it chanced that in August one found oneself for the first time at Cannes, Coutin's, and Montse-Michel in Normandy. If history had a chapter with which he thought himself familiar it was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet so little has labored to do with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture system turned into green and verduous virgin forests merely through the medium of younger eyes and fresher minds. His German bias must have given his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessential because un-German. They breathed native air in the Normandy of twelve hundred, a compliment which would have seemed to the senator lacking in taste or even in sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life in trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed nothing less American than a blizzard. But this atmosphere, in the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century, by an unusual chance, even a senator became natural, simple, interested, cultivated, artistic, liberal, genial. Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal. It threw off all association with the German lecture room. One could not at first see what this novelty meant. It had the air of mere antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Teraspis. But it expelled archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, seeming conscious of it, and Adams drifted back to Washington with a new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and in April returned to Mexico with the Camerons to study the charms of Polke and Chirigarresque architecture. In May he ran through Europe again with hay as far south as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage. After thus covering once more in eighteen ninety-six many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home in October with everybody else to elect McKinley President and to start the world anew. For the old world of public men and measures since eighteen seventy Adams wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or historian, he never saw anything to admire in it or anything he wanted to save, and in this respect he reflected only the public mind which balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both parties as to express no sympathy with either. Even among the most powerful men of that generation he knew none who had a good word to say for it. No period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in American politics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society. But the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a small society like that of Washington, led an idle bystander to depend abjectly on intimacy of private relation. One dragged oneself down the long vista of Pennsylvania Avenue by leaning heavily on one's friends and avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown narrow with years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses round Lafayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in power except in the case of Mr. Blaine, whose tumultuous struggle for existence held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House and laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole nest, so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the world. Because he found himself alone, John Hay took his orders for London, Rock Hill departed to Athens, Cecil's spring rice had been buried in Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life either at home or abroad and broke up his house on the Square. Only the Lodgers and Roosevelt's remained, but even they were at once absorbed into the interests of power. Since 1861 no such social convulsion had occurred. Even this was not quite the worst, to one whose interests lay chiefly in foreign affairs and who at this moment felt most strongly the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian and Nicaraguan chaos. The man in the State Department seemed more important than the man in the White House. Adams knew no one in the United States fit to manage these matters in the face of a hostile Europe, and had no candidate to propose. But he was shocked beyond all restraints of expression to learn that the President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the State Department in order to make a place for Mr. Hannah in the Senate. And himself had done nothing that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long enough to distinguish between the ways of presidential jobbery if not between the jobs. John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for the place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was notoriously feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Department. One might have shrugged one's shoulders had the President named Mr. Hannah his Secretary of State, but Mr. Hannah was a man of force if not of experience, and selections much worse than this had often turned out well enough. But John Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down. The prospect for once was not less vile than the man. One can bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor was the matter improved by hints that the President might call John Hay to the Department whenever John Sherman should retire. Indeed had Hay been ever unconsciously party to such an intrigue he would have put an end, once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his friend's part. But even without this last disaster one felt that Washington had become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary contemplation of Mr. McKinley's ways, which were not likely to be more amusing than the ways of his predecessors, or of senatorial ways which offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls embêtement, or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which would surely cause anguish to his friends. Once more one must go. Nothing was easier. On and off one had done the same thing since the year 1858 at frequent intervals, and had now reached the month of March 1897. Yet as the whole result of six years' dogged effort to begin a new education one could not recommend it to the young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had become more and more dim ever since the gibbering ghost of the civil law had been locked in its dark closet as far back as 1860. Noah's dove had not searched the earth for resting places so carefully or with so little success. Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove who wants and finds rest, but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone and uneducated, who was lost as taste even for olives. To this also the young may be driven as education, and the lesson fails in humor. But it may be worth knowing, to some of them, that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year. Irritated by such complaints the world naturally answers that no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a right to require amusement, or at least education, since this costs nothing to any one, and that a world which cannot educate will not amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right to exist than he. Both views seem sound, but the world wearily objects to be called by epithets, what society always admits in practice. For none likes to be told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly, and have nothing to say in its defence. It rejoins that whatever license is pardonable in youth, the man of sixty, who wishes consideration, had better hold his tongue. This truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds equally for men of half that age. Only the very young have the right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to betray themselves. Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its acute suffering, but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one point with singular unanimity. Such praised silence in the others. Of all characteristics in human nature this has been one of the most abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long history of human expression, has been said by the fool, or unsaid by the wise, shows that for once no difference of opinion has ever existed on this. Even a fool, says the wisest of men, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise. And still more often the wisest of men, when he spoke the highest wisdom, has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the merits of silence in others. Sophocles made remarks in its favour, which should have struck the Athenians as new to them. But of late the repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlisle vociferated his admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best form of expression, and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most noble to the end. But Divini's dying wolf remarked, when one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, only silence is strong. All the rest is but lies. Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have decided to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm that the Alps Snow Summit nearer heaven is seen than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest. With other verses to the effect that words are but a temporary torturing flame of which no one knew more than himself. The evidence of the poets could not be more emphatic. Silent while years engrave the brow, silent the best years are now. Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them, and all philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at sixty, has ever been known to attain knowledge, but that a very few were believed to have attained ignorance, which was, in result, the same. More than this, in every society worth the name, the man of sixty has been encouraged to ride this hobby, the pursuit of ignorance in silence, as though it were the easiest way to get rid of him. In America the silence was more oppressive than the ignorance, but perhaps elsewhere the world might still hide some haunt of futilitarian silence where content reigned, although long search had not revealed it. And so the pilgrimage began anew. The first step led to London where John Hay was to be established. One had seen so many American ministers received in London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about it. Education could not be expected there. But Adams arrived, April 21st, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many days, for Queen Victoria still reigned, and one saw little change in St. James's Street. True, Carleton House terrorists, like the Streets of Rome, actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a bloodless fear. But in spring London is pleasant, and it was more cheery than ever in May, 1897, when everyone was welcoming the return of life after the long winter since 1893. One's fortunes, or one's friend's fortunes, were again in flood. This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found oneself the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled tan-houser returning to the Vortburg needed a wrinkled Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a sort of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris and set up a household at Saint-Germain, where he taught and learned French history for nieces who swarmed under the venerable cedars of the pivillons d'Anjoulem, and rode among the green forest alleys of Saint-Germain and Marley. From time to time Haye wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the summer peace of the stranded tan-houser, who slowly began to feel at home in France, as in other countries he had thought more home-like. At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris because he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the Hayes came by in January 1898, and Mrs. Haye, who had been a staunch and strong ally for twenty years, bade him to go with them to Egypt. Holmes cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see Haye, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw, and what they said, had as little to do with education as possible until one evening, as they were looking at the sunset across the Nile from Aswan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbour. This was the greatest stride in education since 1865, but what did it teach? One lent on a fragment of column in the great hall at Carnac, and watched a jackal creep down the debris of ruin. The jackals' ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between civilizations was that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He tried to trace out the ancient harbour of Ephesus. He went over to Athens, picked up Rock Hill, and searched for the harbour of Tyrants. Together they went on to Constantinople, and studied the great walls of Constantine, and the greater domes