The Education of Henry Adams

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  He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps the
most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his pen,
for he wrote long letters, during the next three months, to his
brother Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the
Boston Courier; and the exercise was good for him. He had little
to say, and said it not very well, but that mattered less. The
habit of expression leads to the search for something to express.
Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one
strikes out every commonplace in the expression. Young men as a
rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else, and in after life
when Adams began to learn what some men could see, he shrank into
corners of shame at the thought that he should have betrayed his
own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he invited his
neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the nearest
approach he had yet made to an intelligent act.

  For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion
naturally centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough,
while bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept
Rome as legitimate education, though abused; but to young men
seeking education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that
everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome
was altogether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome
before 1870 was seductive beyond resistance. The month of May,
1860, was divine. No doubt other young men, and occasionally
young women, have passed the month of May in Rome since then, and
conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly it does --
in them -- but in 1860 the lights and shadows were still
mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and
glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of
science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought,
and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches
unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Mediaeval Rome was sorcery.
Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century
youth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One's emotions
in Rome were one's private affair, like one's glass of absinthe
before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else
they could not have been so intense; and they were surely
immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in
the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were
evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all the
doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the
last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by
common consent, the only spot that the young -- of either sex and
every race -- passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.

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

  Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile. The
problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was more
vital in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when the
idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to
the mind of Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing
in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they
were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of
the Capitol." Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this
passage from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which led Adams more than
once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria
di Ara Coeli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
gained by Gibbon -- or all the historians since -- towards
explaining the Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm
remained intact. Two great experiments of Western civilization
had left there the chief monuments of their failure, and nothing
proved that the city might not still survive to express the
failure of a third.

  The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought of
posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist,
even to the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for
him that he should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men
cannot sit with dignity, "in the close of evening, among the
ruins of the Capitol," unless they have something quite original
to say about it. Tacitus could do it; so could Michael Angelo;
and so, at a pinch, could Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic;
but, in sum, none of them could say very much more than the
tourist, who went on repeating to himself the eternal question:
-- Why! Why!! Why!!! -- as his neighbor, the blind beggar, might
do, sitting next him, on the church steps. No one ever had
answered the question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet
every one who had either head or heart, felt that sooner or later
he must make up his mind what answer to accept. Substitute the
word America for the word Rome, and the question became personal.

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

  Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo, and
Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of
Cicero and Caesar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no
teaching, the lessons of a rather cheap imagination and cheaper
politics. Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments,
ambitions, energies; without her, the Western world was pointless
and fragmentary; she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon
might have gone on for the whole century, sitting among the ruins
of the Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling
him what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.

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

  He told all about it to the Boston Courier; where the narrative
probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did
not speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether it
had any bearing whatever, and what was its value as a
post-graduate course. Quite apart from its value as life
attained, realized, capitalized, it had also a certain value as a
lesson in something, though Adams could never classify the branch
of study. Loosely, the tourist called it knowledge of men, but it
was just the reverse; it was knowledge of one's ignorance of men.
Captain Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a friend of the young
man's uncle, Sydney Brooks, took him with the officers of the
ship to make an evening call on Garibaldi, whom they found in the
Senate House towards sunset, at supper with his picturesque and
piratic staff, in the full noise and color of the Palermo
revolution. As a spectacle, it belonged to Rossini and the
Italian opera, or to Alexandre Dumas at the least, but the
spectacle was not its educational side. Garibaldi left the table,
and, sitting down at the window, had a few words of talk with
Captain Palmer and young Adams. At that moment, in the summer of
1860, Garibaldi was certainly the most serious of the doubtful
energies in the world; the most essential to gauge rightly. Even
then society was dividing between banker and anarchist. One or
the other, Garibaldi must serve. Himself a typical anarchist,
sure to overshadow Europe and alarm empires bigger than Naples,
his success depended on his mind; his energy was beyond doubt.

  Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for
five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of
his greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a
quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt;
absolutely impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing.
Sympathetic it was, and one felt that it was simple; one
suspected even that it might be childlike, but could form no
guess of its intelligence. In his own eyes Garibaldi might be a
Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the hands of Cavour he might become a
Condottiere; in the eyes of history he might, like the rest of
the world, be only the vigorous player in the game he did not
understand. The student was none the wiser.

  This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible
to itself than to a young American who had no experience in
double natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth,
Garibaldi saw and said that he had not understood his own acts;
that he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposes
of the class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought
himself the revolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was
unbounded. What should a young Bostonian have made of a character
like this, internally alive with childlike fancies, and
externally quiet, simple, almost innocent; uttering with apparent
conviction the usual commonplaces of popular politics that all
politicians use as the small change of their intercourse with the
public; but never betraying a thought?

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

  Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to
stumble over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered
two or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided
Paris, and had wanted no French influence in his education. He
disapproved of France in the lump. A certain knowledge of the
language one must have; enough to order dinner and buy a theatre
ticket; but more he did not seek. He disliked the Empire and the
Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he disliked most the
French mind. To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long
list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once
for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France was
not serious, and he was not serious in going there.

  He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he
felt quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he
disapproved. Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but,
as a matter of fact, several thousand Americans passed much of
their time there on this understanding. They sought to take share
in every function that was open to approach, as they sought
tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams
did like the rest. All thought of serious education had long
vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms, without even
aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better in
acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and
Philippe's and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre,
and the Varietes and the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant,
Rose Cheri and Gil Perez, and other lights of the stage. His
friends were good to him. Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became
familiar. In a month or six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of
it; but he studied nothing, entered no society, and made no
acquaintance. Accidental education went far in Paris, and one
picked up a deal of knowledge that might become useful; perhaps,
after all, the three months passed there might serve better
purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did
not intend it -- did not think it -- and looked at it as a
momentary and frivolous vacation before going home to fit himself
for life. Therewith, after staying as long as he could and
spending all the money he dared, he started with mixed emotions
but no education, for home.

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CHAPTER VII

TREASON (1860-1861)

  WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether
fortune or fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any
of his known antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of
law and to vote for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.

  He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which
played with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The
simile is none too strong. Not one man in America wanted the
Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted
secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their
occupations in peace. Not one, however clever or learned, guessed
what happened. Possibly a few Southern loyalists in despair might
dream it as an impossible chance; but none planned it.

  As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics,
quite heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted
away. The prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father
asked a malicious question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he
hinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son
to act as private secretary during the winter in Washington, as
though any young man who could afford to throw away two winters
on the Civil Law could afford to read Blackstone for another
winter without a master. The young man was beyond satire, and
asked only a pretext for throwing all education to the east wind.
November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been from
earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does
the uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail
wreck of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November
seemed temperate before the chill of a Boston January.

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

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

  Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in
1860-61, no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all
the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was
surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly
that the knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly
greater than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master
a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after
Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern
talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself
seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and
ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in
mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
hallucination -- haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent
morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously
ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were
mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree
rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains
of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like
oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson
of the way in which excess of power worked when held by
inadequate hands.

  This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was
paradox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles
Sumner's chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance,
and he stood a living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams
had come for a new education, and the school was seriously,
honestly, taken by most of the world, including Europe, as proper
for the purpose, although the Sioux Indians would have taught
less mischief. From such contradictions among intelligent people,
what was a young man to learn?

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

  Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
example; first of all, on his New England surroundings.
Republican houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams
aimed to create a social centre for New Englanders. They took a
house on I Street, looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out
towards Georgetown -- the Markoe house -- and there the private
secretary began to learn his social duties, for the political
were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies of the Capitol. He
had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly, but he knew
of no one who knew more.

  The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the
boy's oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady
men, well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue
-- men whom one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or
not, bore the stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one
exception, and perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the
New Englander's strength was his poise which almost amounted to a
defect. He offered no more target for love than for hate; he
attracted as little as he repelled; even as a machine, his motion
seemed never accelerated. The character, with its force or
feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to the core; one was it --
had been run in the same mould.

  There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself
to Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few
other men born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to
Henry J. Raymond, who came to view the field for the New York
Times, and who was a man of the world. The average Congressman
was civil enough, but had nothing to ask except offices, and
nothing to offer but the views of his district. The average
Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say, being
always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his
own importance.

  Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence
of only two men -- Sumner and Seward.

  Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and,
after his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite
recovered its tone; but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary
existence as Senator had most to do with his development. No man,
however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or
Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic
stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of
attitude forever, as though they mesmerized the subject. Yet even
among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank
South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or
Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became
Shakespearian and bouffe -- as Godkin used to call it -- like
Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at
least the merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly
thought, as Webster had thought before him, that his great
services and sacrifices, his superiority in education, his
oratorical power, his political experience, his representative
character at the head of the whole New England contingent, and,
above all, his knowledge of the world, made him the most
important member of the Senate; and no Senator had ever saturated
himself more thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the body. 

  Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one
Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and
still more seldom likes to be told of it. Even the greatest
Senators seemed to inspire little personal affection in each
other, and betrayed none at all. Sumner had a number of rivals
who held his judgment in no high esteem, and one of these was
Senator Seward. The two men would have disliked each other by
instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was created
only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the
faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of
either. That the public service must suffer was certain, but what
were the sufferings of the public service compared with the risks
run by a young mosquito -- a private secretary -- trying to buzz
admiration in the ears of each, and unaware that each would
impatiently slap at him for belonging to the other? Innocent and
unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even in a nursery, the
private secretary courted both.

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

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

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

  Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be
rigid, but the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple
enough when it chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had
been attacked in succession as no better than political
mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in his standard history, went so far
as to echo with approval the charge that treachery was hereditary
in the family. Any Adams had at least to be thick-skinned,
hardened to every contradictory epithet that virtue could supply,
and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; but all must
have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to
national interests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced
to choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his father had done,
as his father had followed the steps of John Adams, and no doubt
thereby earned his epithets.

  The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the
edge of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his
masters on their various paths he made no pretence of guessing;
even at that age he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing
motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which
he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always matter of
simple-minded surprise. Critics who know ultimate truth will
pronounce judgment on history; all that Henry Adams ever saw in
man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and he never saw quite
so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one knows the
story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and the
conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion
made the sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and
concentrated education.

  Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the
Government, they must make sure of a government to administer,
and that this chance depended on the action of Virginia. The
whole ascendancy of the winter wavered between the effort of the
cotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the new
President to keep Virginia in. Governor Seward representing the
Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr. Adams took the
lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary knew, the
party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty,
of dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open
eyes. As Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after
Mr. Adams and he had made their speeches: "If there's no
secession now, you and I are ruined."

  They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries
had nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that
side a secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The
sudden arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and
the language of his inaugural address, were the final term of the
winter's tactics, and closed the private secretary's interest in
the matter forever. Perhaps he felt, even then, a good deal more
interest in the appearance of another private secretary, of his
own age, a young man named John Hay, who lighted on LaFayette
Square at the same moment. Friends are born, not made, and Henry
never mistook a friend except when in power. From the first
slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay as
a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4
when Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon new
shoulders, and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He had
tried to make himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed
to him portentous, acting in secret as newspaper correspondent,
cultivating a large acquaintance and even haunting ballrooms
where the simple, old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant even
in the atmosphere of conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to
nothing for education, because no one could teach; all were as
ignorant as himself; none knew what should be done, or how to do
it; all were trying to learn and were more bent on asking than on
answering questions. The mass of ignorance in Washington was
lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top to bottom,
broke down.

  From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military
figure that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked
it, or was it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young
Adams been told that his life was to hang on the correctness of
his estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He saw Mr.
Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural
Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He
saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind,
absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid
gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any
other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of
becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a
private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
private secretary in the least fit for his business would have
thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much
education as the new President but that all the education he
could get would not be enough.

  As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in
March were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who
thought they knew something were more in error than those who
knew nothing. Education was matter of life and death, but all the
education in the world would have helped nothing. Only one man in
Adams's reach seemed to him supremely fitted by knowledge and
experience to be an adviser and friend. This was Senator Sumner;
and there, in fact, the young man's education began; there it
ended.

  Going over the experience again, long after all the great
actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In
the effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would
have liked much to know whether he could have helped it. He had
necessarily followed Seward and his father; he took for granted
that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; he
supposed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled
all personal doubts. He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator
Sumner privately denounced the course, regarded Mr. Adams as
betraying the principles of his life, and broke off relations
with his family.

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

  On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or
afterwards, but his education -- for good or bad -- made an
enormous stride. One has to deal with all sorts of unexpected
morals in life, and, at this moment, he was looking at hundreds
of Southern gentlemen who believed themselves singularly honest,
but who seemed to him engaged in the plainest breach of faith and
the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they did not disturb his
education. History told of little else; and not one rebel
defection -- not even Robert E. Lee's -- cost young Adams a
personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.

  This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to
him hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March,
1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led
to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering
between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,
helps nothing. Washington was a dismal school. Even before the
traitors had flown, the vultures descended on it in swarms that
darkened the ground, and tore the carrion of political patronage
into fragments and gobbets of fat and lean, on the very steps of
the White House. Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or
was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or
Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public.
Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the
young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of
such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and
ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South,
before the country could recover its balance and movement. Henry
was a helpless victim, and, like all the rest, he could only wait
for he knew not what, to send him he knew not where.

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

[combinator]

CHAPTER VIII

DIPLOMACY (1861)

  HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his
Minister to England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone
back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced
many centuries before: Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a
brief day; the Common Law prolonged its shadowy existence for a
week. The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished in
April, 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a
lawless world, to begin a new life without education at all. They
asked few questions, but if they had asked millions they would
have got no answers. No one could help. Looking back on this
moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could only
shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one
of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be
spared from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again
without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew
himself about to be in his new role, he was less ridiculous than
his betters. He was at least no public official, like the
thousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded
their jealousies and intrigues on the President. He was not a
vulture of carrion -- patronage. He knew that his father's
appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal
friendship; he did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed
it, or the reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit;
but he could have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for
them, the strongest and most decisive being that, in his opinion,
Mr. Adams had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his
chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard
to find a fit appointment in the list of possible candidates,
except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well as this
experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of
fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than
Senator Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee,
was likely to give him. In the family history, its members had
taken many a dangerous risk, but never before had they taken one
so desperate.

