DARWINISM (1867-1868)

  POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet
for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in
Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are exceedingly
long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The geological
champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells were intimate
at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin, what Palgrave
said of Tennyson, that the first time he came to town, Adams should be
asked to meet him, but neither of them ever came to town, or ever cared
to meet a young American, and one could not go to them because they
were known to dislike intrusion. The only Americans who were not
allowed to intrude were the half-dozen in the Legation. Adams was
content to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his
"Voyage of the Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter; a
predestined follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to follow
Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but in those
days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English way,
building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow foundations
as to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous. The atomic
theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanical
theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin's Law
of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man had to take on
trust. Neither he nor any one else knew enough to verify them; in his
ignorance of mathematics, he was particularly helpless; but this never
stood in his way. The ideas were new and seemed to lead somewhere--to
some great generalization which would finish one's clamor to be
educated. That a beginner should understand them all, or believe them
all, no one could expect, still less exact. Henry Adams was Darwinist
because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief, and
one must know something in order to contradict even such triflers as
Tyndall and Huxley.

  By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow
trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he
tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best thing; he
became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He was ready to
become anything but quiet. As though the world had not been enough
upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more. He had his wish,
but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand them.

  He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of geology;
a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were history.
Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for vestiges of
Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges of Natural Selection, and
Adams followed him, although he cared nothing about Selection, unless
perhaps for the indirect amusement of upsetting curates. He felt, like
nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution, but he felt no
more concern in Natural than in unnatural Selection, though he seized
with greediness the new volume on the "Antiquity of Man" which Sir
Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order to support Darwin by wrecking
the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next brought out, in 1866, a new
edition of his "Principles," then the highest text-book of geology; but
here the Darwinian doctrine grew in stature. Natural Selection led back
to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity. This was a
vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every
one--except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for
religion; a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
Such a working system for the universe suited a young man who had just
helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million
lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who
objected to it; the idea was only too seductive in its perfection; it
had the charm of art. Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of
philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back
into it--to reach God a posteriori--rather than start from it, like
Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best
way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived.
Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither and
thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the
strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and
another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the
primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady,
uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one
day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his
"Principles" properly noticed in America, young Adams found nothing
simpler than to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir Charles
would tell him what to say. Youth risks such encounters with the
universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at Sir
Charles's ready assent, and still more so at finding himself, after
half an hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of
American geologists about the principles of their profession. This was
getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.

  The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt
by Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their
account. He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but
himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell, asked him
to explain for Americans his last edition of the "Principia," Adams
would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately the mere reading such
works for amusement is quite a different matter from studying them for
criticism. Ignorance must always begin at the beginning. Adams must
inevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason
why the apple fell to the ground. He did not know enough to be
satisfied with the fact. The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what
was Gravitation? and he would have been thrown quite off his base if
Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know.

  At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial Theory
or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial epoch
looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world. If the
glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe? To him the two or
three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested or borrowed to explain
glaciation were proof of nothing, and were quite unsolid as support for
so immense a superstructure as geological uniformity. If one were at
liberty to be as lax in science as in theology, and to assume unity
from the start, one might better say so, as the Church did, and not
invite attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a young man,
altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir
Isaac Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views, which he
thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs. Sir Charles himself
seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in vain. At last he
resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of inserting a sentence
in the text, intended to provoke correction. "The introduction [by
Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent seemed at first sight
inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument, obliging him to allow that
causes had in fact existed on the earth capable of producing more
violent geological changes than would be possible in our own day." The
hint produced no effect. Sir Charles said not a word; he let the
paragraph stand; and Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian
was strict or lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.

  Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the glacial
epoch remained a misty region in the young man's Darwinism. Had it been
the only one, he would not have fretted about it; but uniformity often
worked queerly and sometimes did not work as Natural Selection at all.
Finding himself at a loss for some single figure to illustrate the Law
of Natural Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of
uniformity on record. Much to his surprise Sir Charles told him that
certain forms, like Terebratula,  appeared to be identical from the
beginning to the end of geological time. Since this was altogether too
much uniformity and much too little selection, Adams gave up the
attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the
end--himself. Taking for granted that the vertebrates would serve his
purpose, he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate.
Infinitely to his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first
vertebrate was a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all
fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under
Adams's own favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.

