Chapter VIII. Diplomacy (1861)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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.

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.