  The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one,
except perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary
of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the
Executive appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had
applied for the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally
known as Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the
post, or of helping the Minister. The Assistant Secretary was
inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially
useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps
he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too much of
Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.

  The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path
by giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote
letters, it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one,
at that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people.
The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except
in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst
and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams
into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be
beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had
time to watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House
in the April evenings and march southward, quietly enough, with
the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few
signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence
before being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the
furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of
fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as
the solitary private secretary crawling down to the wretched old
Cunard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for
Liverpool. This time the pitcher of education had gone to the
fountain once too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man
had got to meet a hostile world without defence -- or arms.

  The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May
1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have
enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with
one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was
alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams
the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in
London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters of
introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra
burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate person in the
party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never
dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy
was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered how
his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter,
1778, on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old
son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of
adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered
how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with himself, a
baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar
Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John
Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought it natural
that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also,
with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that
he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend on
Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams
had no friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he
asked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his
father and grandfather had done before him, without a murmur.
This was a lofty view, and for him answered his objects, but it
bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the young man
realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal. He modestly
thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer, and judged
his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time
America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order. Her
representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in
1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private
secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the
Court and Parliament of Great Britain.

  One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If
they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they
stood with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him
quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same
ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of
Cassius M. Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's
education profited less than the private secretary's, Cassius
Clay as a teacher having no equal though possibly some rivals. No
young man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from
such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious
that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the
Government; fewest of all among those who were in it. At home,
for the most part, young men went to the war, grumbled and died;
in England they might grumble or not; no one listened.

  Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He
never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his
tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence --
of talking without meaning -- is never effaced. He had to begin
it at once. He was already an adept when the party landed at
Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a
family of early Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena
of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord
Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar Palmerston laugh at
figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance
in the Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the
ceremony.

  Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the
affair of history and their errors concern historians. The errors
of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a
large part of his education. He thought on May 12 that he was
going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest
profession. For a hundred years the chief effort of his family
had aimed at bringing the Government of England into intelligent
cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His father
was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief
apparent obstacle to good understanding. As for the private
secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively
English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England. He
supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery
family, to be welcome everywhere in the British Islands.

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

  Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension -- a
sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow.
Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The
chances were great that the whole family would turn round and go
home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves
of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long
leisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation
had his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be
-- unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for
his -- trifling though it were -- was proved by his unreflecting
confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that his
father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a
subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over
several generations, he could not certainly point out another who
could have stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this
long day, and tedious journey to London, without once thinking of
the possibility that his father might make a mistake. Whatever
the Minister thought, and certainly his thought was not less
active than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His
manner was the same as ever; his mind and temper were as
perfectly balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve twitched.

  The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden
could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the
private secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his
father as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus
into Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst
of a London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he
preferred to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the
waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for breakfast, rather than ask a
question or express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously,
was too appalling to face. Had he known it better, he would only
have thought it worse.

  Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond
retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of
circumstances, a newcomer in London society needs years to
establish a position, and Minister Adams had not a week or an
hour to spare, while his son had not even a remote chance of
beginning. Politically the prospect looked even worse, and for
Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but for the
Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he
stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one
of the luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he
escaped. The blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed
over him. Lord John Russell had acted -- had probably intended to
act -- kindly by him in forestalling his arrival. The blow must
have fallen within three months, and would then have broken him
down. The British Ministers were a little in doubt still -- a
little ashamed of themselves -- and certain to wait the longer
for their next step in proportion to the haste of their first.

  This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor.
The father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's
was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles
Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as
enemies; the only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred
and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling
with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street; and
the British Government, well used to a liberal unpopularity
abroad, even when officially rude liked to be personally civil.
All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a
corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing
in especial to complain of; his position was good while it
lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had
no such compensations. Brought over in order to help his father,
he could conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was
clear that his father had got to help him. To him, the Legation
was social ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known.
Entire solitude in the great society of London was doubly
desperate because his duties as private secretary required him to
know everybody and go with his father and mother everywhere they
needed escort. He had no friend, or even enemy, to tell him to be
patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have broken out
with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools as
well as of sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do
it at once, for his father would never so much need help again.
In fact he never gave his father the smallest help, unless it
were as a footman, clerk, or a companion for the younger
children.

  He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common
in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most
secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but
useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son
could go only as an invited guest, the most instructive
conversation he ever heard among the young men of his own age who
hung about the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel
chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, mon cher!" No
one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also
slow to assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If
the American Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian
Ambassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be
in trouble to-morrow. It would all come in the day's work. There
was nothing professional in worry. Empires were always tumbling
to pieces and diplomats were always picking them up.

  This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff.
His social education was more barren still, and more trying to
his vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him
writhe with torture. He never forgot the first two or three
social functions he attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in Stratton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure
of a window and hoped that no one noticed him; another was a
garden-party given by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of
Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister and Mrs.
Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till every one
else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to
playing leap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next
thirty years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who,
singularly enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another
nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager
of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and
forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled
nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador
for partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the
world turned to ashes.

  When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his
solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the
Times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for
Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this
is history and can be read by public schools if they choose; but
the curious and unexpected happened to the Legation, for the
effect of Bull Run on them was almost strengthening. They no
longer felt doubt. For the next year they went on only from week
to week, ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more
than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to see them
go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.

[combinator]

  So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or
finished in the character of private secretary; and as about to
begin, without further experiment, a final education in the ranks
of the Army of the Potomac where he would find most of his
friends enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this
idea uppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn,
and began the winter. Any winter in London is a severe trial;
one's first winter is the most trying; but the month of December,
1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a
glutton of gloom.

  One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the
absence of the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit,
Reuter's telegram announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell
from a British mail-steamer was brought to the office. All three
secretaries, public and private were there -- nervous as wild
beasts under the long strain on their endurance -- and all three,
though they knew it to be not merely their order of departure --
not merely diplomatic rupture -- but a declaration of war --
broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end.
They saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for
its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.

  They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it,
is told in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster
who was one of the Fryston party. The moment was for him the
crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries it was
merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they
were a military outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned
position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort
sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog was
never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Londoner
lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source of
comfort denied to them -- he should not be private secretary
long.

  He was mistaken -- of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same
mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing
but one of many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round
hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal to
him which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these,
and to him the most important, was to put an end forever to the
idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an independent and free
citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he had kept up his
relations with the American press. He had written pretty
frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with
the two or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News,
the Star, the weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them
news and views that should have a certain common character, and
prevent clash. He had even gone down to Manchester to study the
cotton famine, and wrote a long account of his visit which his
brother Charles had published in the Boston Courier.
Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and instantly came
back upon him in the most crushing shape possible -- that of a
long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did
not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the
Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he
instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe
Parkes, one of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who had
haunted London since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times
office, to tell them all they did not know about Henry Adams,
rushed to the Legation to tell Adams all he did not want to know
about the Times. For a moment Adams thought his "usefulness" at
an end in other respects than in the press, but a day or two more
taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had
not even a club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the
Times article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and the
world had other persons -- such as President Lincoln, Secretary
Seward, and Commodore Wilkes -- for constant and favorite objects
of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful
again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education
at least had reached the point of seeing its own proportions.
"Surtout point de zele!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession for
a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among
Trent Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters and
meddled with no more newspapers, but he was still young, and felt
unkindly towards the editor of the London Times.

  Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the
Trent Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to
its surprise, still in place. Although the private secretary saw
in this delay -- which he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense
-- no reason for changing his opinion about the views of the
British Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his
table, and go on copying papers, filing letters, and reading
newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the
brutality of Mr. Seward -- or vice versa. The heavy months
dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without improving
his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to
the end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for
it. During this tedious winter and for many months afterwards,
the only gleams of sunshine were on the days he passed at
Walton-on-Thames as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at
Mount Felix.

  His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers,
although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were
strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be
kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper
Grosvenor Street were certainly the best in London; but none
offered a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first
time, the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis
was one of the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself
as closely as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy,
and he had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to
understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most
required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis,
a dozen years older than himself, could have good-naturedly
trained a school of such, without an effort, and with infinite
advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was
in this social polar winter, the single source of warmth and
light.

  Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such
pressure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates
made common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was
merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the
younger members of the household, it was not quite so with the
Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they
gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with American
sources, British society had begun with violent social prejudice
against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except
Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three
generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind,
and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, the
fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself that this
new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary
suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to
do with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally
the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had
Lincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average
Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly
quiet manner and the unassailable social position of Minister
Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore him, since
they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the example.
Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politically he
was negligible; he was there to be put aside. London and Paris
imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln and his
hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams
would vanish with the rest.

  This situation made Minister Adams an exception among
diplomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated
as members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility
of total extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe,
for a year at least, regarded the Washington Government as dead,
and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better
received than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by
little, in private, society took the habit of accepting him, not
so much as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition, or
an eminent counsel retained for a foreign Government. He was to
be received and considered; to be cordially treated as, by birth
and manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of
getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible
advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language,
birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in
order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr.
Adams apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society
few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double
personality and corresponding double weight.

  The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of
the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes
and William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes
and Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be
supported. They saw what the private secretary in May had
overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the American
Minister made a mistake, and, since his strength was theirs, they
lost no time in expressing to all the world their estimate of the
Minister's character. Between them the Minister was almost safe.

  One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences
of different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London,
possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for
in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a
large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes.
Every bore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the
"cool of the evening"; and of course he himself affected social
eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one
who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of
men -- of a great many men. A word from him went far. An
invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost
Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad,
and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he
had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which
were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made
speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too
high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men
who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and
had the ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social
position of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house
in Upper Brook Street to which most clever people were
exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no
one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous
to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader,
a strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a
collector of books, but above all he was a man of the world by
profession, and loved the contacts -- perhaps the collisions --
of society. Not even Henry Brougham dared do the things he did,
yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes was the good-nature of London;
the Gargantuan type of its refinement and coarseness; the most
universal figure of May Fair.

  Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or
Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E.
Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever
to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite
the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or
political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or
variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the
singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and
Lancashiremen seem to hold dear -- the exterior roughness assumed
to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature.
Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker
ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and
emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a
daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace
of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union
cause and made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was
sure to do, partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery
convictions, and partly because it gave him a practical opening
in the House. As a new member, he needed a field.

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

  In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed
as enemies of order, -- anarchists, -- and anarchists they were
if hatred of the so-called established orders made them so. About
them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly the
side of the Union against Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers
to London society, they were at home in the American Legation,
delightful dinner-company, talking always with reckless freedom.
Cobden was the milder and more persuasive; Bright was the more
dangerous to approach; but the private secretary delighted in
both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them talk the same
language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the House.

  With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a
little ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it
might, and disposed to wait before moving again. Little by
little, friends gathered about the Legation who were no
fair-weather companions. The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall,
Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an annoying and troublesome
enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the most valuable
friends the Minister found, both politically and socially, and
the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private secretary
shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and never
forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's
claret which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he
insisted that it was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on
by assenting to his point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent
pleasure in dispute, and in that respect the Duke would perhaps
have done better; but the secretary had to admit that though at
other periods of life he was sufficiently and even amply snubbed
by Englishmen, he could never recall a single occasion during
this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.

  Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either
men or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for
Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made
Devonshire House almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent
Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of
Alderley whose house was one of the most frequented in London.
Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was always a friend. Yet the
regular course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir
Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which young
Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped
them. Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came
into close alliance. By the time society began to reopen its
doors after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private
secretary occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no
more effort of any kind, but silently waited the end. Whatever
might be the advantages of social relations to his father and
mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and society was
futile. He meant to go home.

[combinator]

CHAPTER IX

FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)

  OF the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a
shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in
his short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he
could plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had
found his chief amusement in bloodshed; but the ferocious joy of
destruction at its best requires that one should kill what one
hates, and young Adams neither hated nor wanted to kill his
friends the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as to wipe
England off the earth. Never could any good come from that
besotted race! He was feebly trying to save his own life. Every
day the British Government deliberately crowded him one step
further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knew it; no
one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent
Affair showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of
the rebel cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes,
the sign of hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to
intervene. Lord Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were
discourteous in their indifference, and, to an irritable young
private secretary of twenty-four, were insolent in their
disregard of truth. Whatever forms of phrase were usual in public
to modify the harshness of invective, in private no political
opponent in England, and few political friends, hesitated to say
brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This was no great
reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the
intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief
that Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an
instant did the Legation draw a free breath. The suspense was
hideous and unendurable.

  The Minister, no doubt, endured it, but he had support and
consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his
friends who were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps about
Richmond, or his enemies who were exulting in Pall Mall. He bore
it as well as he could till midsummer, but, when the story of the
second Bull Run appeared, he could bear it no longer, and after a
sleepless night, walking up and down his room without reflecting
that his father was beneath him, he announced at breakfast his
intention to go home into the army. His mother seemed to be less
impressed by the announcement than by the walking over her head,
which was so unlike her as to surprise her son. His father, too,
received the announcement quietly. No doubt they expected it, and
had taken their measures in advance. In those days, parents got
used to all sorts of announcements from their children. Mr. Adams
took his son's defection as quietly as he took Bull Run; but his
son never got the chance to go. He found obstacles constantly
rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brother Charles, who
was himself in the Army of the Potomac, and whose opinion had
always the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with
delaying action; but he felt, of his own accord, that if he
deserted his post in London, and found the Capuan comforts he
expected in Virginia where he would have only bullets to wound
him, he would never forgive himself for leaving his father and
mother alone to be devoured by the wild beasts of the British
amphitheatre. This reflection might not have stopped him, but his
father's suggestion was decisive. The Minister pointed out that
it was too late for him to take part in the actual campaign, and
that long before next spring they would all go home together.