  By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire
familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he
loved best. Like Catherine Olney in "Northanger Abbey," he yearned for
nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey,
unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior's House, and both
these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions or without, he never
tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all the
historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and
Uriconium; or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey ruins,
all was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of the Roman
Campagna; but perhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge on a summer
afternoon and look across the Marches to the mountains of Wales. The
peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with absence of
evolution; it was better marked in Egypt: it was felt wherever
time-sequences became interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As
one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer
haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium,
nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the railroad;
Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildwas were far
superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa, or the
monks of Buildwas, had they approached where he lay in the grass, would
have taken him only for another and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They
would have seen little to surprise them in the modern landscape unless
it were the steam of a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of
time as one liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past,
measuring time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of
wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of all
was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's earliest
ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose name, according
to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose
kingdom, according to Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria. Life
began and ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian,
without vertebrates or any other organism except a few shell-fish. On
the further verge of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which
every trace of organic existence had been erased.

  That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American,
seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate parentage as
modern as though just caught in the Severn below, astonished him as
much as though he had found Darwin himself. In the scale of evolution,
one vertebrate was as good as another. For anything he, or any one
else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution out of a
thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis. To an American in search of
a father, it mattered nothing whether the father breathed through
lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether
another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced
descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This
matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La
Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals,
stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had
doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:--

  "Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme,
     Que scelerat pour scelerat,
   Il vaut mieux etre un loup qu'un homme."

  It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the
problem of Pteraspis,  for it was quite certain that no complete proof
of Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis,  and
that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate had
been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or trilobites
whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a child on the
shores of Quincy Bay.

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

  All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir
Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles
labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them
till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams gladly
studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the
day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove
only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform;
and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians--except
Darwin--Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of the
Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of
ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in
the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he
felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be
brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey
from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had no
more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most was
Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change.

  Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass
close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass--or
whatever there was to nibble--in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he
seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of
fishes. He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he
determined to stop it. Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had
any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be
many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of
ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived
and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which
had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to
discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth
was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved
true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for
fun.

  From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded
as criminal--worse than crime--sacrilege! Society punished it
ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father, looked
on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy him
nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn from
Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on enterprises
great or small. He had no notion of letting the currents of his action
be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him, the current of his
time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology
under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards;
on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of
every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was,
as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their
practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as
though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty the
surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten. For the young
men whose lives were cast in the generation between 1867 and 1900, Law
should be Evolution from lower to higher, aggregation of the atom in
the mass, concentration of multiplicity in unity, compulsion of anarchy
in order; and he would force himself to follow wherever it led, though
he should sacrifice five thousand millions more in money, and a million
more lives.

  As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he could
not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying it. He,
at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith. The Church
was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded
deeply in interest and law. This was the result of five or six years in
England; a result so British as to be almost the equivalent of an
Oxford degree.

  Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles who
left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned resolutely to
business, and attacked the burning question of specie payments. His
principles assured him that the honest way to resume payments was to
restrict currency. He thought he might win a name among financiers and
statesmen at home by showing how this task had been done by England,
after the classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the
study of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a
morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to his
confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best British
financial writers held that restriction was a fatal mistake, and that
the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone, as the
Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were the remedies.

  The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis  to his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution was
not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever the
last hope of employment in State Street. Six months of patient labor
would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his whole
scheme of making himself a position as a practical man-of-business. If
he did publish, how could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that
moral and absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had
nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it alone?
Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might not revenge
impertinences offered to their science; but capitalists never forgot or
forgave.

  With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821, and,
doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American for
choice. He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus
thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to crush the author;
but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic--when successful--than
his ignorance. The editor accepted both.

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

  With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself
what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his
helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No one
could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a
part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might perhaps
have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers or
William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one would have picked out
William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Boston
was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry
Higginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard;
Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start.
Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the
century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could
show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor.
The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks. Had Adams
foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser,
and could have chosen no better path.

  Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the
pleasantest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the
Silurian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord
Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background
the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly, and
the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing
that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 was nearly
complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himself
almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before
he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secretary
could afford to be happy. His old education was finished; his new one
was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling himself near the end
of a very long, anxious, tempestuous, successful voyage, with another
to follow, and a summer sea between.