of Justinian. His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of thought along the great highways of exchange. CHAPTER XXIV The summer of the Spanish War began the Indian summer of life, to one who had reached sixty years of age, and cared only to reap in peace such harvest as these sixty years had yielded. He had reason to be more than content with it. Since 1864 he had felt no such sense of power and momentum, and had seen no such number of personal friends wielding it. The sense of solidarity counts for much in one's contentment, but the sense of winning one's game counts for more. And in London, in 1898, the scene was singularly interesting to the last survivor of the legation of 1861. He thought himself perhaps the only person living who could get full enjoyment of the drama. He carried every scene of it, in a century and a half since the Stamp Act, quite alive in his mind, all the interminable disputes of his disputatious ancestors as far back as the year 1750, as well as his own insignificance in the Civil War, every step in which had the object of bringing England into an American system. For this they had written libraries of argument and remonstrance, and had piled war on war, losing their tempers for life, and souring the gentle, patient, puritan nature of their descendants, and to leave in their private secretaries at times used language almost intemperate. And suddenly, by pure chance, the blessing fell on hay. After two hundred years of stupid and greedy blundering, which no argument and no violence affected, the people of England learned their lesson, just at the moment when hay would otherwise have faced a flood of the old anxieties. Hay himself scarcely knew how grateful he should be, for to him the change came almost, of course. He saw only the necessary stages that had led to it, and to him they seemed natural. But to Adams, still living in the atmosphere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sudden appearance of Germany as the grusely terror which in twenty years affected what Adams's had tried for two hundred in vain, frightened England into America's arms, seemed as melodramatic as any plot of Napoleon the Great. He could feel only the sense of satisfaction at seeing the diplomatic triumph of all his family, since the breed existed, at last realized under his own eyes for the advantage of his oldest and closest ally. This was history, not education, yet it taught something exceedingly serious, if not ultimate, could one trust the lesson. For the first time in his life he felt a sense of possible purpose working itself out in history. Probably no one else on this earthly planet, not even hay, could have come out on precisely such extreme personal satisfaction. But as he sat at Hay's table, listening to any member of the British cabinet, for all we're alike now, discussed the Philippines as a question of balance of power in the east. He could see that the family work of a hundred and fifty years fell at once into the grand perspective of true empire building, which Hay's work set off with artistic skill. The roughness of the archaic foundations looked stronger and larger in scale for the refinement and certainty of the arcade. In the long list of famous American ministers in London, none could have given the work quite the completeness, the harmony, the perfect ease of Hay. Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it, for chaos cannot be taught. But he thought he had a personal property by inheritance in this proof of sequence and intelligence in the affairs of man, a property which no one else had right to dispute. And this personal triumph left him a little cold toward the other diplomatic results of the war. He knew that Puerto Rico must be taken, but he would have been glad to escape the Philippines. Apart from too intimate an acquaintance with the value of islands and the South Seas, he knew the West Indies well enough to be assured that whatever the American people might think or say about it, they would sooner or later have to police those islands, not against Europe but for Europe and America too. Education on the outskirts of civilized life teaches not very much, but it taught this, and one felt no call to shoulder the load of archipelagos in the antipodes when one was trying painfully to pluck up courage to face the labor of shouldering archipelagos at home. The country decided otherwise, and one acquiesced readily enough since the matter concerned only the public willingness to carry loads. In London the balance of power in the East came alone into discussion, and in every point of view one had as much reason to be gratified with the result as though one had shared in the danger, instead of being vigorously employed and looking on from a great distance. After all, friends had done the work, if not oneself, and he too serves a certain purpose who only stands in cheers. In June at the crisis of interest the Camerons came over and took the fine old house of Surrandon Derring in Kent, which they made a sort of country house to the Embassy. Kent has charms rivaling those of Shropshire, and even compared with the many beautiful places scattered along the Welsh border few are nobler or more genial than Surrandon, with its unbroken descent from the Saxons, its avenues, its terraces, its deer park, its large repose on the Kentish hillside, and its broad outlook over what was once the forest of Enderida. Filled with a constant stream of guests the house seemed to wake for the chance to show its charms to the American, with whose activity the whole world was resounding, and never since the Battle of Hastings could the little telegraph office of the Kentish village have done such work. There on a hot July 4th, 1898, to an expectant group under the shady trees, came the telegram announcing the destruction of the Spanish Armada, as it might have come to Queen Elizabeth in 1588, and there later in the season came the order summoning Hay to the State Department. Hay had no wish to be Secretary of State. He much preferred to remain Ambassador, and his friends were quite as cold about it as he. No one knew so well what sort of strain falls on Secretaries of State, or how little strength he had in reserve against it. Even at Surrandon he showed none too much endurance, and he would gladly have found a valid excuse for refusing. The discussion on both sides was earnest, but the decided voice of the conclave was that, though if he were a mere office-seeker he might certainly decline promotion. If he were a member of the government he could not. No serious statesmen could accept a favour and refuse a service. Doubtless he might refuse, but in that case he must resign. The amusement of making Presidents has keen fascination for idle American hands, but these black arts have the old drawback of all deviltry. One must serve the spirit one evokes, even though the service were perdition to body and soul. For him, no doubt, the service, though hard, might bring some share of profit, but for the friends who gave this unselfish decision all would prove loss. For one, Adams on that subject had become a little daft. No one in his experience had ever passed unscathed through that malaria's marsh. In his fancy office was poison. What killed body and soul, physically and socially? Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy, in proportion as it held more power. But the poison he complained of was not ambition. He shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for the healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits. His poison was that of the will, the distortion of sight, the warping of mind, the degradation of tissue, the coarsening of taste, the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat. Hay needed no office in order to wield influence. For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting for him to stoop to it. He enjoyed more than enough power without office. No one of his position, wealth, and political experience, living at the center of politics, in contact with the active party managers, could escape influence. His only ambition was to escape annoyance. But no one knew better than he that at sixty years of age, sensitive to physical strain, still more sensitive to brutality, vindictiveness, or betrayal, he took office at cost of life. Neither he nor any of the Surrand and Circle made pretence of gladness at the new dignity, for with all his gaiety of manner and lightness of wit he took dark views of himself, none the lighter for their humour. And his obedience to the President's order was the gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark views, too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for while Hay had at least the honours of office, his friends would share only the ennuis of it. But as usual with Hay nothing was gained by taking such matter solemnly, and old habits of the Civil War left their mark of military drill on everyone who lived through it. He shouldered his pack and started for home. Adams had no mind to lose his friend without a struggle, though he had never known such sort of struggle to avail. The chance was desperate, but he could not afford to throw it away. So as soon as the Surrand and Establishment broke up, on October 17th he prepared for return home, and on November 13th, none too gladly, found himself again gazing into Lafayette Square. He had made another false start and lost two years of more education. Nor had he excuse, for this time neither politics nor society drew him away from his trail. He had nothing to do with Hay's politics at home or abroad, and never affected agreement with his views or his methods, nor did Hay care whether his friends agreed or disagreed. They all united in trying to help each other to get along the best way they could, and all they tried to save was the personal relation. Even there, Adams would have been beaten had he not been helped by Mrs. Hay, who saw the necessity of distraction and led her husband into the habit of stopping every afternoon to take his friend off for an hour's walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards, and a chat with any one who called. For the moment, therefore, the situation was saved at least an outward appearance, and Adams could go back to his own pursuits, which was slowly taking a direction. Perhaps they had no right to be called pursuits, for in truth one consciously pursued nothing but drifted as attraction offered itself. The short session broke up the Washington Circle so that on March 22nd Adams was able to sail with the lodges for Europe and to pass April in Sicily and Rome. With the lodges education always began afresh. Forty years had left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860, but Sicily in all ages seemed to have taught only catastrophe and violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its study on the Eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy without a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse teaches more than Rome, yet even Rome was not mute, and the Church of Aracoeli seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought to a center, for every new journey fed back to its steps. Karnak, Ephesus, Delphi, Mycenae, Constantinople, Syracuse, all lying on the road to the capital. What they had to bring by way of intellectual riches could not yet be discerned, but they carried camel-loads of moral, and New York sent most of all. For in forty years America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant horizon, somewhere on the same plain with the Republic of Brutus and Cato, while schoolboys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar. Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with political assassination as though they had lived under Nero. The climax of empire could be seen approaching year after year as though Sulla were a president or McKinley a consul. Nothing annoyed Americans more than to be told this simple and obvious in no way unpleasant truth. Therefore one sat silent as ever on the capital. But by way of completing the lesson the lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St. Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory or sufficient ever offered, worth fully forty years more study and better worth it than Gibbon himself or even St. Augustine, St. Ambrose or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh crosslights on the old assistant professor of 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he had taught then and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn five and twenty years afterwards, between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his lifeblood for the sublime truths of sack and sock. Hic Jacket, Hamonculus Scriptor, Doctor Barbaricus, Enricus Adams, Adai Filius et Evai, Primo Explicuit, Sochnam. The Latin was as twelfth century as the law, and he meant as satire the claim, that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of sack and sock, although any German professor would have scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality. But the whole point of view had vanished in nineteen hundred. Not he, but Sir Henry Main and Rudolph Solm were the parents or creators of sack and sock. Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing and that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law as one's scholars turned to the law school, because one could see no other path to a profession. The law had proved as futile as politics or religion or any other single thread spun by the human spider. It offered no more continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no meaning and unconscious, that in any case it no longer mattered. He passed a summer of solitude contrasting sadly with the last at Surrendon. But the solitude did what the society did not. It forced and drove him into the study of his ignorance and silence. Here at last he encountered the practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could no longer escape, and by way of a summer school he began a methodical survey, a triangulation of the 12th century. The pursuit had a singular French charm which France had long lost, a calmness, lucidity, simplicity of expression, vigor of action, complexity of local color that made Paris flat. In the long summer days one found a sort of saturated green pleasure in the forests and gray infinity of rest in the little 12th century churches that lined them, as unassuming as their own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches. But churches were many, and summer was short, so that he was at last driven back to the keys and photographs. For weeks he lived in silence. His solitude was broken in November by the chance arrival of John Lafarge. At that moment contact with Lafarge had a new value. Of all the men who had deeply affected their friends since 1850, John Lafarge was certainly the foremost, and for Henry Adams, who had sat at his feet since 1872, the question how much he owed to Lafarge could be answered only by admitting that he had no standard to measure it by. Of all his friends, Lafarge alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the common places of American uniformity, and in the process had vastly perplexed most Americans who came in contact with it. The American mind, the Bostonian as well as the southern or western, likes to walk straight up to its object and assert or deny something that it takes for a fact. It has a conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality. The most disconcerting trait of John Lafarge was his reversal of the process. His approach was quiet and indirect. He moved round an object and never separated it from its surroundings. He prided himself on faithfulness to tradition and convention. He was never abrupt and abhorred dispute. His manners and attitude toward the universe were the same, where the tossing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sketching the trade wind from a whale-boat in the blast of sea sickness, or drinking the chano-yu and the formal rites of Japan, or sipping his coconut cup of cava in the ceremonial of Samoan chiefs, or reflecting under the sacred bow-tree at Anarajpura. One was never quite sure of his whole meaning until too late to respond, for he had no difficulty in carrying different shades of contradiction in his mind. As he said of his friend Okokura, his thought ran as a stream runs through the grass, hidden perhaps but always there, and one felt often uncertain in what direction it flowed, for even a contradiction was to him only a shade of difference, a complementary color, about which no intelligent artist would dispute. Constantly he repulsed argument. Adams, you reason too much, was one of his standing reproaches, even in the mild discussion of rice and mangoes in the warm night of Tahiti dinners. He should have blamed Adams for being born in Boston. The mind resorts to reason for want of training, and Adams had never met a perfectly trained mind. To Lafarge eccentricity meant convention. A mind really eccentric never betrayed it. True eccentricity was a tone, a shade, a nuance, and the finer the tone, the truer the eccentricity. Of course all artists hold more or less the same point of view in their art, but few carry it into daily life, and often the contrast is excessive between the art and their talk. One evening Humphries Johnston, who was devoted to Lafarge, asked him to meet Whistler at dinner. Lafarge was ill, more ill than usual even for him, but he admired and liked Whistler, and insisted on going. By chance Adams was so placed as to overhear the conversation of both, and had no choice but to hear that of Whistler which engrossed the table. At that moment the Boer War was raging, and as everyone knows on that subject Whistler raged worse than the Boers. For two hours he declaimed against England, witty, boring, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and noisy. But in substance what he said was not merely commonplace, it was true. That is to say, his hearers, including Adams, and as far as he knew, Lafarge, agreed with it all, and mostly as a matter of course. Yet Lafarge was silent, and this difference of expression was a difference of art. Whistler in his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point reached by Lafarge, or even attempted. But in talk he showed, above or below his color instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed. This vehemence which Whistler never betrayed in his painting, Lafarge seemed to lavish on his glass. With the relative value of Lafarge's glass and the history of glass decoration, Adams was too ignorant to metal, and as a rule artists were, if possible, more ignorant than he. For whatever it was, it led him back to the twelfth century, and to Chatra, where Lafarge not only felt at home, but felt a sort of ownership. No other American had a right there, unless he too were a member of the Church, and worked in glass. Adams himself was an interloper, but long habit led Lafarge to resign himself to Adams, as one who meant well, though deplorably Bostonian. While Adams, though nearly sixty years old before he knew anything either of glass or of Chatra, asked no