  The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel
cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again
to copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a
continuous supply. Properly, the affidavits were no business of
the private secretary, but practically the private secretary did
a second secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would
save Mr. Seward the trouble of sending more secretaries of his
own selection to help the Minister. The work was nothing, and no
one ever complained of it; not even Moran, the Secretary of
Legation after the departure of Charley Wilson, though he might
sit up all night to copy. Not the work, but the play exhausted.
The effort of facing a hostile society was bad enough, but that
of facing friends was worse. After terrific disasters like the
seven days before Richmond and the second Bull Run, friends
needed support; a tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the
average mind sees quickest through a bluff; nothing answers but
candor; yet private secretaries never feel candid, however much
they feel the reverse, and therefore they must affect candor; not
always a simple act when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and
choking with tears over the blunders and incapacity of one's
Government. If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
Least of all, must one throw extra strain on the Minister, who
had all he could carry without being fretted in his family. One
must read one's Times every morning over one's muffin without
reading aloud -- "Another disastrous Federal Defeat"; and one
might not even indulge in harmless profanity. Self-restraint
among friends required much more effort than keeping a quiet face
before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day the
private secretary smiled, when standing with the crowd in the
throne-room while the endless procession made bows to the royal
family, at hearing, behind his shoulder, one Cabinet Minister
remark gaily to another: "So the Federals have got another
licking!" The point of the remark was its truth. Even a private
secretary had learned to control his tones and guard his features
and betray no joy over the "lickings" of an enemy -- in the
enemy's presence.

  London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial;
it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of
Abraham Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible
more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two
men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless;
explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust
itself. One's best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for
the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality and Seward's ferocity
became a dogma of popular faith. The last time Henry Adams saw
Thackeray, before his sudden death at Christmas in 1863, was in
entering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening reception.
Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing because,
in his usual blind way, he had stumbled into the wrong house and
not found it out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he
knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his
tone changed as he spoke of his -- and Adams's -- friend, Mrs.
Frank Hampton, of South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally
Baxter and painted as Ethel Newcome. Though he had never quite
forgiven her marriage, his warmth of feeling revived when he
heard that she had died of consumption at Columbia while her
parents and sister were refused permission to pass through the
lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice trembled
and his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln and
his hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals
made a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of women --
particularly of women -- in order to punish their opponents. On
quite insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had
Adams carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was
unjust, he would have gained nothing by showing them. At that
moment Thackeray, and all London society with him, needed the
nervous relief of expressing emotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not
what they said he -- was what were they?

  For like reason, the members of the Legation kept silence, even
in private, under the boorish Scotch jibes of Carlyle. If Carlyle
was wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this
measure would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more
sincere or more sound in one thought than in another. The proof
that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt
to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself. Demolition
of one's idols is painful, and Carlyle had been an idol. Doubts
cast on his stature spread far into general darkness like shadows
of a setting sun. Not merely the idols fell, but also the habit
of faith. If Carlyle, too, was a fraud, what were his scholars
and school?

  Society as a rule was civil, and one had no more reason to
complain than every other diplomatist has had, in like
conditions, but one's few friends in society were mere ornament.
The Legation could not dream of contesting social control. The
best they could do was to escape mortification, and by this time
their relations were good enough to save the Minister's family
from that annoyance. Now and then, the fact could not be wholly
disguised that some one had refused to meet -- or to receive --
the Minister; but never an open insult, or any expression of
which the Minister had to take notice. Diplomacy served as a
buffer in times of irritation, and no diplomat who knew his
business fretted at what every diplomat -- and none more commonly
than the English -- had to expect; therefore Henry Adams, though
not a diplomat and wholly unprotected, went his way peacefully
enough, seeing clearly that society cared little to make his
acquaintance, but seeing also no reason why society should
discover charms in him of which he was himself unconscious. He
went where he was asked; he was always courteously received; he
was, on the whole, better treated than at Washington; and he held
his tongue.

  For a thousand reasons, the best diplomatic house in London was
Lord Palmerston's, while Lord John Russell's was one of the
worst. Of neither host could a private secretary expect to know
anything. He might as well have expected to know the Grand Lama.
Personally Lord Palmerston was the last man in London that a
cautious private secretary wanted to know. Other Prime Ministers
may perhaps have lived who inspired among diplomatists as much
distrust as Palmerston, and yet between Palmerston's word and
Russell's word, one hesitated to decide, and gave years of
education to deciding, whether either could be trusted, or how
far. The Queen herself in her famous memorandum of August 12,
1850, gave her opinion of Palmerston in words that differed
little from words used by Lord John Russell, and both the Queen
and Russell said in substance only what Cobden and Bright said in
private. Every diplomatist agreed with them, yet the diplomatic
standard of trust seemed to be other than the parliamentarian No
professional diplomatists worried about falsehoods. Words were
with them forms of expression which varied with individuals, but
falsehood was more or less necessary to all. The worst liars were
the candid. What diplomatists wanted to know was the motive that
lay beyond the expression. In the case of Palmerston they were
unanimous in warning new colleagues that they might expect to be
sacrificed by him to any momentary personal object. Every new
Minister or Ambassador at the Court of St. James received this
preliminary lesson that he must, if possible, keep out of
Palmerston's reach. The rule was not secret or merely diplomatic.
The Queen herself had emphatically expressed the same opinion
officially. If Palmerston had an object to gain, he would go down
to the House of Commons and betray or misrepresent a foreign
Minister, without concern for his victim. No one got back on him
with a blow equally mischievous -- not even the Queen -- for, as
old Baron Brunnow described him: "C'est une peau de rhinocere!"
Having gained his point, he laughed, and his public laughed with
him, for the usual British -- or American -- public likes to be
amused, and thought it very amusing to see these beribboned and
bestarred foreigners caught and tossed and gored on the horns of
this jovial, slashing, devil-may-care British bull.

  Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is
their own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them;
but they complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to
lay traps. He was the enfant terrible of the British Government.
On the other hand, Lady Palmerston was believed to be good and
loyal. All the diplomats and their wives seemed to think so, and
took their troubles to her, believing that she would try to help
them. For this reason among others, her evenings at home --
Saturday Reviews, they were called -- had great vogue. An
ignorant young American could not be expected to explain it.
Cambridge House was no better for entertaining than a score of
others. Lady Palmerston was no longer young or handsome, and
could hardly at any age have been vivacious. The people one met
there were never smart and seldom young; they were largely
diplomatic, and diplomats are commonly dull; they were largely
political, and politicians rarely decorate or beautify an evening
party; they were sprinkled with literary people, who are
notoriously unfashionable; the women were of course ill-dressed
and middle-aged; the men looked mostly bored or out of place;
yet, beyond a doubt, Cambridge House was the best, and perhaps
the only political house in London, and its success was due to
Lady Palmerston, who never seemed to make an effort beyond a
friendly recognition. As a lesson in social education, Cambridge
House gave much subject for thought. First or last, one was to
know dozens of statesmen more powerful and more agreeable than
Lord Palmerston; dozens of ladies more beautiful and more
painstaking than Lady Palmerston; but no political house so
successful as Cambridge House. The world never explains such
riddles. The foreigners said only that Lady Palmerston was "
sympathique."

  The small fry of the Legations were admitted there, or
tolerated, without a further effort to recognize their existence,
but they were pleased because rarely tolerated anywhere else, and
there they could at least stand in a corner and look at a bishop
or even a duke. This was the social diversion of young Adams. No
one knew him -- not even the lackeys. The last Saturday evening
he ever attended, he gave his name as usual at the foot of the
staircase, and was rather disturbed to hear it shouted up as "Mr.
Handrew Hadams!" He tried to correct it, and the footman shouted
more loudly: "Mr. Hanthony Hadams!" With some temper he repeated
the correction, and was finally announced as "Mr. Halexander
Hadams," and under this name made his bow for the last time to
Lord Palmerston who certainly knew no better.

  Far down the staircase one heard Lord Palmerston's laugh as he
stood at the door receiving his guests, talking probably to one
of his henchmen, Delane, Borthwick, or Hayward, who were sure to
be near. The laugh was singular, mechanical, wooden, and did not
seem to disturb his features. "Ha! . . . Ha! . . . Ha!" Each was
a slow, deliberate ejaculation, and all were in the same tone, as
though he meant to say: "Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes!" by way of
assurance. It was a laugh of 1810 and the Congress of Vienna.
Adams would have much liked to stop a moment and ask whether
William Pitt and the Duke of Wellington had laughed so; but young
men attached to foreign Ministers asked no questions at all of
Palmerston and their chiefs asked as few as possible. One made
the usual bow and received the usual glance of civility; then
passed on to Lady Palmerston, who was always kind in manner, but
who wasted no remarks; and so to Lady Jocelyn with her daughter,
who commonly had something friendly to say; then went through the
diplomatic corps, Brunnow, Musurus, Azeglio, Apponyi, Van de
Weyer, Bille, Tricoupi, and the rest, finally dropping into the
hands of some literary accident as strange there as one's self.
The routine varied little. There was no attempt at entertainment.
Except for the desperate isolation of these two first seasons,
even secretaries would have found the effort almost as mechanical
as a levee at St. James's Palace.

  Lord Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary; he was Prime
Minister, but he loved foreign affairs and could no more resist
scoring a point in diplomacy than in whist. Ministers of foreign
powers, knowing his habits, tried to hold him at arms'-length,
and, to do this, were obliged to court the actual Foreign
Secretary, Lord John Russell, who, on July 30, 1861, was called
up to the House of Lords as an earl. By some process of personal
affiliation, Minister Adams succeeded in persuading himself that
he could trust Lord Russell more safely than Lord Palmerston. His
son, being young and ill-balanced in temper, thought there was
nothing to choose. Englishmen saw little difference between them,
and Americans were bound to follow English experience in English
character. Minister Adams had much to learn, although with him as
well as with his son, the months of education began to count as
aeons.

[combinator]

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

  The moment was nervous -- as far as the private secretary knew,
quite the most critical moment in the records of American
diplomacy -- but the story belongs to history, not to education,
and can be read there by any one who cares to read it. As a part
of Henry Adams's education it had a value distinct from history.
That his father succeeded in muzzling Palmerston without a public
scandal, was well enough for the Minister, but was not enough for
a private secretary who liked going to Cambridge House, and was
puzzled to reconcile contradictions. That Palmerston had wanted a
quarrel was obvious; why, then, did he submit so tamely to being
made the victim of the quarrel? The correspondence that followed
his note was conducted feebly on his side, and he allowed the
United States Minister to close it by a refusal to receive
further communications from him except through Lord Russell. The
step was excessively strong, for it broke off private relations
as well as public, and cost even the private secretary his
invitations to Cambridge House. Lady Palmerston tried her best,
but the two ladies found no resource except tears. They had to do
with American Minister perplexed in the extreme. Not that Mr.
Adams lost his temper, for he never felt such a weight of
responsibility, and was never more cool; but he could conceive no
other way of protecting his Government, not to speak of himself,
than to force Lord Russell to interpose. He believed that
Palmerston's submission and silence were due to Russell. Perhaps
he was right; at the time, his son had no doubt of it, though
afterwards he felt less sure. Palmerston wanted a quarrel; the
motive seemed evident; yet when the quarrel was made, he backed
out of it; for some reason it seemed that he did not want it --
at least, not then. He never showed resentment against Mr. Adams
at the time or afterwards. He never began another quarrel.
Incredible as it seemed, he behaved like a well-bred gentleman
who felt himself in the wrong. Possibly this change may have been
due to Lord Russell's remonstrances, but the private secretary
would have felt his education in politics more complete had he
ever finally made up his mind whether Palmerston was more angry
with General Butler, or more annoyed at himself, for committing
what was in both cases an unpardonable betise.

  At the time, the question was hardly raised, for no one doubted
Palmerston's attitude or his plans. The season was near its end,
and Cambridge House was soon closed. The Legation had troubles
enough without caring to publish more. The tide of English
feeling ran so violently against it that one could only wait to
see whether General McClellan would bring it relief. The year
1862 was a dark spot in Henry Adams's life, and the education it
gave was mostly one that he gladly forgot. As far as he was
aware, he made no friends; he could hardly make enemies; yet
towards the close of the year he was flattered by an invitation
from Monckton Milnes to Fryston, and it was one of many acts of
charity towards the young that gave Milnes immortality. Milnes
made it his business to be kind. Other people criticised him for
his manner of doing it, but never imitated him. Naturally, a
dispirited, disheartened private secretary was exceedingly
grateful, and never forgot the kindness, but it was chiefly as
education that this first country visit had value. Commonly,
country visits are much alike, but Monckton Milnes was never like
anybody, and his country parties served his purpose of mixing
strange elements. Fryston was one of a class of houses that no
one sought for its natural beauties, and the winter mists of
Yorkshire were rather more evident for the absence of the hostess
on account of them, so that the singular guests whom Milnes
collected to enliven his December had nothing to do but astonish
each other, if anything could astonish such men. Of the five,
Adams alone was tame; he alone added nothing to the wit or humor,
except as a listener; but they needed a listener and he was
useful. Of the remaining four, Milnes was the oldest, and perhaps
the sanest in spite of his superficial eccentricities, for
Yorkshire sanity was true to a standard of its own, if not to
other conventions; yet even Milnes startled a young American
whose Boston and Washington mind was still fresh. He would not
have been startled by the hard-drinking, horse-racing
Yorkshireman of whom he had read in books; but Milnes required a
knowledge of society and literature that only himself possessed,
if one were to try to keep pace with him. He had sought contact
with everybody and everything that Europe could offer. He knew it
all from several points of view, and chiefly as humorous.