  He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back
in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season he wandered
on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome of the
middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as had become
with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of
Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its mediaeval
society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itself as seriously
as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years of accidental
education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868
than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever that made Rome more
intelligible to him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no
better when he got back to London and went through his last season.
London had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his
habits, and even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like an Englishman,
and going into society where he knew not a face, and cared not a straw.
He lived deep into the lives and loves and disappointments of his
friends. When at last he found himself back again at Liverpool, his
heart wrenched by the act of parting, he moved mechanically, unstrung,
but he had no more acquired education than when he first trod the steps
of the Adelphi Hotel in November, 1858. He could see only one great
change, and this was wholly in years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed
his imagination; even the architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy
interest; he felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the
British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people
who frequented their country houses; he had become English to the point
of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices
against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of American
youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes. As
far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education,
but in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years
in London.

Henry becomes increasingly interested in contemporary methods of science, foreshadowing his later attempts to apply scientific method to the study of history. The works of two Englishmen are especially important to Henry at this point in his education. Naturalist Charles Robert Darwin has recently published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, arguing for a theory of evolution. Geologist Sir Charles Lyell, a friend of Darwin, a frequent visitor to the Legation, and eventually a friend of Henry's, has supported Darwin's theory in his Antiquity of Man and the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology . Henry is somewhat skeptical of evolution but influenced by the scientific approach.

The significance of Darwin and Lyell in the story of Henry's education is that they are early influences in his burgeoning enthusiasm for scientific method. As Ernest Samuels points out in The Young Henry Adams, "It is hard to exaggerate the stir caused by the scientific discoveries of the mid-century." Darwin, especially, was front-page news. Influenced early by Lyell and in turn influencing the geologist's work, Darwin proposes that plants and animals develop from earlier forms through hereditary transmissions of slight differences; a process of natural selection determines which will survive. He proposes that species themselves actually change through evolution. For example, individuals in a given generation may have a variation in their physical makeup that gives them an advantage in their environment. If their food source is in a tree, their toes may allow them to climb slightly better; or their necks or legs may be longer; or they may be able to shake the food loose better. Individuals with these characteristics are more likely to survive and reproduce. In this way, the species may evolve. Darwin's theory of evolution poses a direct threat to fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible -- Genesis, for example -- and this is news in the 1860s. As one reviewer says of Darwin's work, "Old ladies of both sexes consider it a decidedly dangerous book." Lyell also bothers fundamentalists by showing geological evidence of man's development of the use of tools, for example, over a long period of time. Darwin's theories are consistent with Lyell's discoveries, and Lyell follows him in supporting evolution. Both negate the likelihood of a sudden event of Creation. Lyell further maintains that changes in the earth's surface can best be explained by continuing causes -- not by primeval geological catastrophes as formerly believed. So both argue that there is a process in the development of the earth and its inhabitants. Portions of these theories have been refined, reconsidered, and even discarded over time. The importance for Henry Adams is that they start him thinking about history in terms of scientific approach. Could the developmental patterns of a society, for example, be understood in the way that Darwin explains evolution? Could a scientist's method of measuring the gradual augmentation and diffusion of heat or the dissipation of energy apply to historical cycles? Could there be a workable dynamic theory of history? Later in life, and later in the Education, Adams attempts to espouse just such a theory. Glossary vestige a trace, mark, or sign of something that once existed but has disappeared. curates clergymen. a posteriori  from effect to cause; based on observation rather than theory. intelligible clear, comprehensible, understandable. Pteraspis the first vertebrate, according to Lyell; a fish, existing 400 million years ago, related to the sturgeon, used by Adams as a symbol of sequence and continuity throughout the Education. audacity bold courage, daring.


THE PRESS (1868)

  AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical
rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family clambered
down the side of their Cunard steamer into the government tugboat,
which set them ashore in black darkness at the end of some North River
pier. Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000 landing from a
galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on
the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years
before. The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but
diplomatist, started up an unknown street, in company with the private
secretary who had become private citizen, in search of carriages to
convey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous
but successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in their
native land.

  How much its character had changed or was changing, they could
not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the
land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was always
trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand
itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of
its tail. Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan,
stretching loosely towards the prairies, its few score of leaders far
in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in
the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage over
Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction, while
Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several contradictory
movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or
oriented towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead.
Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the head of
the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where the leaders
could be found. One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay,
since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical
energies--coal, iron, steam--a distinct superiority in power over the
old industrial elements--agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the
result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the
action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his
starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an
estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a
scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish
Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow--not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still
reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the
customs--but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer
hand than he--American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans
and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He
made no complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse off
than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their
heritage by his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he was not
himself at fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any
superiority of his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out of the
track, and must get back into it as best he could.

