Chapter X. Political Morality (1862)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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: --

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.
. . .

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.