  The second of the party was also of a certain age; a quiet,
well-mannered, singularly agreeable gentleman of the literary
class. When Milnes showed Adams to his room to dress for dinner,
he stayed a moment to say a word about this guest, whom he called
Stirling of Keir. His sketch closed with the hint that Stirling
was violent only on one point -- hatred of Napoleon III. On that
point, Adams was himself sensitive, which led him to wonder how
bad the Scotch gentleman might be. The third was a man of thirty
or thereabouts, whom Adams had already met at Lady Palmerston's
carrying his arm in a sling. His figure and bearing were
sympathetic -- almost pathetic -- with a certain grave and gentle
charm, a pleasant smile, and an interesting story. He was
Lawrence Oliphant, just from Japan, where he had been wounded in
the fanatics' attack on the British Legation. He seemed
exceptionally sane and peculiarly suited for country houses,
where every man would enjoy his company, and every woman would
adore him. He had not then published "Piccadilly"; perhaps he was
writing it; while, like all the young men about the Foreign
Office, he contributed to The Owl.

  The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a
year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action -- and in
this trait, was remotely followed, a generation later, by another
famous young man, Robert Louis Stevenson -- a tropical bird,
high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and
screams of humor, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale.
One could hardly call him a crimson macaw among owls, and yet no
ordinary contrast availed. Milnes introduced him as Mr. Algernon
Swinburne. The name suggested nothing. Milnes was always
unearthing new coins and trying to give them currency. He had
unearthed Henry Adams who knew himself to be worthless and not
current. When Milnes lingered a moment in Adams's room to add
that Swinburne had written some poetry, not yet published, of
really extraordinary merit, Adams only wondered what more Milnes
would discover, and whether by chance he could discover merit in
a private secretary. He was capable of it.

  In due course this party of five men sat down to dinner with
the usual club manners of ladyless dinner-tables, easy and formal
at the same time. Conversation ran first to Oliphant who told his
dramatic story simply, and from him the talk drifted off into
other channels, until Milnes thought it time to bring Swinburne
out. Then, at last, if never before, Adams acquired education.
What he had sought so long, he found; but he was none the wiser;
only the more astonished. For once, too, he felt at ease, for the
others were no less astonished than himself, and their
astonishment grew apace. For the rest of the evening Swinburne
figured alone; the end of dinner made the monologue only freer,
for in 1862, even when ladies were not in the house, smoking was
forbidden, and guests usually smoked in the stables or the
kitchen; but Monckton Milnes was a licensed libertine who let his
guests smoke in Adams's bedroom, since Adams was an
American-German barbarian ignorant of manners; and there after
dinner all sat -- or lay -- till far into the night, listening to
the rush of Swinburne's talk. In a long experience, before or
after, no one ever approached it; yet one had heard accounts of
the best talking of the time, and read accounts of talkers in all
time, among the rest, of Voltaire, who seemed to approach nearest
the pattern.

  That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of
men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite
original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and
convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even
Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible
memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and
modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of
Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or
Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of
his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads --
"Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of
Burdens" -- which he declaimed as though they were books of the
Iliad. It was singular that his most appreciative listener should
have been the author only of pretty verses like "We wandered by
the brook-side," and "She seemed to those that saw them meet";
and who never cared to write in any other tone; but Milnes took
everything into his sympathies, including Americans like young
Adams whose standards were stiffest of all, while Swinburne,
though millions of ages far from them, united them by his humor
even more than by his poetry. The story of his first day as a
member of Professor Stubbs's household was professionally clever
farce, if not high comedy, in a young man who could write a Greek
ode or a Proven‡al chanson as easily as an English quatrain.

  Late at night when the symposium broke up, Stirling of Keir
wanted to take with him to his chamber a copy of "Queen
Rosamund," the only volume Swinburne had then published, which
was on the library table, and Adams offered to light him down
with his solitary bedroom candle. All the way, Stirling was
ejaculating explosions of wonder, until at length, at the foot of
the stairs and at the climax of his imagination, he paused, and
burst out: "He's a cross between the devil and the Duke of
Argyll!"

  To appreciate the full merit of this description, a judicious
critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one --
at least in person -- but he understood that to a Scotchman the
likeness meant something quite portentous, beyond English
experience, supernatural, and what the French call moyenageux, or
mediaeval with a grotesque turn. That Stirling as well as Milnes
should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who
lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that
Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and
pork-pies of London, at once the cause and effect of dyspepsia.
The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on
a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.

  Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius
never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its
uttermost flights, was never moyenageux. One felt the horror of
Longfellow and Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of
Holmes, at the wild Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What
could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his
good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend in
Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry
Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams could no more
interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet.
To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of
genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there
the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only
receive; one had nothing to give -- nothing even to offer.

  Swinburne tested him then and there by one of his favorite
tests -- Victor Hugo for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the
surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a
severe exercise for foreigners; it requires extraordinary
knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear to
appreciate even the recitation of French verse; but unless a poet
has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the
end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with
pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did
not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade
Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for
Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was
unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing.

  Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to
sustain himself on the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo;
but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he
succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In
truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's
English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's
failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to
admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was
needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost.

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

  With the best of will, one could not do this in London; the
actors had not the instinct of the drama; and yet even a private
secretary was not wholly wanting in instinct. As soon as he
reached town he hurried to Pickering's for a copy of "Queen
Rosamund," and at that time, if Swinburne was not joking,
Pickering had sold seven copies. When the "Poems and Ballads"
came out, and met their great success and scandal, he sought one
of the first copies from Moxon. If he had sinned and doubted at
all, he wholly repented and did penance before "Atalanta in
Calydon," and would have offered Swinburne a solemn worship as
Milnes's female offered Hugo, if it would have pleased the poet.
Unfortunately it was worthless.

  The three young men returned to London, and each went his own
way. Adams's interest in making friends was something desperate,
but "the London season," Milnes used to say, "is a season for
making acquaintances and losing friends"; there was no intimate
life. Of Swinburne he saw no more till Monckton Milnes summoned
his whole array of Frystonians to support him in presiding at the
dinner of the Authors' Fund, when Adams found himself seated next
to Swinburne, famous then, but no nearer. They never met again.
Oliphant he met oftener; all the world knew and loved him; but he
too disappeared in the way that all the world knows. Stirling of
Keir, after one or two efforts, passed also from Adams's vision
into Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. The only record of his
wonderful visit to Fryston may perhaps exist still in the
registers of the St. James's Club, for immediately afterwards
Milnes proposed Henry Adams for membership, and unless his memory
erred, the nomination was seconded by Tricoupi and endorsed by
Laurence Oliphant and Evelyn Ashley. The list was a little
singular for variety, but on the whole it suggested that the
private secretary was getting on.

[combinator]

CHAPTER X

POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)

  ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquired
whether Minister Adams would like the place of Assistant
Secretary for his son. It was the first -- and last -- office
ever offered him, if indeed he could claim what was offered in
fact to his father. To them both, the change seemed useless. Any
young man could make some sort of Assistant Secretary; only one,
just at that moment, could make an Assistant Son. More than half
his duties were domestic; they sometimes required long absences;
they always required independence of the Government service. His
position was abnormal. The British Government by courtesy allowed
the son to go to Court as Attache, though he was never attached,
and after five or six years' toleration, the decision was
declared irregular. In the Legation, as private secretary, he was
liable to do Secretary's work. In society, when official, he was
attached to the Minister; when unofficial, he was a young man
without any position at all. As the years went on, he began to
find advantages in having no position at all except that of young
man. Gradually he aspired to become a gentleman; just a member of
society like the rest. The position was irregular; at that time
many positions were irregular; yet it lent itself to a sort of
irregular education that seemed to be the only sort of education
the young man was ever to get.

  Such as it was, few young men had more. The spring and summer
of 1863 saw a great change in Secretary Seward's management of
foreign affairs. Under the stimulus of danger, he too got
education. He felt, at last, that his official representatives
abroad needed support. Officially he could give them nothing but
despatches, which were of no great value to any one; and at best
the mere weight of an office had little to do with the public.
Governments were made to deal with Governments, not with private
individuals or with the opinions of foreign society. In order to
affect European opinion, the weight of American opinion had to be
brought to bear personally, and had to be backed by the weight of
American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously to work and sent
over every important American on whom he could lay his hands. All
came to the Legation more or less intimately, and Henry Adams had
a chance to see them all, bankers or bishops, who did their work
quietly and well, though, to the outsider, the work seemed wasted
and the "influential classes" more indurated with prejudice than
ever. The waste was only apparent; the work all told in the end,
and meanwhile it helped education.

  Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the
Minister and to cooperate with him. The most interesting of these
was Thurlow Weed, who came to do what the private secretary
himself had attempted two years before, with boyish ignorance of
his own powers. Mr. Weed took charge of the press, and began, to
the amused astonishment of the secretaries, by making what the
Legation had learned to accept as the invariable mistake of every
amateur diplomat; he wrote letters to the London Times. Mistake
or not, Mr. Weed soon got into his hands the threads of
management, and did quietly and smoothly all that was to be done.
With his work the private secretary had no connection; it was he
that interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete American education
in himself. His mind was naturally strong and beautifully
balanced; his temper never seemed ruffled; his manners were
carefully perfect in the style of benevolent simplicity, the
tradition of Benjamin Franklin. He was the model of political
management and patient address; but the trait that excited
enthusiasm in a private secretary was his faculty of irresistibly
conquering confidence. Of all flowers in the garden of education,
confidence was becoming the rarest; but before Mr. Weed went
away, young Adams followed him about not only obediently -- for
obedience had long since become a blind instinct -- but rather
with sympathy and affection, much like a little dog.

  The sympathy was not due only to Mr. Weed's skill of
management, although Adams never met another such master, or any
one who approached him; nor was the confidence due to any display
of professions, either moral or social, by Mr. Weed. The trait
that astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparent
unselfishness. Never, in any man who wielded such power, did
Adams meet anything like it. The effect of power and publicity on
all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by
killing the victim's sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a
passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use
expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it
stimulates; and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a rare
immune. He thought apparently not of himself, but of the person
he was talking with. He held himself naturally in the background.
He was not jealous. He grasped power, but not office. He
distributed offices by handfuls without caring to take them. He
had the instinct of empire: he gave, but he did not receive. This
rare superiority to the politicians he controlled, a trait that
private secretaries never met in the politicians themselves,
excited Adams's wonder and curiosity, but when he tried to get
behind it, and to educate himself from the stores of Mr. Weed's
experience, he found the study still more fascinating. Management
was an instinct with Mr. Weed; an object to be pursued for its
own sake, as one plays cards; but he appeared to play with men as
though they were only cards; he seemed incapable of feeling
himself one of them. He took them and played them for their
face-value; but once, when he had told, with his usual humor,
some stories of his political experience which were strong even
for the Albany lobby, the private secretary made bold to ask him
outright: "Then, Mr. Weed, do you think that no politician can be
trusted? " Mr. Weed hesitated for a moment; then said in his mild
manner: "I never advise a young man to begin by thinking so."

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

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

  Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of
dishonesty. The reasons that satisfied him had not altogether
satisfied his father, and of course his father's doubts gravely
shook his own convictions, but, in practice, if only for safety,
the Legation put little or no confidence in Ministers, and there
the private secretary's diplomatic education began. The
recognition of belligerency, the management of the Declaration of
Paris, the Trent Affair, all strengthened the belief that Lord
Russell had started in May, 1861, with the assumption that the
Confederacy was established; every step he had taken proved his
persistence in the same idea; he never would consent to put
obstacles in the way of recognition; and he was waiting only for
the proper moment to interpose. All these points seemed so fixed
-- so self-evident -- that no one in the Legation would have
doubted or even discussed them except that Lord Russell
obstinately denied the whole charge, and persisted in assuring

  Minister Adams of his honest and impartial neutrality.
With the insolence of youth and zeal, Henry Adams jumped at once
to the conclusion that Earl Russell -- like other statesmen --
lied; and, although the Minister thought differently, he had to
act as though Russell were false. Month by month the
demonstration followed its mathematical stages; one of the most
perfect educational courses in politics and diplomacy that a
young man ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly tutors in
the world were provided for him at public expense -- Lord
Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr.
Gladstone, Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by the
British Government; William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams,
William Maxwell Evarts, Thurlow Weed, and other considerable
professors employed by the American Government; but there was
only one student to profit by this immense staff of teachers. The
private secretary alone sought education.

  To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught.
Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel's metaphysical
doctrine of the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to
understand. Yet the stages of demonstration were clear. They
began in June, 1862, after the escape of one rebel cruiser, by
the remonstrances of the Minister against the escape of "No.
290," which was imminent. Lord Russell declined to act on the
evidence. New evidence was sent in every few days, and with it,
on July 24, was included Collier's legal opinion: "It appears
difficult to make out a stronger case of infringement of the
Foreign Enlistment Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion,
is little better than a dead letter." Such language implied
almost a charge of collusion with the rebel agents -- an intent
to aid the Confederacy. In spite of the warning, Earl Russell let
the ship, four days afterwards, escape.

  Young Adams had nothing to do with law; that was business of
his betters. His opinion of law hung on his opinion of lawyers.
In spite of Thurlow Weed's advice, could one afford to trust
human nature in politics ? History said not. Sir Robert Collier
seemed to hold that Law agreed with History. For education the
point was vital. If one could not trust a dozen of the most
respected private characters in the world, composing the Queen's
Ministry, one could trust no mortal man.