  One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be
fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at his
father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he. All were
equally survivals from the forties--bric-a-brac from the time of Louis
Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments that had been more or less
suited to the colonial architecture, but which never had much value in
Desbrosses Street or Fifth Avenue. They could scarcely have earned five
dollars a day in any modern industry. The men who commanded high pay
were as a rule not ornamental. Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould
lacked social charm. Doubtless the country needed ornament--needed it
very badly indeed--but it needed energy still more, and capital most of
all, for its supply was ridiculously out of proportion to its wants. On
the new scale of power, merely to make the continent habitable for
civilized people would require an immediate outlay that would have
bankrupted the world. As yet, no portion of the world except a few
narrow stretches of western Europe had ever been tolerably provided
with the essentials of comfort and convenience; to fit out an entire
continent with roads and the decencies of life would exhaust the credit
of the entire planet. Such an estimate seemed outrageous to a Texan
member of Congress who loved the simplicity of nature's noblemen; but
the mere suggestion that a sun existed above him would outrage the
self-respect of a deep-sea fish that carried a lantern on the end of
its nose. From the moment that railways were introduced, life took on
extravagance.

  Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the
Desbrosses Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the effort to
see his own length. The new Americans, of whom he was to be one, must,
whether they were fit or unfit, create a world of their own, a science,
a society, a philosophy, a universe, where they had not yet created a
road or even learned to dig their own iron. They had no time for
thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond their day's work;
their attitude to the universe outside them was that of the deep-sea
fish. Above all, they naturally and intensely disliked to be told what
to do, and how to do it, by men who took their ideas and their methods
from the abstract theories of history, philosophy, or theology. They
knew enough to know that their world was one of energies quite new.

  All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as little
as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he knew, the less
he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and seemed rather
inclined to boast of it, at least on the stump; but the leaders of
industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other. They used, without
qualm, whatever instruments they found at hand. They had been obliged,
in 1861, to turn aside and waste immense energy in settling what had
been settled a thousand years before, and should never have been
revived. At prodigious expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance
down, leaving everything but the mere fact of power untouched, since
nothing else had a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having
cleared its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw
itself on that which stood first--its roads. The field was vast;
altogether beyond its power to control offhand; and society dropped
every thought of dealing with anything more than the single fraction
called a railway system. This relatively small part of its task was
still so big as to need the energies of a generation, for it required
all the new machinery to be created--capital, banks, mines, furnaces,
shops, power-houses, technical knowledge, mechanical population,
together with a steady remodelling of social and political habits,
ideas, and institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new
conditions. The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged
to the railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself.

  Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act as
though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the new start.
His brother Charles had determined to strike for the railroads; Henry
was to strike for the press; and they hoped to play into each other's
hands. They had great need, for they found no one else to play with.
After discovering the worthlessness of a so-called education, they had
still to discover the worthlessness of so-called social connection. No
young man had a larger acquaintance and relationship than Henry Adams,
yet he knew no one who could help him. He was for sale, in the open
market. So were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and knew
too that they were cheap; to be bought at the price of a mechanic.
There was no concealment, no delicacy, and no illusion about it.
Neither he nor his friends complained; but he felt sometimes a little
surprised that, as far as he knew, no one, seeking in the labor market,
ever so much as inquired about their fitness. The want of solidarity
between old and young seemed American. The young man was required to
impose himself, by the usual business methods, as a necessity on his
elders, in order to compel them to buy him as an investment. As Adams
felt it, he was in a manner expected to blackmail. Many a young man
complained to him in after life of the same experience, which became a
matter of curious reflection as he grew old. The labor market of good
society was ill-organized.

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

  He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations,
renewing friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years old,
the man who has not yet got further than to study the situation, is
lost, or near it. He could see nothing in the situation that could be
of use to him. His friends had won no more from it than he. His brother
Charles, after three years of civil life, was no better off than
himself, except for being married and in greater need of income. His
brother John had become a brilliant political leader on the wrong side.
No one had yet regained the lost ground of the war.

  He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the
simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had learned
so painfully in London was worse than useless in America where every
standard was different. Newport was charming, but it asked for no
education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer and pleasanter,
and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in that society were a
kind of social partnership, like the classes at college; not education
but the subjects of education. All were doing the same thing, and
asking the same question of the future. None could help. Society seemed
founded on the law that all was for the best New Yorkers in the best of
Newports, and that all young people were rich if they could waltz. It
was a new version of the Ant and Grasshopper.

