Chapter XVI. The Press (1868)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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