  Lord Russell felt the force of this inference, and undertook to
disprove it. His effort lasted till his death. At first he
excused himself by throwing the blame on the law officers. This
was a politician's practice, and the lawyers overruled it. Then
he pleaded guilty to criminal negligence, and said in his
"Recollections":-- "I assent entirely to the opinion of the Lord
Chief Justice of England that the Alabama ought to have been
detained during the four days I was waiting for the opinion of
the law officers. But I think that the fault was not that of the
commissioners of customs, it was my fault as Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs." This concession brought all parties on
common ground. Of course it was his fault! The true issue lay not
in the question of his fault, but of his intent. To a young man,
getting an education in politics, there could be no sense in
history unless a constant course of faults implied a constant
motive.

  For his father the question was not so abstruse; it was a
practical matter of business to be handled as Weed or Evarts
handled their bargains and jobs. Minister Adams held the
convenient belief that, in the main, Russell was true, and the
theory answered his purposes so well that he died still holding
it. His son was seeking education, and wanted to know whether he
could, in politics, risk trusting any one. Unfortunately no one
could then decide; no one knew the facts. Minister Adams died
without knowing them. Henry Adams was an older man than his
father in 1862, before he learned a part of them. The most
curious fact, even then, was that Russell believed in his own
good faith and that Argyll believed in it also.

  Argyll betrayed a taste for throwing the blame on Bethell, Lord
Westbury, then Lord Chancellor, but this escape helped Adams not
at all. On the contrary, it complicated the case of Russell. In
England, one half of society enjoyed throwing stones at Lord
Palmerston, while the other half delighted in flinging mud at
Earl Russell, but every one of every party united in pelting
Westbury with every missile at hand. The private secretary had no
doubts about him, for he never professed to be moral. He was the
head and heart of the whole rebel contention, and his opinions on
neutrality were as clear as they were on morality. The private
secretary had nothing to do with him, and regretted it, for Lord
Westbury's wit and wisdom were great; but as far as his authority
went he affirmed the law that in politics no man should be
trusted.

  Russell alone insisted on his honesty of intention and
persuaded both the Duke and the Minister to believe him. Every
one in the Legation accepted his assurances as the only
assertions they could venture to trust. They knew he expected the
rebels to win in the end, but they believed he would not actively
interpose to decide it. On that -- on nothing else -- they rested
their frail hopes of remaining a day longer in England. Minister
Adams remained six years longer in England; then returned to
America to lead a busy life till he died in 1886 still holding
the same faith in Earl Russell, who had died in 1878. In 1889,
Spencer Walpole published the official life of Earl Russell, and
told a part of the story which had never been known to the
Minister and which astounded his son, who burned with curiosity
to know what his father would have said of it.

  The story was this: The Alabama escaped, by Russell's confessed
negligence, on July 28, 1862. In America the Union armies had
suffered great disasters before Richmond and at the second Bull
Run, August 29-30, followed by Lee's invasion of Maryland,
September 7, the news of which, arriving in England on September
14, roused the natural idea that the crisis was at hand. The next
news was expected by the Confederates to announce the fall of
Washington or Baltimore. Palmerston instantly, September 14,
wrote to Russell: "If this should happen, would it not be time
for us to consider whether in such a state of things England and
France might not address the contending parties and recommend an
arrangement on the basis of separation?"

  This letter, quite in the line of Palmerston's supposed
opinions, would have surprised no one, if it had been
communicated to the Legation; and indeed, if Lee had captured
Washington, no one could have blamed Palmerston for offering
intervention. Not Palmerston's letter but Russell's reply,
merited the painful attention of a young man seeking a moral
standard for judging politicians: --

[combinator]

GOTHA, September, 17, 1862

  MY DEAR PALMERSTON:--

    Whether the Federal army is destroyed or not, it is clear
  that it is driven back to Washington and has made no progress
  in subduing the insurgent States. Such being the case, I agree
  with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the
  United States Government with a view to the recognition of the
  independence of the Confederates. I agree further that in case
  of failure, we ought ourselves to recognize the Southern States
  as an independent State. For the purpose of taking so important
  a step, I think we must have a meeting of the Cabinet. The 23d
  or 30th would suit me for the meeting.

    We ought then, if we agree on such a step, to propose it
  first to France, and then on the part of England and France, to
  Russia and other powers, as a measure decided upon by us.

    We ought to make ourselves safe in Canada, not by sending
  more troops there, but by concentrating those we have in a few
  defensible posts before the winter sets in. . . .

  Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical
difficulty in education which a mere student could never
overcome; a difficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want
of experience, but in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord
Russell's course had been consistent from the first, and had all
the look of rigid determination to recognize the Southern
Confederacy "with a view" to breaking up the Union. His letter of
September 17 hung directly on his encouragement of the Alabama
and his protection of the rebel navy; while the whole of his plan
had its root in the Proclamation of Belligerency, May 13, 1861.
The policy had every look of persistent forethought, but it took
for granted the deliberate dishonesty of three famous men:
Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. This dishonesty, as concerned
Russell, was denied by Russell himself, and disbelieved by
Argyll, Forster, and most of America's friends in England, as
well as by Minister Adams. What the Minister would have thought
had he seen this letter of September 17, his son would have
greatly liked to know, but he would have liked still more to know
what the Minister would have thought of Palmerston's answer,
dated September 23: --

   . . . It is evident that a great conflict is taking place to
  the northwest of Washington, and its issue must have a great
  effect on the state of affairs. If the Federals sustain a great
  defeat, they may be at once ready for mediation, and the iron
  should be struck while it is hot. If, on the other hand, they
  should have the best of it, we may wait a while and see what
  may follow. . .

  The roles were reversed. Russell wrote what was expected from
Palmerston, or even more violently; while Palmerston wrote what
was expected from Russell, or even more temperately. The private
secretary's view had been altogether wrong, which would not have
much surprised even him, but he would have been greatly
astonished to learn that the most confidential associates of
these men knew little more about their intentions than was known
in the Legation. The most trusted member of the Cabinet was Lord
Granville, and to him Russell next wrote. Granville replied at
once decidedly opposing recognition of the Confederacy, and
Russell sent the reply to Palmerston, who returned it October 2,
with the mere suggestion of waiting for further news from
America. At the same time Granville wrote to another member of
the Cabinet, Lord Stanley of Alderley, a letter published forty
years afterwards in Granville's "Life" (I, 442) to the private
secretary altogether the most curious and instructive relic of
the whole lesson in politics: 

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

  Out of a Cabinet of a dozen members, Granville, the best
informed of them all, could pick only three who would favor
recognition. Even a private secretary thought he knew as much as
this, or more. Ignorance was not confined to the young and
insignificant, nor were they the only victims of blindness.
Granville's letter made only one point clear. He knew of no fixed
policy or conspiracy. If any existed, it was confined to
Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and perhaps Newcastle. In truth,
the Legation knew, then, all that was to be known, and the true
fault of education was to suspect too much.

  By that time, October 3, news of Antietam and of Lee's retreat
into Virginia had reached London. The Emancipation Proclamation
arrived. Had the private secretary known all that Granville or
Palmerston knew, he would surely have thought the danger past, at
least for a time, and any man of common sense would have told him
to stop worrying over phantoms. This healthy lesson would have
been worth much for practical education, but it was quite upset
by the sudden rush of a new actor upon the stage with a rhapsody
that made Russell seem sane, and all education superfluous.

  This new actor, as every one knows, was William Ewart
Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. If, in the domain of
the world's politics, one point was fixed, one value ascertained,
one element serious, it was the British Exchequer; and if one man
lived who could be certainly counted as sane by overwhelming
interest, it was the man who had in charge the finances of
England. If education had the smallest value, it should have
shown its force in Gladstone, who was educated beyond all record
of English training. From him, if from no one else, the poor
student could safely learn.

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

  Had the puzzled student seen this letter, he must have
concluded from it that the best educated statesman England ever
produced did not know what he was talking about, an assumption
which all the world would think quite inadmissible from a private
secretary -- but this was a trifle. Gladstone having thus
arranged, with Palmerston and Russell, for intervention in the
American war, reflected on the subject for a fortnight from
September 25 to October 7, when he was to speak on the occasion
of a great dinner at Newcastle. He decided to announce the
Government's policy with all the force his personal and official
authority could give it. This decision was no sudden impulse; it
was the result of deep reflection pursued to the last moment. On
the morning of October 7, he entered in his diary: "Reflected
further on what I should say about Lancashire and America, for
both these subjects are critical." That evening at dinner, as the
mature fruit of his long study, he deliberately pronounced the
famous phrase:--

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

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

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

  Even after forty years, most people would refuse to believe it;
they would still insist that Gladstone, Russell, and Palmerston
were true villains of melodrama. The evidence against Gladstone
in special seemed overwhelming. The word "must" can never be used
by a responsible Minister of one Government towards another, as
Gladstone used it. No one knew so well as he that he and his own
officials and friends at Liverpool were alone "making" a rebel
navy, and that Jefferson Davis had next to nothing to do with it.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer he was the Minister most
interested in knowing that Palmerston, Russell, and himself were
banded together by mutual pledge to make the Confederacy a nation
the next week, and that the Southern leaders had as yet no hope
of "making a nation" but in them. Such thoughts occurred to every
one at the moment and time only added to their force. Never in
the history of political turpitude had any brigand of modern
civilization offered a worse example. The proof of it was that it
outraged even Palmerston, who immediately put up Sir George
Cornewall Lewis to repudiate the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
against whom he turned his press at the same time. Palmerston had
no notion of letting his hand be forced by Gladstone.

  Russell did nothing of the kind; if he agreed with Palmerston,
he followed Gladstone. Although he had just created a new evangel
of non-intervention for Italy, and preached it like an apostle,
he preached the gospel of intervention in America as though he
were a mouthpiece of the Congress of Vienna. On October 13, he
issued his call for the Cabinet to meet, on October 23, for
discussion of the "duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the
most friendly and conciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of
arms." Meanwhile Minister Adams, deeply perturbed and profoundly
anxious, would betray no sign of alarm, and purposely delayed to
ask explanation. The howl of anger against Gladstone became
louder every day, for every one knew that the Cabinet was called
for October 23, and then could not fail to decide its policy
about the United States. Lord Lyons put off his departure for
America till October 25 expressly to share in the conclusions to
be discussed on October 23. When Minister Adams at last requested
an interview, Russell named October 23 as the day. To the last
moment every act of Russell showed that, in his mind, the
intervention was still in doubt.

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

   . . . His lordship took my allusion at once, though not
  without a slight indication of embarrassment. He said that Mr.
  Gladstone had been evidently much misunderstood. I must have
  seen in the newspapers the letters which contained his later
  explanations. That he had certain opinions in regard to the
  nature of the struggle in America, as on all public questions,
  just as other Englishmen had, was natural enough. And it was
  the fashion here for public men to express such as they held in
  their public addresses. Of course it was not for him to disavow
  anything on the part of Mr. Gladstone; but he had no idea that
  in saying what he had, there was a serious intention to justify
  any of the inferences that had been drawn from it of a
  disposition in the Government now to adopt a new policy. . . .

  A student trying to learn the processes of politics in a free
government could not but ponder long on the moral to be drawn
from this "explanation" of Mr. Gladstone by Earl Russell. The
point set for study as the first condition of political life, was
whether any politician could be believed or trusted. The question
which a private secretary asked himself, in copying this despatch
of October 24, 1862, was whether his father believed, or should
believe, one word of Lord Russell's "embarrassment." The "truth"
was not known for thirty years, but when published, seemed to be
the reverse of Earl Russell's statement. Mr. Gladstone's speech
had been drawn out by Russell's own policy of intervention and
had no sense except to declare the "disposition in the Government
now to adopt" that new policy. Earl Russell never disavowed
Gladstone, although Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall
Lewis instantly did so. As far as the curious student could
penetrate the mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed Earl Russell's
intent.

  As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would
decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively
honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might
be ignored as a delusion. Therefore the student felt compelled to
reach some sort of idea that should serve to bring the case
within a general law. Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He
bluntly told Russell that while he was "willing to acquit"
Gladstone of "any deliberate intention to bring on the worst
effects," he was bound to say that Gladstone was doing it quite
as certainly as if he had one; and to this charge, which struck
more sharply at Russell's secret policy than at Gladstone's
public defence of it, Russell replied as well as he could: --

  . . . His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that Lord
  Palmerston and other members of the Government regretted the
  speech, and`Mr. Gladstone himself was not disinclined to
  correct, as far as he could, the misinterpretation which had
  been made of it. It was still their intention to adhere to the
  rule of perfect neutrality in the struggle, and to let it come
  to its natural end without the smallest interference, direct or
  otherwise. But he could not say what circumstances might happen
  from month to month in the future. I observed that the policy
  he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and asked if I was to
  understand him as saying that no change of it was now proposed.
  To which he gave his assent. . . .

[combinator]

Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that
Russell could be trusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was
the diplomatic tradition, especially held by the Russian
diplomats. Possibly it was sound, but it helped in no way the
education of a private secretary. The cat's-paw theory offered no
safer clue, than the frank, old-fashioned, honest theory of
villainy. Neither the one nor the other was reasonable.

  No one ever told the Minister that Earl Russell, only a few
hours before, had asked the Cabinet to intervene, and that the
Cabinet had refused. The Minister was led to believe that the
Cabinet meeting was not held, and that its decision was informal.
Russell's biographer said that, "with this memorandum [of
Russell's, dated October 13] the Cabinet assembled from all parts
of the country on October 23; but . . . members of the Cabinet
doubted the policy of moving, or moving at that time." The Duke
of Newcastle and Sir George Grey joined Granville in opposition.
As far as known, Russell and Gladstone stood alone.
"Considerations such as these prevented the matter being pursued
any further."

  Still no one has distinctly said that this decision was formal;
perhaps the unanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet
unnecessary; but it is certain that, within an hour or two before
or after this decision, "his lordship said [to the United States
Minister] that the policy of the Government was to adhere to a
strict neutrality and to leave this struggle to settle itself."
When Mr. Adams, not satisfied even with this positive assurance,
pressed for a categorical answer: "I asked him if I was to
understand that policy as not now to be changed; he said: Yes!"