  At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or had shown a
sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward Atkinson. Boston was
cool towards sons, whether prodigals or other, and needed much time to
make up its mind what to do for them--time which Adams, at thirty years
old, could hardly spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to
hire an office in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze
there alone, vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for
Fortune to knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the
elevator; or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in use.
Whether this course would have offered his best chance he never knew;
it was one of the points in practical education which most needed a
clear understanding, and he could never reach it. His father and mother
would have been glad to see him stay with them and begin reading
Blackstone again, and he showed no very filial tenderness by abruptly
breaking the tie that had lasted so long. After all, perhaps Beacon
Street was as good as any other street for his objects in life;
possibly his easiest and surest path was from Beacon Street to State
Street and back again, all the days of his years. Who could tell? Even
after life was over, the doubt could not be determined.

  In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path
that had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his brothers.
He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his peculiar birthright.
The mere thought of beginning life again in Mount Vernon Street lowered
the pulsations of his heart. This is a story of education--not a mere
lesson of life--and, with education, temperament has in strictness
nothing to do, although in practice they run close together. Neither by
temperament nor by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted
far away and behind his companions there; no one trusted his
temperament or education; he had to go.

  Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his
plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the shortest road
to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside the social pale. No
Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced one's self as an
adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of deplorably bad judgment,
and the charges were true. The chances of ending in the gutter were, at
best, even. The risk was the greater in Adams's case, because he had no
very clear idea what to do when he got there. That he must educate
himself over again, for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile
to his old educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do
it--how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist of
the Capital--he had not an idea, and no one to teach him. The question
of money is rarely serious for a young American unless he is married,
and money never troubled Adams more than others; not because he had it,
but because he could do without it, like most people in Washington who
all lived on the income of bricklayers; but with or without money he
met the difficulty that, after getting to Washington in order to go on
the press, it was necessary to seek a press to go on. For large work he
could count on the North American Review, but this was scarcely a
press. For current discussion and correspondence, he could depend on
the New York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily, and no
New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the death of Henry
J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was out of the question
both for political and personal reasons, and because Whitelaw Reid had
already undertaken that singularly venturesome position, amid
difficulties that would have swamped Adams in four-and-twenty hours.
Charles A. Dana had made the Sun a very successful as well as a very
amusing paper, but had hurt his own social position in doing it; and
Adams knew himself well enough to know that he could never please
himself and Dana too; with the best intentions, he must always fail as
a blackguard, and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life
to the Sun. As for the New York Herald,  it was a despotic empire
admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the moment, the
New York daily press offered no field except the free-trade Holy Land
of the Evening Post  under William Cullen Bryant, while beside it lay
only the elevated plateau of the New Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and
the Nation. Much as Adams liked Godkin, and glad as he was to creep
under the shelter of the Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware
that he should find there only the same circle of readers that he
reached in the North American Review.

  The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington,
except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then Attorney
General and living there, he would stand in solitude much like that of
London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in Boston seemed to care for
doing; he held out a hand to the young man. Whether Boston, like Salem,
really shunned strangers, or whether Evarts was an exception even in
New York, he had the social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by
nature, prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born
man-of-the-world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without scruple, and
accepted the world without fearing or abusing it. His wit was the least
part of his social attraction. His talk was broad and free. He laughed
where he could; he joked if a joke was possible; he was true to his
friends, and never lost his temper or became ill-natured. Like all New
Yorkers he was decidedly not a Bostonian; but he was what one might
call a transplanted New Englander, like General Sherman; a variety,
grown in ranker soil. In the course of life, and in widely different
countries, Adams incurred heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom
he had no claim and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps
half-a-dozen such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is a
large number as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily than
when Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.

  Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep
gratitude, the more because his first struggle with a sleeping-car made
him doubt the value--to him--of a Pullman civilization; but he was even
more grateful for the shelter of Mr. Evarts's house in H Street at the
corner of Fourteenth, where he abode in safety and content till he
found rooms in the roomless village. To him the village seemed
unchanged. Had he not known that a great war and eight years of
astonishing movement had passed over it, he would have noticed nothing
that betrayed growth. As of old, houses were few; rooms fewer; even the
men were the same. No one seemed to miss the usual comforts of
civilization, and Adams was glad to get rid of them, for his best
chance lay in the eighteenth century.