better than to learn, and only Lafarge could help him, for he knew enough at least to see that Lafarge alone could use glass like a thirteenth century artist. In Europe the art had been dead for centuries, and modern glass was pitiable. Even Lafarge felt the early glass rather as a document than as a historical emotion, and in hundreds of windows at Chalke, and Bourge, and Paris, Adams knew barely one or two that were meant to hold their own against a colour scheme so strong as his. In conversation Lafarge's mind was opaline, with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with colour toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate, it was renaissance, it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry. Even the gloom of a Paris December at the Elysee Palace Hotel was somewhat relieved by this companionship, and education made a step backward toward Chateau. But Lafarge's health became more and more alarming, and Adams was glad to get him safely back to New York, January 15, 1900, while he himself went at once to Washington to find out what had become of Hay. Nothing good could be hoped, for Hay's troubles had begun and were quite as great as he had foreseen. Adams saw as little encouragement as Hay himself did, though he dared not say so. He doubted Hay's endurance, the President's firmness in supporting him, and the loyalty of his party friends. But all this worry on Hay's account fretted him not nearly so much as the Boer War did on his own. Here was a problem in his political education that passed all experience since the trees in winter of 1860 to 61. Much to his astonishment very few Americans seemed to share his point of view. Their hostility to England seemed mere temper, but to Adams the war became almost a personal outrage. He had been taught from childhood, even in England, that his forebears and their associates in 1776 had settled once and for all the liberties of the British free colonies. And he very strongly objected to being thrown on the defensive again, and forced to sit down a hundred and fifty years after John Adams had begun the task to prove by appeal to law and fact that George Washington was not a felon, whatever might be the case with George III. For reasons still more personal, he declined peremptorily to entertain question of the felony of John Adams. He felt obliged to go even further and avow the opinion that if at any time England should take toward Canada the position she took toward her Boer colonies, the United States would be bound by their record to interpose and to insist on the application of the principles of 1776. To him the attitude of Mr. Chamberlain and his colleagues seemed exceedingly un-American and terribly embarrassing to Hay. And early in the stress of civil war to hold his tongue and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms. Hay's chance lay in patience and good temper till the luck should return, and to him the only object was time. But as political education the point seemed vital to Adams who never liked shutting his eyes or denying an evident fact. Political politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things. In this case the contradiction seemed crude. With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York School, like Abram Hewitt, Everett's, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden, men who played the game for ambition or amusement and played it as a rule much better than the professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of the usual player and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work. In return the professionals felt no great love for them and set them aside when they could. Only their control of money made them inevitable, and even this did not always carry their points. The story of Abram Hewitt would offer one type of this statesman series and that of Hay another. President Cleveland set aside the one, President Harrison set aside the other. There is no politics in it was his comment on Hay's appointment to office. Hay held a different opinion and turned to McKinley, whose judgment of men was finer than common in Presidents. Mr. McKinley brought to the problem of American government a solution which lay very far outside of Henry Adams' education, but which seemed to be at least practical and American. He undertook to pool interests in a general trust into which every interest should be taken more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should, under his management, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results. How much they cost was another matter. If the public is ever driven to its last resources and the usual remedies of chaos, the result will probably cost more. Himself a marvellous manager of men, McKinley found several manipulators to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of whom was Hay. But unfortunately Hay's strength was weakest, and his task hardest. At home, interests could be easily combined by simply paying their price, but abroad whatever helped on one side hurt him on another. Hay thought England must be brought first into the combine, but at that time Germany, Russia, and France were combining against England, and the Boer War helped them. For the moment Hay had no ally, abroad or at home, except Ponsfurt, and Adams always maintained that Ponsfurt alone pulled him through. Yet the difficulty abroad was far less troublesome than the obstacles at home. The Senate had grown more and more unmanageable, even since the time of Andrew Johnson, and this was less the fault of the Senate than of the system. A treaty of peace in any normal state of things, said Hay, ought to be ratified with unanimity in 24 hours. They wasted six weeks in wrangling over this one and ratified it with one vote to spare. We have five or six matters now demanding settlement. I can settle them all, honorably and advantageously, to our own side, and I am assured by leading men in the Senate that not one of these treaties, if negotiated, will pass the Senate. I should have a majority in every case, but a malcontent third would certainly dish every one of them. To such monstrous shape has the original mistake of the Constitution grown in the evolution of our politics. You must understand it is not merely my solution the Senate will reject. They will reject, for instance, any treaty, whatever, on any subject, with England. I doubt if they would