  John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of
Gladstone," forty years afterwards, would have interested the
Minister, as well as his private secretary: "If this relation be
accurate," said Morley of a relation officially published at the
time, and never questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary did not
construe strict neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call
good offices." For a vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's
construction of neutrality mattered little to the student, who
asked only Russell's intent, and cared only to know whether his
construction had any other object than to deceive the Minister.

  In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and
possibly Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his
personal friend Mr. Adams; but to one who is still in the world
even if not of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell
totally deceived the private secretary, whatever he may have done
to the Minister. The policy of abstention was not settled on
October 23. Only the next day, October 24, Gladstone circulated a
rejoinder to G. C. Lewis, insisting on the duty of England,
France, and Russia to intervene by representing, "with moral
authority and force, the opinion of the civilized world upon the
conditions of the case." Nothing had been decided. By some means,
scarcely accidental, the French Emperor was led to think that his
influence might turn the scale, and only ten days after Russell's
categorical "Yes!" Napoleon officially invited him to say "No!"
He was more than ready to do so. Another Cabinet meeting was
called for November 11, and this time Gladstone himself reports
the debate: 

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

  Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
  Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely
  fighting out his battle. However, though we decline for the
  moment, the answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave
  the matter very open for the future.

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

  Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who
looked on at this scene, was dead, the private secretary of 1862
read these lines with stupor, and hurried to discuss them with
John Hay, who was more astounded than himself. All the world had
been at cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and the
situation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, had
known none of the facts. One would have done better to draw no
conclusions at all. One's diplomatic education was a long
mistake.

  These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on
September 14, under the impression that the President was about
to be driven from Washington and the Army of the Potomac
dispersed, suggested to Russell that in such a case, intervention
might be feasible. Russell instantly answered that, in any case,
he wanted to intervene and should call a Cabinet for the purpose.
Palmerston hesitated; Russell insisted; Granville protested.
Meanwhile the rebel army was defeated at Antietam, September 17,
and driven out of Maryland. Then Gladstone, October 7, tried to
force Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as a fait
accompli. Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir George
Cornewall Lewis to contradict Gladstone and treated him sharply
in the press, at the very moment when Russell was calling a
Cabinet to make Gladstone's words good. On October 23, Russell
assured Adams that no change in policy was now proposed. On the
same day he had proposed it, and was voted down. Instantly
Napoleon III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone with a
proposition which had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to
replace America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence on
Europe, and to replace England in her old sovereignty of the
seas, if Palmerston would support France in Mexico. The young
student of diplomacy, knowing Palmerston, must have taken for
granted that Palmerston inspired this motion and would support
it; knowing Russell and his Whig antecedents, he would conceive
that Russell must oppose it; knowing Gladstone and his lofty
principles, he would not doubt that Gladstone violently denounced
the scheme. If education was worth a straw, this was the only
arrangement of persons that a trained student would imagine
possible, and it was the arrangement actually assumed by nine men
out of ten, as history. In truth, each valuation was false.
Palmerston never showed favor to the scheme and gave it only "a
feeble and half-hearted support." Russell gave way without
resolutely fighting out "his battle." The only resolute,
vehement, conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and
Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.

  Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders,
but to him the best part of life was thrown away if he learned
such a lesson wrong. Henry James had not yet taught the world to
read a volume for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his
burning-glass turned on alternate sides of the same figure.
Psychological study was still simple, and at worst -- or at best
-- English character was never subtile. Surely no one would
believe that complexity was the trait that confused the student
of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. Under a very strong light
human nature will always appear complex and full of
contradictions, but the British statesman would appear, on the
whole, among the least complex of men.

  Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by
contrast, be called complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and
Gladstone deceived only by their simplicity. Russell was the most
interesting to a young man because his conduct seemed most
statesmanlike. Every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to
November, 1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the
Union. The only point in Russell's character about which the
student thought no doubt to be possible was its want of good
faith. It was thoroughly dishonest, but strong. Habitually
Russell said one thing and did another. He seemed unconscious of
his own contradictions even when his opponents pointed them out,
as they were much in the habit of doing, in the strongest
language. As the student watched him deal with the Civil War in
America, Russell alone showed persistence, even obstinacy, in a
definite determination, which he supported, as was necessary, by
the usual definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of
the falsehoods; on the contrary, he was vain of his own insight
in detecting them; but he was wholly upset by the idea that
Russell should think himself true.

  Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old school,
clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods --
dishonest but strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no
objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else
honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought
him true, but officially, in practice, treated him as false.
Punch, before 1862, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling
lies, and afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education
stopped there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered
a rational explanation of Earl Russell.

  Palmerston was simple -- so simple as to mislead the student
altogether -- but scarcely more consistent. The world thought him
positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be
cautious, careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for
pugnacious and quarrelsome; the "Lives" of Russell, Gladstone,
and Granville show him to have been good-tempered, conciliatory,
avoiding quarrels. He surprised the Minister by refusing to
pursue his attack on General Butler. He tried to check Russell.
He scolded Gladstone. He discouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli
none of the English statesmen were so cautious as he in talking
of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made no professions;
concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The
most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that,
after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction
of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit himself in
error, and to consent in spirit -- for by that time he was nearly
as dead as any of them -- to beg his pardon.

  Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions.
The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a
reduction to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could
reach in 1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone
admitted, avowed, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which
brought all reason and all hope of education to a still-stand: --

  I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
  palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially
  since it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had
  outlived half a century . . . I declared in the heat of the
  American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation. . . .
  Strange to say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be made
  by a Minister of the Crown with no authority other than his
  own, was not due to any feeling of partisanship for the South
  or hostility to the North. . . . I really, though most
  strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all
  America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end.
  . . . That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the
  facts was the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive
  the gross impropriety of such an utterance from a Cabinet
  Minister of a power allied in blood and language, and bound to
  loyal neutrality; the case being further exaggerated by the
  fact that we were already, so to speak, under indictment before
  the world for not (as was alleged) having strictly enforced the
  laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruisers. My offence
  was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness, and
  with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it,
  that my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very
  severe blame. It illustrates vividly that incapacity which my
  mind so long retained, and perhaps still exhibits, an
  incapacity of viewing subjects all round. . . .

  Long and patiently -- more than patiently -- sympathetically,
did the private secretary, forty years afterwards in the twilight
of a life of study, read and re-read and reflect upon this
confession. Then, it seemed, he had seen nothing correctly at the
time. His whole theory of conspiracy -- of policy -- of logic and
connection in the affairs of man, resolved itself into
"incredible grossness." He felt no rancor, for he had won the
game; he forgave, since he must admit, the "incapacity of viewing
subjects all round" which had so nearly cost him life and
fortune; he was willing even to believe. He noted, without
irritation, that Mr. Gladstone, in his confession, had not
alluded to the understanding between Russell, Palmerston, and
himself; had even wholly left out his most "incredible" act, his
ardent support of Napoleon's policy, a policy which even
Palmerston and Russell had supported feebly, with only half a
heart. All this was indifferent. Granting, in spite of evidence,
that Gladstone had no set plan of breaking up the Union; that he
was party to no conspiracy; that he saw none of the results of
his acts which were clear to every one else; granting in short
what the English themselves seemed at last to conclude -- that
Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging on
senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve -- what sort of
education should have been the result of it? How should it have
affected one's future opinions and acts?

  Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are
rough; its judgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not
have affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of
the individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
individual -- a single will or intention -- bent on breaking up
the Union "as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister
would still have found his interest in thinking Russell friendly
and Palmerston hostile. The individual would still have been
identical with the mass. The problem would have been the same;
the answer equally obscure. Every student would, like the private
secretary, answer for himself alone.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XI

THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)

  MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and
seldom credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his
own. Earl Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy
united them; and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without
being amused by his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart
from this shadowy personal relation, no doubt the Minister was
diplomatically right; he had nothing to lose and everything to
gain by making a friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether
Russell were true or false mattered less, because, in either
case, the American Legation could act only as though he were
false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined effort to
betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely used
stronger expressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been
greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier's hint of collusion with
the rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to
hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the
Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly,
to treat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so
unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington
Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last
effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week
elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating
his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain language
for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to
understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had
affected it; this was one of the points that greatly interested a
student, but young men have a passion for regarding their elders
as senile, which was only in part warranted in this instance by
observing that Russell's generation were mostly senile from
youth. They had never got beyond 1815 Both Palmerston and Russell
were in this case. Their senility was congenital, like
Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions, which
caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not
conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams
from the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on
the defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he
showed mere confusion and helplessness.

  Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between
Russell and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal
negligence. If, by an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil
enough to admit that the escape of the Alabama had been due to
criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard
to the ironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one
could be so simple as to believe that two armored ships-of-war
could be built publicly, under the eyes of the Government, and go
to sea like the Alabama, without active and incessant collusion.
The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumed ignorance,
the more violently in the end, the Minister would have to tear it
off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl Russell,
he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with him
if this crisis were allowed to arrive.

  As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself
for action. A campaign more beautiful -- better suited for
training the mind of a youth eager for training -- has not often
unrolled itself for study, from the beginning, before a young man
perched in so commanding a position. Very slowly, indeed, after
two years of solitude, one began to feel the first faint flush of
new and imperial life. One was twenty-five years old, and quite
ready to assert it; some of one's friends were wearing stars on
their collars; some had won stars of a more enduring kind. At
moments one's breath came quick. One began to dream the sensation
of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like vertigo, for
an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed,
doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that of any
Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the armies in
the field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of
what might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel
that, somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking
shape; that it was massed and guided as it had not been before.
Men seemed to have learned their business -- at a cost that
ruined -- and perhaps too late. A private secretary knew better
than most people how much of the new power was to be swung in
London, and almost exactly when; but the diplomatic campaign had
to wait for the military campaign to lead. The student could only
study.

  Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows
began to fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to
listen with incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one
after another, with the precision of machinery, the opposing
mass, the world shivered. Such development of power was unknown.
The magnificent resistance and the return shocks heightened the
suspense. During the July days Londoners were stupid with
unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.

  An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for
one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at
home; but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One
had ample time to watch the process, and had even a little time
to gloat over the repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and
Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened
that Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some small
reception at the house of Monckton Milnes. He went early in order
to exchange a word or two of congratulation before the rooms
should fill, and on arriving he found only the ladies in the
drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.
Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of the
Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young American
friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms
about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth
who knew too little to realize the passions of 1863 -- backed by
those of 1813 -- and reenforced by those of 1763 -- might
conceive that such publicity embarrassed a private secretary who
came from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening, for
the first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking of
himself. He was thinking of Delane, whose eye caught his, at the
moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane probably regarded it as a
piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard of young Adams, and
never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in the Times;
he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind of the
American Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of
all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of
Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed
ideas. Even if he had read Adams's thought, he would have felt
for it only the usual amused British contempt for all that he had
not been taught at school. It needed a whole generation for the
Times to reach Milnes's standpoint.

  Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured
him that he regarded his own personal score as cleared off --
sufficiently settled, then and there -- because his father had
assumed the debt, and was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself.
"You come next!" would have been the friendly warning. For nearly
a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging
itself for the collision between the Legation and Delane who
stood behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams had been steadily
strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view of the final
struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent Affair. The
work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly complete.
No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had
as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.
Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to
press assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not
an additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the
Assistant Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work
that the Minister did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week
would have done the work as well or better, but the Minister
could trust no clerk; without express authority he could admit no
one into the Legation; he strained a point already by admitting
his son. Congress and its committees were the proper judges of
what was best for the public service, and if the arrangement
seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private secretary
who profited by it more than they did. A great staff would have
suppressed him. The whole Legation was a sort of improvised,
volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. He was
rather better off than the rest, because he was invisible and
unknown. Better or worse, he did his work with the others, and if
the secretaries made any remarks about Congress, they made no
complaints, and knew that none would have received a moment's
attention.

  If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular
service, he had done great things for its support. If the
Minister had no secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he
had a well-organized press; efficient legal support; and a swarm
of social allies permeating all classes. All he needed was a
victory in the field, and Secretary Stanton undertook that part
of diplomacy. Vicksburg and Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at
the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was ready to deal with Earl
Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Delane, or any
one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity of the case,
was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.

  Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was
history, and had nothing to do with education. The private
secretary copied the notes into his private books, and that was
all the share he had in the matter, except to talk in private.

  No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in
a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the
affair was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance
to measure the motive forces of men; their qualities of
character; their foresight; their tenacity of purpose.

  In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the
rams. Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his
efforts for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the
Legation in September, 1863 the Minister must surely have
admitted that Russell had, from the first, meant to force his
plan of intervention on his colleagues. Every separate step since
April, 1861, led to this final coercion. Although Russell's
hostile activity of 1862 was still secret -- and remained secret
for some five-and-twenty years -- his animus seemed to be made
clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel armaments. Little
by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of hope came the
raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every
rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded with
connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous
sentence: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your
lordship that this is war!"

What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what
the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his
education. Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory
paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have
continued thus:--

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

[combinator]

  This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the
private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact
statement with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister
announced that a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as
clerk, the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic
propriety, merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or
rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order to make clear the
issue. The war was Russell's war--Adams only accepted it.

  Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the
Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious
secretaries that "instructions have been issued which will
prevent the departure of the two ironclad vessels from
Liverpool." The members of the modest Legation in Portland Place
accepted it as Grant had accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg.
The private secretary conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had
struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel left on the
Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the rebel
right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of
the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he
were ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and
death like this; and though the private secretary should covet
and attain every office in the gift of President or people, he
would never again find education to compare with the
life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half struggle
in London, as it had racked and thumb-screwed him in its shifting
phases; but its practical value as education turned on his
correctness of judgment in measuring the men and their forces. He
felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because they
represented traditional England and an English policy,
respectable enough in itself, but which, for four generations,
every Adams had fought and exploited as the chief source of his
political fortunes. As he understood it, Russell had followed
this policy steadily, ably, even vigorously, and had brought it
to the moment of execution. Then he had met wills stronger than
his own, and, after persevering to the last possible instant, had
been beaten. Lord North and George Canning had a like experience.
This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it
was also the idea of his Government. For once, the volunteer
secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the
self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and
is proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this
case the English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the
State Department as the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department,
and more decisive. It was well planned, well prepared, and well
executed. He could never discover a mistake in it. Possibly he
was biassed by personal interest, but his chief reason for
trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself to be one
of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it. When
others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their
opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were
talking about, and could not be taught without living over again
the London life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely
strong and steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to
Russell or Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power,
patience and steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two
years and a half in their plan for breaking up the Union, and had
yielded at last only in the jaws of war. After a long and
desperate struggle, the American Minister had trumped their best
card and won the game.

  Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none.
At every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the
more he was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with
growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of
Adams's whole contention, that from the first he meant to break
up the Union. Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort;
that he had meant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that
he did not know what he meant. Driven from one defence after
another, he pleaded at last, like Gladstone, that he had no
defence. Concealing all he could conceal -- burying in profound
secrecy his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of 1862
-- he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith. What was
worse for the private secretary, to the total derision and
despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result
of combined practice, experience, and theory -- he proved it.

  Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's
death was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in
1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889.
During the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872,
his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and
he had been compelled to see England pay more than L3,000,000
penalty for his errors. On the other hand, he brought forward --
or his biographer for him -- evidence tending to prove that he
was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in spite of
appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or policy,
as far as concerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his
nature. Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.

  In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of
admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led
even his old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped
Gladstone's; but this was not enough for the student of diplomacy
who had made a certain theory his law of life, and wanted to hold
Russell up against himself; to show that he had foresight and
persistence of which he was unaware. The effort became hopeless
when the biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that
Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down
once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could
unravel the skein.

  Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from
Gotha, 17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond
Gladstone's plea in excuse for his speech in pursuance of the
same effort, that it was "the most singular and palpable error,"
"the least excusable," "a mistake of incredible grossness," which
passed defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of
the public for his speech, he attempted no excuse for Lord
Russell who led him into the "incredible grossness" of announcing
the Foreign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence, "singular
and palpable," was not the speech alone, but its cause -- the
policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed . . . I
really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of
friendliness." Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell
supposed nothing of the sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most
strangely believed" in any proposition so obviously and palpably
absurd, nor did Napoleon delude himself with philanthropy.
Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up policy, speech,
motives, and persons, as though he were trying to confuse chiefly
himself.

  There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in
1863, as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on
September 1 that he could not interfere in any way with those
vessels, and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration
of war on September 5. A student held that, in this refusal, he
was merely following his policy of September, 1862, and of every
step he had taken since 1861.

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

  For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of
Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground,
after two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have
roused Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well
earned by Russell's old attacks on himself, Palmerston met the
appeal with wonderful loyalty. "On consulting the law officers he
found that there was no lawful ground for meddling with the
ironclads," or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust
neither his law officers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he
suggested buying the ships for the British Navy. As proof of
"criminal negligence" in the past, this suggestion seemed
decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in other
troubles of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the
American Minister. He should have done so at once, on September
3. Instead he waited till September 4, and then merely said that
the matter was under "serious and anxious consideration." This
note did not reach the Legation till three o'clock on the
afternoon of September 5 -- after the "superfluous" declaration
of war had been sent. Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the
Lairds: had cost his Ministry the price of two ironclads, besides
the Alabama Claims -- say, in round numbers, twenty million
dollars -- and had put himself in the position of appearing to
yield only to a threat of war. Finally he wrote to the Admiralty
a letter which, from the American point of view, would have
sounded youthful from an Eton schoolboy: --

September 14, 1863.
  MY DEAR DUKE: --

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

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

  To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any
practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use
in attacking it as only theoretical. He no longer cared whether
he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much of
it as he wanted; but he found in the "Life of Gladstone" (II,
464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for
curious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that
politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to
comprehend"; and he added, by way of strengthening it: "For my
own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood,
above one or two."

  Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.

  Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the
American type was more familiar. Perhaps this was the sufficient
result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XII

ECCENTRICITY (1863)

  KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political
education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood
of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English
human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris,
such a habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the
instincts of native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided,
eccentric, systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical.
The less one knew of it, the better.

  This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to
penetrate a Boston mind -- it would, indeed, have been shut out
by instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration -- rested on an
experience which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to
think conclusive -- for him. That it should be conclusive for any
one else never occurred to him, since he had no thought of
educating anybody else. For him -- alone -- the less English
education he got, the better!

  For several years, under the keenest incitement to
watchfulness, he observed the English mind in contact with itself
and other minds. Especially with the American the contact was
interesting because the limits and defects of the American mind
were one of the favorite topics of the European. From the
old-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an
economic thinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line.
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might
exasperate a pine forest. The English mind disliked the French
mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile,
but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was
not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow,
and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical,
sharp, and direct.

  The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was
either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most
struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity.
Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with
close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for
sake of the eccentricity itself.

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

  The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but
Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at
all, and that his pictures of English society were exact and
good-natured. The American, who could not believe it, fell back
on Dickens, who, at all events, had the vice of exaggeration to
extravagance, but Dickens's English audience thought the
exaggeration rather in manner or style, than in types. Mr.
Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed
till his face was distorted -- not because Dundreary was
exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that
Gladstone had seen -- or might have seen -- in any club in Pall
Mall. Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained
little else.

  Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps
it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston
thought so. The Bostonian called it national character -- native
vigor -- robustness -- honesty -- courage. He respected and
feared it. British self-assertion, bluff, brutal, blunt as it
was, seemed to him a better and nobler thing than the acuteness
of the Yankee or the polish of the Parisian. Perhaps he was
right.

  These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no
settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and
amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Whatever others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the
national eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to
correct it. The savage satires of Dickens and the gentler
ridicule of Matthew Arnold against the British middle class were
but a part of the rebellion, for the middle class were no worse
than their neighbors in the eyes of an American in 1863; they
were even a very little better in the sense that one could appeal
to their interests, while a university man, like Gladstone, stood
outside of argument. From none of them could a young American
afford to borrow ideas.

  The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by
regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in
the shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him
hesitate; he saw his own national type -- his father, Weed,
Evarts, for instance -- deal with the British, and show itself
certainly not the weaker; certainly sometimes the stronger.
Biassed though he were, he could hardly be biassed to such a
degree as to mistake the effects of force on others, and while --
labor as he might -- Earl Russell and his state papers seemed
weak to a secretary, he could not see that they seemed strong to
Russell's own followers. Russell might be dishonest or he might
be merely obtuse -- the English type might be brutal or might be
only stupid -- but strong, in either case, it was not, nor did it
seem strong to Englishmen.

Eccentricity was not always a force; Americans were deeply
interested in deciding whether it was always a weakness.
Evidently, on the hustings or in Parliament, among
eccentricities, eccentricity was at home; but in private society
the question was not easy to answer. That English society was
infinitely more amusing because of its eccentricities, no one
denied. Barring the atrocious insolence and brutality which
Englishmen and especially Englishwomen showed to each other --
very rarely, indeed, to foreigners -- English society was much
more easy and tolerant than American. One must expect to be
treated with exquisite courtesy this week and be totally forgotten
the next, but this was the way of the world, and education
consisted in learning to turn one's back on others with the same
unconscious indifference that others showed among themselves. The
smart of wounded vanity lasted no long time with a young man about
town who had little vanity to smart, and who, in his own country,
would have found himself in no better position. He had nothing to
complain of. No one was ever brutal to him. On the contrary, he
was much better treated than ever he was likely to be in Boston --
let alone New York or Washington -- and if his reception varied
inconceivably between extreme courtesy and extreme neglect, it
merely proved that he had become, or was becoming, at home. Not
from a sense of personal griefs or disappointments did he labor
over this part of the social problem, but only because his
education was becoming English, and the further it went, the less
it promised.

  By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized
with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to
rebellion -- when foreign -- and it felt particular confidence in
the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes --
foreign rebellion of English blood -- which came nearer ideal
eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians
or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of
rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach
themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the English leaders
on the Northern side were marked eccentrics. William E. Forster
was a practical, hard-headed Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in
politics took shape as working arrangements on an economical
base. Cobden, considering the one-sided conditions of his life,
was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was stronger in his
expressions than either of them, but with all his self-assertion
he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He did not,
like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously earnest,"
as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every question"; he
was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative of the old
Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend inconsistencies.
Monckton Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chiefly by
those who did not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only
ideas a little in advance of the time; his manner was eccentric,
but not his mind, as any one could see who read a page of his
poetry. None of them, except Milnes, was a university man. As a
rule, the Legation was troubled very little, if at all, by
indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions among its English
friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical, well
considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all
rebels, and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed
by old Lord Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a July
4th reception at the Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his
old credit as "Attorney General to Mr. Madison." The Church was
rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The
universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most
public confidence -- like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey -- took infinite pains to be
neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers,
as well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a
vast majority of the English people seemed to follow the
professional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took
that direction; Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and
Gladstone, threw their sympathies on the side which they should
naturally have opposed, and did so for no reason except their
eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots and Yorkshiremen were
cautious.

  This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first
cause of this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No
one understood why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent
for London at the same time that he made so good a choice as Mr.
Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to
send to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason. Possibly
Mason had a certain amount of common sense, but he seemed to have
nothing else, and in London society he counted merely as one
eccentric more. He enjoyed a great opportunity; he might even
have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with all society at his
feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and made the
social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but Mr.
Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with
Palmerston; he drove Russell off the field; he swept the board
before Cockburn; he overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a
finger against Mason, who became his bulwark of defence.

  Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake.
Neither could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must
have been unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason,
President Davis sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to
Russia. Some twenty years later, in the shifting search for the
education he never found, Adams became closely intimate at
Washington with Lamar, then Senator from Mississippi, who had
grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable and most amiable
Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in social
charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all
his Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps
this was a reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others,
on a futile mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better
in London, in place of Mason. London society would have delighted
in him; his stories would have won success; his manners would
have made him loved; his oratory would have swept every audience;
even Monckton Milnes could never have resisted the temptation of
having him to breakfast between Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop
of Oxford.

  Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate management
or criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject that
amused him was his English allies. At that moment -- the early
summer of 1863 -- the rebel party in England were full of
confidence, and felt strong enough to challenge the American
Legation to a show of power. They knew better than the Legation
what they could depend upon: that the law officers and
commissioners of customs at Liverpool dared not prosecute the
ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone were
ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon
would offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they
owned Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were
building their ships. The political member of the Laird firm was
Lindsay, about whom the whole web of rebel interests clung --
rams, cruisers, munitions, and Confederate loan; social
introductions and parliamentary tactics. The firm of Laird, with
a certain dignity, claimed to be champion of England's navy; and
public opinion, in the summer of 1863, still inclined towards
them.

  Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the
managers must have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as
their champion an eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort
of Brougham of Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse
temper. Mr. Roebuck had been a tribune of the people, and, like
tribunes of most other peoples, in growing old, had grown
fatuous. He was regarded by the friends of the Union as rather a
comical personage -- a favorite subject for Punch to laugh at --
with a bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even more than common
by the political epidemic of egotism. In all England they could
have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own case.
No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet.
the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let
Roebuck represent them and take charge of their interests.

[combinator]

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

  All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which,
little by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the
House of Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began
with Lamar's failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his
consequent detention in Paris waiting instructions. The motion to
recognize the Confederacy was about to be made, and, in prospect
of the debate, Mr. Lindsay collected a party at his villa on the
Thames to bring the rebel agents into relations with Roebuck.
Lamar was sent for, and came. After much conversation of a
general sort, such as is the usual object or resource of the
English Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by way
of showing interest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked
Roebuck whether he expected Bright to take part in the debate:
"No, sir!" said Roebuck sententiously; "Bright and I have met
before. It was the old story -- the story of the sword-fish and
the whale! NO, sir! Mr. Bright will not cross swords with me
again!"

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

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

  The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of
Bright's courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern
people themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing
want of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such
ignorance of the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational
as that of the rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the
courage of a prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty
nearly every man in England that could be reached by a blow, and
when he could not reach the individual he struck the class, or
when the class was too small for him, the whole people of
England. At times he had the whole country on his back. He could
not act on the defensive; his mind required attack. Even among
friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were
denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his
phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded
his opponents, real or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at
dull heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.

  One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St.
James's Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient
efforts to unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American
platform. The secretary went to the meeting and made a report
which reposes somewhere on file in the State Department to this
day, as harmless as such reports should be; but it contained no
mention of what interested young Adams most -- Bright's
psychology. With singular skill and oratorical power, Bright
managed at the outset, in his opening paragraph, to insult or
outrage every class of Englishman commonly considered
respectable, and, for fear of any escaping, he insulted them
repeatedly under consecutive heads. The rhetorical effect was
tremendous:--

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

  An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed,
in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than
Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed
artifice and hurt his oratory. The audience cheered furiously,
and the private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind,
for he knew how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw
Bright talk republican principles before Trades-Unions; but,
while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason to doubt the courage
of a man who, after quarrelling with the Trades-Unions, quarreled
with all the world outside the Trades-Unions, he did feel a doubt
whether to class Bright as eccentric or conventional. Every one
called Bright "un-English," from Lord Palmerston to William E.
Forster; but to an American he seemed more English than any of
his critics. He was a liberal hater, and what he hated he reviled
after the manner of Milton, but he was afraid of no one. He was
almost the only man in England, or, for that matter, in Europe,
who hated Palmerston and was not afraid of him, or of the press
or the pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He
loathed the whole fabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham
aristocracy, and sham socialism. He had the British weakness of
believing only in himself and his own conventions. In all this,
an American saw, if one may make the distinction, much racial
eccentricity, but little that was personal. Bright was singularly
well poised; but he used singularly strong language.