  The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an aspirant
to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately took him to
the White House and presented him to President Andrew Johnson. The
interview was brief and consisted in the stock remark common to
monarchs and valets, that the young man looked even younger than he
was. The younger man felt even younger than he looked. He never saw the
President again, and never felt a wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson
was not the sort of man whom a young reformer of thirty, with two or
three foreign educations, was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet,
musing over the interview as a matter of education, long years
afterwards, he could not help recalling the President's figure with a
distinctness that surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and
statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that
had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were
greater than others; but all were statesmen and all were supported,
lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness. To them the
universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their universe, a
Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that he never
entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern system until he
found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery was only a part of
the Southern system, and the life of it all--the vigor--the poetry--was
its moral certainty of self. The Southerner could not doubt; and this
self-assurance not only gave Andrew Johnson the look of a true
President, but actually made him one. When Adams came to look back on
it afterwards, he was surprised to realize how strong the Executive was
in 1868--perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly he never
again found himself so well satisfied, or so much at home.

  Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed little
changed in these eight years. He was the same--with a difference.
Perhaps he--unlike Henry Adams--had at last got an education, and all
he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself to doing without it.
Whatever the reason, although his manner was as roughly kind as ever,
and his talk as free, he appeared to have closed his account with the
public; he no longer seemed to care; he asked nothing, gave nothing,
and invited no support; he talked little of himself or of others, and
waited only for his discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in
these last days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in
the evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
drew near, wanting to feel that the great man--the only chief he ever
served even as a volunteer--recognized some personal relation, he asked
Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his rooms, and play his game
of whist there, as he did every night in his own house. Mr. Seward came
and had his whist, and Adams remembered his rough parting speech: "A
very sensible entertainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of
Mr. Seward, and the only one he ever accepted.

  Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,
Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what should
have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State Department had
ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the Treasury had taken its
place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a man new to politics--Hugh
McCulloch--not a person of much importance in the eyes of practical
politicians such as young members of the press meant themselves to
become, but they all liked Mr. McCulloch, though they thought him a
stop-gap rather than a force. Had they known what sort of forces the
Treasury was to offer them for support in the generation to come, they
might have reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams
was fated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he ever
cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the idea that
McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to represent
everything that one liked least. He was no politician, he had no party,
and no power. He was not fashionable or decorative. He was a banker,
and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice which the serf
feels to his overseer; for he knew he must obey, and he knew that the
helpless showed only their helplessness when they tempered obedience by
mockery. The world, after 1865, became a bankers' world, and no banker
would ever trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to
Washington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at all,
for he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow five thousand
dollars of any bank in America. The banker never would trust him, and
he would never trust the banker. To him, the banking mind was
obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the more surprise at finding
McCulloch the broadest, most liberal, most genial, and most practical
public man in Washington.

  There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
that time was very great. The whole financial system was in chaos;
every part of it required reform; the utmost experience, tact, and
skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No one knew how well
McCulloch did it until his successor took it in charge, and tried to
correct his methods. Adams did not know enough to appreciate
McCulloch's technical skill, but he was struck at his open and generous
treatment of young men. Of all rare qualities, this was, in Adams's
experience, the rarest. As a rule, officials dread interference. The
strongest often resent it most. Any official who admits equality in
discussion of his official course, feels it to be an act of virtue;
after a few months or years he tires of the effort. Every friend in
power is a friend lost. This rule is so nearly absolute that it may be
taken in practice as admitting no exception. Apparent exceptions exist,
and McCulloch was one of them.

  McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and
infantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early political
education. He had neither past nor future, and could afford to be
careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded by all the active
and intelligent young men in the country. Full of faith, greedy for
work, eager for reform, energetic, confident, capable, quick of study,
charmed with a fight, equally ready to defend or attack, they were
unselfish, and even--as young men went--honest. They came mostly from
the army, with the spirit of the volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank
Barlow, Frank Bartlett were types of the generation. Most of the press,
and much of the public, especially in the West, shared their ideas. No
one denied the need for reform. The whole government, from top to
bottom, was rotten with the senility of what was antiquated and the
instability of what was improvised. The currency was only one example;
the tariff was another; but the whole fabric required reconstruction as
much as in 1789, for the Constitution had become as antiquated as the
Confederation. Sooner or later a shock must come, the more dangerous
the longer postponed. The Civil War had made a new system in fact; the
country would have to reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.

  One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough, but no
one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant, universal
nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests upheld it.
McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with large
good-nature and willing sympathy--outside of parties, jobs, bargains,
corporations or intrigues--which Adams never was to meet again.

  Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil War
had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer type
were not always docile under control, but they were handy in a fight.
Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted as one of them. He found
himself much at home with them--more at home than he ever had been
before, or was ever to be again--in the atmosphere of the Treasury. He
had no strong party passion, and he felt as though he and his friends
owned this administration, which, in its dying days, had neither
friends nor future except in them.

  These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme Court was
about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge Curtis had been
employed to argue against the constitutional power of the Government to
make an artificial standard of value in time of peace. Evarts was
anxious to fix on a line of argument that should have a chance of
standing up against that of Judge Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He
did not know which foot to put forward. About to deal with Judge
Curtis, the last of the strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could
risk no chances. In doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to
discuss, and Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day,
driving, dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.

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

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

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

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

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

On a hot July night in 1868, the Adams family arrives in the States after seven years abroad. Henry is thirty years old. After a few months of relaxation and renewing friendships, he leaves Boston on October 12 to become a freelance journalist in Washington; en route to the nation's capital, he stops off in New York and arranges to do some work for the Nation as well as the Post. Henry's review of Sir Charles Lyell's latest edition of the Principles of Geology appears in the North American Review. United States Attorney General William M. Evarts hosts Henry in his home until the young man finds suitable housing. Seward is still Secretary of State but is of little practical help to Henry, an example of a favorite Adams aphorism that may seem odd considering his many advantages: "Every friend in power is a friend lost." Ulysses S. Grant wins the presidential election in November. Henry becomes interested in issues involving governmental control of the economy, especially "greenback" currency.

Adams does not allow a great deal of insight into his personal life, but certain matters here bear consideration. First, it is clear throughout the book that Henry is a child of privilege. He has unusually rich advantages; if he rarely recognizes this, perhaps it is because he has never known another life. When he arrives in Washington, he points out that the "first step of course, was the making of acquaintance, and the first acquaintance was naturally the President." He is not being ironic. For Henry, grandson of one President and great-grandson of another, it seems quite natural, of course, that the nation's Attorney General should take him to meet President Andrew Johnson. Nor is Henry strapped for funds, although he mentions having to make a living several times in the Education. In his adult life, Adams enjoys an increasing annual income, mostly from family and personal investments, of between $6,000 and $50,000, during a period of negligible taxes when a top professor at Harvard or a reasonably successful businessman may make $4,000. As a beginning assistant professor at Harvard, in 1870, he will earn $2,000 for the school year and spend about $30 per month for room and board. So Adams is more than comfortable whether he works or not. Remember, as Jean Gooder points out, that the Education was originally written for close friends, many of whom were significantly wealthier than Adams. Adams's public personality is of interest. He was a small man, five feet three inches tall and slightly built; but he could be quite aggressive verbally. While he often was charming, he was known as a sardonic debater even in social situations. In London, he was not above challenging a casual observation by a hostess who said that she could always tell Americans on sight. He asked her to identify one American and one Englishman in a group of strangers and delighted in pointing out her errors. An acquaintance in Washington in December 1868, Moorfield Storey, reports in a memoir that Henry is an acerbic young man in a social setting, "laying down the law with a certain assumption;" in private, Adams was usually pleasant and friendly. The issue of most interest to Henry in the late fall of 1868 is the constitutionality of the wartime greenback currency. For purposes of expediency during the war, the federal government issued paper money, which was not supported by gold, by passing the Legal Tender Act. Two cases come before the United States Supreme Court in early December 1868, challenging the constitutionality of the Act. Being a strict constructionist regarding the Constitution, and a supporter of "hard" money  at this point in his life, Henry journalistically takes the side opposed to the government. In an article published in the Nation on December 17, Adams argues that the Constitution is based on a "doctrine of limited powers;" regardless of the stress of the times, no government agency has the right to extend those powers. Issuing paper money without gold backing is, he concludes, unconstitutional. Adams even goes out of his way to attack, by name, his recent host, Attorney General Evarts, who has argued that "the safety of the state . . . in times of national peril" supersedes a literal interpretation of the Constitution. The Court initially finds that greenbacks are unconstitutional; soon after, with two new justices appointed by President Grant, it reverses itself and supports greenbacks as legal tender.   Evarts accepts Adams's aggressive attack as part of the business of journalism and continues to befriend the young reformer. Glossary flotsam or jetsam odds and ends. doctrinaire a person who dogmatically applies theory regardless of practical problems. filial suitable to a son or daughter.