accept any treaty of consequence with Russia or Germany. The recalcitrant third would be differently composed, but it would be on hand. So the real duties of a Secretary of State seem to be three, to fight claims upon us by other states, to press more or less fraudulent claims of our own citizens upon other countries, to find offices for the friends of Senators when there are none. Is it worthwhile for me to keep up this useless labor? To Adams, who, like Hay, had seen a dozen acquaintances struggling with the same enemies, the question had scarcely the interest of a new study. He had said all he had to say about it in a dozen or more volumes relating to the politics of 100 years before. To him the spectacle was so familiar as to be humorous. The intrigue was too open to be interesting. The inference of the German and Russian legations and of Klanagel, with the press and the Senate, was innocently undisguised. The charming Russian minister, Count Cassini, the ideal of diplomatic manners and training, let few days pass without appealing through the press to the public against the government. The German minister, von Hollenbein, more cautiously did the same thing, and of course every whisper of theirs was brought instantly to the Department. These three forces, acting with the regular opposition and the natural obstructionists, could always stop action in the Senate. The Fathers had intended to neutralise the energy of government and had succeeded, but their machine was never meant to do the work of a twenty million horsepower society in the twentieth century, where much work needed to be quickly and efficiently done. The only defence of the system was that, as government did nothing well, it had best do nothing. But the government in truth did perfectly well all it was given to do, and even if the charge were true it applied equally to human society altogether if one chose to treat mankind from that point of view. As a matter of mechanics, so much work must be done. Bad machinery merely added to friction. Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient, and loyal, Hay had treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling it to pieces to get rid of its defects. He liked it all. He laughed and accepted. He had never known unhappiness and would have gladly lived his entire life over again exactly as it happened. In the whole New York school one met a similar dash of humour and cynicism more or less pronounced but seldom bitter. Yet even the gayest of tempers succumbs at last to constant friction. The old friend was rapidly fading. The habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual humour, the equality of indifference were sinking into the routine of office. The mind lingered in the department. The thought failed to react, the wit and humour shrank within the blank walls of politics, and the irritations multiplied. To a head of bureau the result seemed ennobling. Although as education this branch of study was more familiar and older than the twelfth century, the task of bringing the two periods into a common relation was new. Ignorance required that these political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and twentieth centuries should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics. Nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics, even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s equals gt squared over two. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person in a remote wilderness like Lafayette Square could take liberties with Congress and venture to multiply half its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction at any given time. A historical formula that should satisfy the conditions of the stellar universe weighed heavily on his mind, but a trifling matter like this was one in which he could look for no help from anybody. He could only look for derision at best. All his associates in history condemned such an attempt as futile and almost immoral, certainly hostile to sound historical system. Newton's tried it only because of its hostility to all that he had taught for history, since he started afresh from that new point that whatever was right all that he had ever taught was wrong. He had pursued ignorance thus far with success and had swept his mind clear of knowledge. In beginning again from the starting point of Sir Isaac Newton he looked about him in vain for a teacher. Few men in Washington cared to overstep the school conventions, and the most distinguished of them, Simon Newcomb, was too sound a mathematician to treat such a scheme seriously. The greatest of Americans, judged by his rank in science, willed Gibbs never came to Washington, and Adams never enjoyed a chance to meet him. After Gibbs one of the most distinguished was Langley of the Smithsonian, who was more accessible, to whom Adams had been much in the habit of turning whenever he wanted an outlet for his vast reservoirs of ignorance. Langley listened with outward patience to his disputatious questionings, but he too nourished a scientific passion for doubt and sentimental attachment for its avowal. He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. Like so many other great observers Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, though doubting their respectability. He generously let others doubt what he felt obliged to affirm, and early put into Adams's hands the concepts of modern science, a volume by Judge Stallow, which had been treated for a dozen years by the schools with a conspiracy of silence such as inevitably meets every revolutionary work that upsets the stock and machinery of instruction. Adams read, and failed to understand. Then he asked questions, and failed to get answers. Probably this was education. Probably it was the only scientific education open to a sixty-year-old student, who asked to be as ignorant as an astronomer. For him the details of science meant nothing. He wanted to know its mass. Solar heat was not enough, or was too much. Kinetic atoms led only to motion, never to direction or progress. He had no use for multiplicity. It needed unity. It could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything must be made to move together. One must seek new worlds to measure. And so, like Rassilis, Adams set out once more, and found himself, on May 12th, settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero. End of Chapter 24