Chapter XXVIII. The Height of Knowledge (1902)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the
activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans
ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages;
and the world learns to regard assassination as a form of hysteria,
and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous
political murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with
horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House.

The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to centre
on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of his son,
Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that of his chief,
"all the more hideous that we were so sure of his recovery." The
world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have acquired the funeral
habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him yesterday, and he did
not know me." Among the letters of condolence showered upon him was
one from Clarence King at Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace and
tenderness -- the old King manner"; and King himself "simply waiting
till nature and the foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of
King impressed him intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he
said -- "the best and brightest man of his generation, with talents
immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has
often sickened me to witness it; with everything in his favor but
blind luck; hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy
of life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless
suffering alone and uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ca vous
amuse, la vie?"

The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on
the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's funeral,
and from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel than that
which led to Washington, where a revolution had occurred that must in
any case have made the men of his age instantly old, but which,
besides hurrying to the front the generation that till then he had
regarded as boys, could not fail to break the social ties that had
till then held them all together.

Ca vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt
half glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only
to save himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure
loss. On that side, his education had been finished at school. His
friends in power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total
wreck by trying to save them.

As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them
at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken seriously
in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new one.
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts,
and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative
energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man
living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive
quality that belongs to ultimate matter -- the quality that mediaeval
theology assigned to God -- he was pure act. With him wielding
unmeasured power with immeasurable energy, in the White House, the
relation of age to youth -- of teacher to pupil -- was altogether out
of place; and no other was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false
one, while Adams's ceased of itself. History's truths are little
valuable now; but human nature retains a few of its archaic,
proverbial laws, and the wisest courtier that ever lived -- Lucius
Seneca himself -- must have remained in some shade of doubt what
advantage he should get from the power of his friend and pupil Nero
Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he received Nero's filial
invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the vast circle of his
knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a friend lost -- a
fact very much worth insisting upon -- while the gray-headed moth
that had fluttered through many moth-administrations and had singed
his wings more or less in them all, though he now slept nine months
out of the twelve, acquired an instinct of self-preservation that
kept him to the north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a
sufficient habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from
hovering between them.

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was
bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power
is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly
as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction
afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear
the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of
it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and
hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion. Roosevelt enjoyed
a singularly direct nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally
in restless agitation that would have worn out most tempers in a
month, and his first year of Presidency showed chronic excitement
that made a friend tremble. The effect of unlimited power on limited
mind is worth noting in Presidents because it must represent the same
process in society, and the power of self-control must have limit
somewhere in face of the control of the infinite.

Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but
this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of
history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The personal
lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason
why Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result was
mathematically certain. With Hay, it was only the steady decline of
strength, and the necessary economy of force; but with Lodge it was
law of politics. He could not help himself, for his position as the
President's friend and independent statesman at once was false, and
he must be unsure in both relations.

To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great -- much
greater than that of the usual Senator -- but it hung on his position
in Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive patronage;
and his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure. Nowhere in
America was society so complex or change so rapid. No doubt the
Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic irritability --
a sort of Bostonitis -- which, in its primitive Puritan forms, seemed
due to knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of
himself. Many years earlier William M. Evarts had pointed out to
Adams the impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England
leader. The trait led to good ends -- such as admiration of Abraham
Lincoln and George Washington -- but the virtue was exacting; for New
England standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each
other, and constantly multiplying in number, until balance between
them threatened to become impossible. The old ones were quite
difficult enough -- State Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the
old Congregational clergy another; Harvard College, poor in votes,
but rich in social influence, a third; the foreign element,
especially the Irish, held aloof, and seldom consented to approve any
one; the new socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to become
more exclusive than the Irish. New power was disintegrating society,
and setting independent centres of force to work, until money had all
it could do to hold the machine together. No one could represent it
faithfully as a whole.

Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the
task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in that
of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for study,
or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the
two. Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a
creature of teaching -- Boston incarnate -- the child of his local
parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the intent,
though virtuous, was -- as Adams admitted in his own case --
restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an
accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he
could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but
shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive
muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising
Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer
atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian of
Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought --
saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste
-- revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and
Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy
among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare -- standing first on
the social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning;
shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the
license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always
intelligent -- Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual
statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's
plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He
betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they
dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine
it.

Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the
inconsequences of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were also
at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust of English
thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac, sometimes
precious but never sure. For him, only the Greek, the Italian or the
French standards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of
Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his theory never
affected his practice. He knew that his artistic standard was the
illusion of his own mind; that English disorder approached nearer to
truth, if truth existed, than French measure or Italian line, or
German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conservative
Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Christian, but
stupendously anarchistic. He loved the atrocities of English art and
society, as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss Austen, not because of
their example, but because of their humor. He made no scruple of
defying sequence and denying consistency -- but he was not a
Senator.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are
apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care whether
his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than
he; but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they were
always liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion yield
suddenly under their feet. With this game an elderly friend had long
before carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There was nothing in
it for him but the amusement of the pugilist or acrobat. The larger
study was lost in the division of interests and the ambitions of
fifth-rate men; but foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and
made personal relation possible with Hay which could not be
maintained with Roosevelt or Lodge. As an affair of pure education
the point is worth notice from young men who are drawn into politics.
The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power
-- steam, electric, furnace, or other -- which have to be controlled
by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to manage
it. The work of internal government has become the task of
controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen gods,
alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell nothing of
political value if one skinned them alive. Most of them have nothing
to tell, but are forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the
development or economy of power. They are trustees for the public,
and whenever society assumes the property, it must confer on them
that title; but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it,
and will then control society without appeal, as it controls its
stokers and pit-men. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of
men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures
of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no
longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men,
and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially
in mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while
for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that in
domestic politics, every one works for an immediate object, commonly
for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon, while in
foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide as the
world. There the merest scholar could see what he was doing. For
history, international relations are the only sure standards of
movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adams had
always insisted that international relation was the only sure base
for a chart of history.

He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he
found it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as much
alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and round hm, he
measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress
more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. The Secretary of
State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which
Congress would rather ignore; of obligations which Congress
repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress distrusts and
tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since the first day the
Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the Secretary of
State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to extend his functions
beyond the appointment of Consuls in Senators' service.

This is a matter of history which any one may approve or dispute
as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an old scholar,
for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865. Hay had become
the most imposing figure ever known in the office. He had an
influence that no other Secretary of State ever possessed, as he had
a nation behind him such as history had never imagined. He needed to
write no state papers; he wanted no help, and he stood far above
counsel or advice; but he could instruct an attentive scholar as no
other teacher in the world could do; and Adams sought only
instruction -- wanted only to chart the international channel for
fifty years to come; to triangulate the future; to obtain his
dimension, and fix the acceleration of movement in politics since the
year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in
finance and force.

Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at last
the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he had
achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate, with
only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to renounce, without
equivalent, treaty rights which she had for fifty years defended
tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph in his negotiations with
the Senate enabled him to carry one step further his measures for
general peace. About England the Senate could make no further
effective opposition, for England was won, and Canada alone could
give trouble. The next difficulty was with France, and there the
Senate blocked advance, but England assumed the task, and, owing to
political changes in France, effected the object -- a combination
which, as late as 1901, had been visionary. The next, and far more
difficult step, was to bring Germany into the combine; while, at the
end of the vista, most unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be
satisfied and disarmed. This was the instinct of what might be named
McKinleyism; the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts,
realized at home, and realizable abroad.

With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
century, had nothing to do, and made not the least presence of
meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining governments,
like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist
scheme of Jaures and Bebel. That John Hay, of all men, should adopt a
socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservative
Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy in
politics as in science. When one saw the field, one realized that Hay
could not help himself, nor could Bebel. Either Germany must destroy
England and France to create the next inevitable unification as a
system of continent against continent -- or she must pool interests.
Both schemes in turn were attributed to the Kaiser; one or the other
he would have to choose; opinion was balanced doubtfully on their
merits; but, granting both to be feasible, Hay's and McKinley's
statesmanship turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join
what might be called the Coal-power combination, rather than build up
the only possible alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging
Germany in Russia. Thus Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were
partners.

The problem was pretty -- even fascinating -- and, to an old
Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometrical
demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life, it had all sorts
of ultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet -- theory
and practice -- it risks going astray; and Hay was probably the most
accomplished master of both then living. He knew not only the forces
but also the men, and he had no other thought than his policy.

Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a scholar
could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole educational staff
of the Government at a time when the Government had just reached the
heights of highest activity and influence. Since 1860, education had
done its worst, under the greatest masters and at enormous expense to
the world, to train these two minds to catch and comprehend every
spring of international action, not to speak of personal influence;
and the entire machinery of politics in several great countries had
little to do but supply the last and best information. Education
could be carried no further.

With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its
effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his
ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing -- to be
groping in darkness -- to be falling forever in space; and the worst
depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no
one knew more. He had, at least, the mechanical assurance of certain
values to guide him -- like the relative intensities of his
Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his Gun-powers -- but he
conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every relative
value of persons, as well as he knew the inmost thoughts of his own
Government -- had the Czar and the Kaiser and the Mikado turned
schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught him all they knew, he would still
have known nothing. They knew nothing themselves. Only by comparison
of their ignorance could the student measure his own.