  Long afterwards, in 1880, Adams happened to be living again in
London for a season, when James Russell Lowell was transferred
there as Minister; and as Adams's relations with Lowell had
become closer and more intimate with years, he wanted the new
Minister to know some of his old friends. Bright was then in the
Cabinet, and no longer the most radical member even there, but he
was still a rare figure in society. He came to dinner, along with
Sir Francis Doyle and Sir Robert Cunliffe, and as usual did most
of the talking. As usual also, he talked of the things most on
his mind. Apparently it must have been some reform of the
criminal law which the Judges opposed, that excited him, for at
the end of dinner, over the wine, he took possession of the table
in his old way, and ended with a superb denunciation of the
Bench, spoken in his massive manner, as though every word were a
hammer, smashing what it struck:-- 

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

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

  Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew
his Englishmen better than Lowell did -- better than England did.
He knew what amount of violence in language was necessary to
drive an idea into a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that
no violence was enough to affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire
peasant. Bright kept his own head cool and clear. He was not
excited; he never betrayed excitement. As for his denunciation of
the English Bench, it was a very old story, not original with
him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a commonplace
generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted by
foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be
treated only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were
probably not very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright
said that the French, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a
nation of brutes and ought to be exterminated, no one would have
found fault; the whole human race, according to the highest
authority, has been exterminated once already for the same
reason, and only the rainbow protects them from a repetition of
it. What shocked Lowell was that he denounced his own people.

  Adams felt no moral obligation to defend Judges, who, as far as
he knew, were the only class of society specially adapted to
defend themselves; but he was curious -- even anxious -- as a
point of education, to decide for himself whether Bright's
language was violent for its purpose. He thought not. Perhaps
Cobden did better by persuasion, but that was another matter. Of
course, even Englishmen sometimes complained of being so
constantly told that they were brutes and hypocrites, although
they were told little else by their censors, and bore it, on the
whole, meekly; but the fact that it was true in the main troubled
the ten-pound voter much less than it troubled Newman, Gladstone,
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. Bright was personally
disliked by his victims, but not distrusted. They never doubted
what he would do next, as they did with John Russell, Gladstone,
and Disraeli. He betrayed no one, and he never advanced an
opinion in practical matters which did not prove to be practical.

  The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual
opposites of Bright, seemed to an American bystander the weakest
and most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political
economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers
of de Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class, they were
timid -- with good reason -- and timidity, which is high wisdom
in philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action.
Numbers of these men haunted London society, all tending to
free-thinking, but never venturing much freedom of thought. Like
the anti-slavery doctrinaires of the forties and fifties, they
became mute and useless when slavery struck them in the face. For
type of these eccentrics, literature seems to have chosen Henry
Reeve, at least to the extent of biography. He was a bulky figure
in society, always friendly, good-natured, obliging, and useful;
almost as universal as Milnes and more busy. As editor of the
Edinburgh Review he had authority and even power, although the
Review and the whole Whig doctrinaire school had begun -- as the
French say -- to date; and of course the literary and artistic
sharpshooters of 1867 -- like Frank Palgrave -- frothed and
foamed at the mere mention of Reeve's name. Three-fourths of
their fury was due only to his ponderous manner. London society
abused its rights of personal criticism by fixing on every too
conspicuous figure some word or phrase that stuck to it. Every
one had heard of Mrs. Grote as "the origin of the word
grotesque." Every one had laughed at the story of Reeve
approaching Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat florid manner,
asking in his literary dialect how her husband the historian was:
"And how is the learned Grotius?" "Pretty well, thank you,
Puffendorf! " One winced at the word, as though it were a drawing
of Forain.

  No one would have been more shocked than Reeve had he been
charged with want of moral courage. He proved his courage
afterwards by publishing the "Greville Memoirs," braving the
displeasure of the Queen. Yet the Edinburgh Review and its editor
avoided taking sides except where sides were already fixed.
Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh
Review; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and
Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of
oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless
hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he
never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it might
encourage.

  The sum of these experiences in 1863 left the conviction that
eccentricity was weakness. The young American who should adopt
English thought was lost. From the facts, the conclusion was
correct, yet, as usual, the conclusion was wrong. The years of
Palmerston's last Cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of
truce -- of arrested development. The British system like the
French, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the
British mind shown itself so decousu -- so unravelled, at sea,
floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities
had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church.
England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to clearing away
only a part of the debris. A young American in 1863 could see
little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not
foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England
in its wake, was to vanish in 1870. He was in dead-water, and the
parti-colored, fantastic cranks swam about his boat, as though he
were the ancient mariner, and they saurians of the prime.

[combinator]

CHAPTER XIII

THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY (1864)

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

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

  Henry Adams had failed to acquire any useful education; he
should at least have acquired social experience. Curiously
enough, he failed here also. From the European or English point
of view, he had no social experience, and never got it. Minister
Adams happened on a political interregnum owing to Lord
Palmerston's personal influence from 1860 to 1865; but this
political interregnum was less marked than the social still-stand
during the same years. The Prince Consort was dead; the Queen had
retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In its best days,
Victorian society had never been "smart." During the forties,
under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be
simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste
of Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any taste except that of
Queen Victoria. Style lingered in the background with the
powdered footman behind the yellow chariot, but speaking socially
the Queen had no style save what she inherited. Balmoral was a
startling revelation of royal taste. Nothing could be worse than
the toilettes at Court unless it were the way they were worn.
One's eyes might be dazzled by jewels, but they were heirlooms,
and if any lady appeared well dressed, she was either a foreigner
or "fast." Fashion was not fashionable in London until the
Americans and the Jews were let loose. The style of London
toilette universal in 1864 was grotesque, like Monckton Milnes on
horseback in Rotten Row.

  Society of this sort might fit a young man in some degree for
editing Shakespeare or Swift, but had little relation with the
society of 1870, and none with that of 1900. Owing to other
causes, young Adams never got the full training of such style as
still existed. The embarrassments of his first few seasons
socially ruined him. His own want of experience prevented his
asking introductions to the ladies who ruled society; his want of
friends prevented his knowing who these ladies were; and he had
every reason to expect snubbing if he put himself in evidence.
This sensitiveness was thrown away on English society, where men
and women treated each others' advances much more brutally than
those of strangers, but young Adams was son and private secretary
too; he could not be as thick-skinned as an Englishman. He was
not alone. Every young diplomat, and most of the old ones, felt
awkward in an English house from a certainty that they were not
precisely wanted there, and a possibility that they might be told
so.

  If there was in those days a country house in England which had
a right to call itself broad in views and large in tastes, it was
Bretton in Yorkshire; and if there was a hostess who had a right
to consider herself fashionable as well as charming, it was Lady
Margaret Beaumont; yet one morning at breakfast there, sitting by
her side -- not for his own merits -- Henry Adams heard her say
to herself in her languid and liberal way, with her rich voice
and musing manner, looking into her tea-cup: "I don't think I
care for foreigners!" Horror-stricken, not so much on his own
account as on hers, the young man could only execute himself as
gaily as he might: "But Lady Margaret, please make one small
exception for me!" Of course she replied what was evident, that
she did not call him a foreigner, and her genial Irish charm made
the slip of tongue a happy courtesy; but none the less she knew
that, except for his momentary personal introduction, he was in
fact a foreigner, and there was no imaginable reason why she
should like him, or any other foreigner, unless it were because
she was bored by natives. She seemed to feel that her
indifference needed a reason to excuse itself in her own eyes,
and she showed the subconscious sympathy of the Irish nature
which never feels itself perfectly at home even in England. She,
too, was some shadowy shade un-English.

  Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the
private secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till
he found his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt
himself in society, and he never knew definitely what was meant
as society by those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a
score of societies which seemed quite independent of each other.
The smartest was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange.
The largest was the sporting world, also unknown to him except
through the talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these
lay groups of nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like
Evarts, frequented legal circles where one still sat over the
wine and told anecdotes of the bench and bar; but he himself
never set eyes on a judge except when his father took him to call
on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old Lord Campbell, both
abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church and the Bishops formed
several societies which no secretary ever saw except as an
interloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical
and surgical professions; City people; artists; county families;
the Scotch, and indefinite other subdivisions of society existed,
which were as strange to each other as they were to Adams. At the
end of eight or ten seasons in London society he professed to
know less about it, or how to enter it, than he did when he made
his first appearance at Miss Burdett Coutts's in May, 1861.

  Sooner or later every young man dropped into a set or circle,
and frequented the few houses that were willing to harbor him. An
American who neither hunted nor raced, neither shot nor fished
nor gambled, and was not marriageable, had no need to think of
society at large. Ninety-nine houses in every hundred were
useless to him, a greater bore to him than he to them. Thus the
question of getting into -- or getting out of -- society which
troubled young foreigners greatly, settled itself after three or
four years of painful speculation. Society had no unity; one
wandered about in it like a maggot in cheese; it was not a hansom
cab, to be got into, or out of, at dinner-time.

  Therefore he always professed himself ignorant of society; he
never knew whether he had been in it or not, but from the
accounts of his future friends, like General Dick Taylor or
George Smalley, and of various ladies who reigned in the
seventies, he inclined to think that he knew very little about
it. Certain great houses and certain great functions of course he
attended, like every one else who could get cards, but even of
these the number was small that kept an interest or helped
education. In seven years he could remember only two that seemed
to have any meaning for him, and he never knew what that meaning
was. Neither of the two was official; neither was English in
interest; and both were scandals to the philosopher while they
scarcely enlightened men of the world.

  One was at Devonshire House, an ordinary, unpremeditated
evening reception. Naturally every one went to Devonshire House
if asked, and the rooms that night were fairly full of the usual
people. The private secretary was standing among the rest, when
Mme. de Castiglione entered, the famous beauty of the Second
Empire. How beautiful she may have been, or indeed what sort of
beauty she was, Adams never knew, because the company, consisting
of the most refined and aristocratic society in the world,
instantly formed a lane, and stood in ranks to stare at her,
while those behind mounted on chairs to look over their
neighbors' heads; so that the lady walked through this polite
mob, stared completely out of countenance, and fled the house at
once. This was all!

  The other strange spectacle was at Stafford House, April 13,
1864, when, in a palace gallery that recalled Paolo Veronese's
pictures of Christ in his scenes of miracle, Garibaldi, in his
gray capote over his red shirt, received all London, and three
duchesses literally worshipped at his feet. Here, at all events,
a private secretary had surely caught the last and highest touch
of social experience; but what it meant -- what social, moral, or
mental development it pointed out to the searcher of truth -- was
not a matter to be treated fully by a leader in the Morning Post
or even by a sermon in Westminster Abbey. Mme. de Castiglione and
Garibaldi covered, between them, too much space for simple
measurement; their curves were too complex for mere arithmetic.
The task of bringing the two into any common relation with an
ordered social system tending to orderly development -- in London
or elsewhere -- was well fitted for Algernon Swinburne or Victor
Hugo, but was beyond any process yet reached by the education of
Henry Adams, who would probably, even then, have rejected, as
superficial or supernatural, all the views taken by any of the
company who looked on with him at these two interesting and
perplexing sights.

  From the Court, or Court society, a mere private secretary got
nothing at all, or next to nothing, that could help him on his
road through life. Royalty was in abeyance. One was tempted to
think in these years, 1860-65, that the nicest distinction
between the very best society and the second-best, was their
attitude towards royalty. The one regarded royalty as a bore, and
avoided it, or quietly said that the Queen had never been in
society. The same thing might have been said of fully half the
peerage. Adams never knew even the names of half the rest; he
never exchanged ten words with any member of the royal family; he
never knew any one in those years who showed interest in any
member of the royal family, or who would have given five
shillings for the opinion of any royal person on any subject; or
cared to enter any royal or noble presence, unless the house was
made attractive by as much social effort as would have been
necessary in other countries where no rank existed. No doubt, as
one of a swarm, young Adams slightly knew various gilded youth
who frequented balls and led such dancing as was most in vogue,
but they seemed to set no value on rank; their anxiety was only
to know where to find the best partners before midnight, and the
best supper after midnight. To the American, as to Arthur
Pendennis or Barnes Newcome, the value of social position and
knowledge was evident enough; he valued it at rather more than it
was worth to him; but it was a shadowy thing which seemed to vary
with every street corner; a thing which had shifting standards,
and which no one could catch outright. The half-dozen leaders and
beauties of his time, with great names and of the utmost fashion,
made some of the poorest marriages, and the least showy careers.

  Tired of looking on at society from the outside, Adams grew to
loathe the sight of his Court dress; to groan at every
announcement of a Court ball; and to dread every invitation to a
formal dinner. The greatest social event gave not half the
pleasure that one could buy for ten shillings at the opera when
Patti sang Cherubino or Gretchen, and not a fourth of the
education. Yet this was not the opinion of the best judges.
Lothrop Motley, who stood among the very best, said to him early
in his apprenticeship that the London dinner and the English
country house were the perfection of human society. The young man
meditated over it, uncertain of its meaning. Motley could not
have thought the dinner itself perfect, since there was not then
-- outside of a few bankers or foreigners -- a good cook or a
good table in London, and nine out of ten of the dinners that
Motley ate came from Gunter's, and all were alike. Every one,
especially in young society, complained bitterly that Englishmen
did not know a good dinner when they ate it, and could not order
one if they were given carte blanche. Henry Adams was not a
judge, and knew no more than they, but he heard the complaints,
and he could not think that Motley meant to praise the English
cuisine.