Chapter XXX. Vis Inertiae (1903)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

WASHINGTON was always amusing, but in 1900, as in 1800, its chief
interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of New York
had become planetary -- beyond control -- while the task of
Washington, in 1900 as in 1800, was to control it. The success of
Washington in the past century promised ill for its success in the
next.

To a student who had passed the best years of his life in
pondering over the political philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin, and
Madison, the problem that Roosevelt took in hand seemed alive with
historical interest, but it would need at least another half-century
to show its results. As yet, one could not measure the forces or
their arrangement; the forces had not even aligned themselves except
in foreign affairs; and there one turned to seek the channel of
wisdom as naturally as though Washington did not exist. The President
could do nothing effectual in foreign affairs, but at least he could
see something of the field.

Hay had reached the summit of his career, and saw himself on the
edge of wreck. Committed to the task of keeping China "open," he saw
China about to be shut. Almost alone in the world, he represented the
"open door," and could not escape being crushed by it. Yet luck had
been with him in full tide. Though Sir Julian Pauncefote had died in
May, 1902, after carrying out tasks that filled an ex-private
secretary of 1861 with open-mouthed astonishment, Hay had been helped
by the appointment of Michael Herbert as his successor, who counted
for double the value of an ordinary diplomat. To reduce friction is
the chief use of friendship, and in politics the loss by friction is
outrageous. To Herbert and his wife, the small knot of houses that
seemed to give a vague unity to foreign affairs opened their doors
and their hearts, for the Herberts were already at home there; and
this personal sympathy prolonged Hay's life, for it not only eased
the effort of endurance, but it also led directly to a revolution in
Germany. Down to that moment, the Kaiser, rightly or wrongly, had
counted as the ally of the Czar in all matters relating to the East.
Holleben and Cassini were taken to be a single force in Eastern
affairs, and this supposed alliance gave Hay no little anxiety and
some trouble. Suddenly Holleben, who seemed to have had no thought
but to obey with almost agonized anxiety the least hint of the
Kaiser's will, received a telegram ordering him to pretext illness
and come home, which he obeyed within four-and-twenty hours. The ways
of the German Foreign Office had been always abrupt, not to say
ruthless, towards its agents, and yet commonly some discontent had
been shown as excuse; but, in this case, no cause was guessed for
Holleben's disgrace except the Kaiser's wish to have a personal
representative at Washington. Breaking down all precedent, he sent
Speck von Sternburg to counterbalance Herbert.

Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy, and valuable
as his presence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling compared
with the political. Of Hay's official tasks, one knew no more than
any newspaper reporter did, but of one's own diplomatic education the
successive steps had become strides. The scholar was studying, not on
Hay's account, but on his own. He had seen Hay, in 1898, bring
England into his combine; he had seen the steady movement which was
to bring France back into an Atlantic system; and now he saw suddenly
the dramatic swing of Germany towards the west -- the movement of all
others nearest mathematical certainty. Whether the Kaiser meant it or
not, he gave the effect of meaning to assert his independence of
Russia, and to Hay this change of front had enormous value. The least
was that it seemed to isolate Cassini, and unmask the Russian
movement which became more threatening every month as the Manchurian
scheme had to be revealed.

Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to
him by the Kaiser's coup d'etat. Carefully as he had tried to follow
the Kaiser's career, he had never suspected such refinement of
policy, which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's ability to the
highest point, and altogether upset the centre of statesmanship. That
Germany could be so quickly detached from separate objects and
brought into an Atlantic system seemed a paradox more paradoxical
than any that one's education had yet offered, though it had offered
little but paradox. If Germany could be held there, a century of
friction would be saved. No price would be too great for such an
object; although no price could probably be wrung out of Congress as
equivalent for it. The Kaiser, by one personal act of energy, freed
Hay's hands so completely that he saw his problems simplified to
Russia alone.

Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The
history of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little but
to state one or two sides of the Russian problem. One's year of
Berlin in youth, though it taught no Civil Law, had opened one's eyes
to the Russian enigma, and both German and French historians had
labored over its proportions with a sort of fascinated horror.
Germany, of all countries, was most vitally concerned in it; but even
a cave-dweller in La Fayette Square, seeking only a measure of motion
since the Crusades, saw before his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a
survey of future order or anarchy that would exhaust the power of his
telescopes and defy the accuracy of his theodolites.

The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every day
more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed clear signs
of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte were reversed
when applied in Manchuria. Historians and students should have no
sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had private reasons for wishing
well to the Czar and his people. At much length, in several labored
chapters of history, he had told how the personal friendliness of the
Czar Alexander I, in 1810, saved the fortunes of J. Q. Adams. and
opened to him the brilliant diplomatic career that ended in the White
House. Even in his own effaced existence he had reasons, not
altogether trivial, for gratitude to the Czar Alexander II, whose
firm neutrality had saved him some terribly anxious days and nights
in 1862; while he had seen enough of Russia to sympathize warmly with
Prince Khilkoff's railways and de Witte's industries. The last and
highest triumph of history would, to his mind, be the bringing of
Russia into the Atlantic combine, and the just and fair allotment of
the whole world among the regulated activities of the universe. At
the rate of unification since 1840, this end should be possible
within another sixty years; and, in foresight of that point, Adams
could already finish -- provisionally -- his chart of international
unity; but, for the moment, the gravest doubts and ignorance covered
the whole field. No one -- Czar or diplomat, Kaiser or Mikado --
seemed to know anything. Through individual Russians one could always
see with ease, for their diplomacy never suggested depth; and perhaps
Hay protected Cassini for the very reason that Cassini could not
disguise an emotion, and never failed to betray that, in setting the
enormous bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, he regretted
infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too. He would
almost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf. His
political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in the
single idea that Russia must fatally roll -- must, by her
irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way.

For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the
fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American intensity.
When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their
energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar
nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western
equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia knocking away the last blocks that
held back the launch of this huge mass into the China Sea. The vast
force of inertia known as China was to be united with the huge bulk
of Russia in a single mass which no amount of new force could
henceforward deflect. Had the Russian Government, with the sharpest
sense of enlightenment, employed scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs,
and borrowed all the resources of Europe, it could not have lifted
such a weight; and had no idea of trying.

These were the positions charted on the map of political unity
by an insect in Washington in the spring of 1903; and they seemed to
him fixed. Russia held Europe and America in her grasp, and Cassini
held Hay in his. The Siberian Railway offered checkmate to all
possible opposition. Japan must make the best terms she could;
England must go on receding; America and Germany would look on at the
avalanche. The wall of Russian inertia that barred Europe across the
Baltic, would bar America across the Pacific; and Hay's policy of the
open door would infallibly fail.

Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant
stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany after
it by its mere mass. To the humble student, the loss of Hay's game
affected only Hay; for himself, the game -- not the stakes -- was the
chief interest; and though want of habit made him object to read his
newspapers blackened -- since he liked to blacken them himself -- he
was in any case condemned to pass but a short space of time either in
Siberia or in Paris, and could balance his endless columns of
calculation equally in either place. The figures, not the facts,
concerned his chart, and he mused deeply over his next equation. The
Atlantic would have to deal with a vast continental mass of inert
motion, like a glacier, which moved, and consciously moved, by
mechanical gravitation alone. Russia saw herself so, and so must an
American see her; he had no more to do than measure, if he could, the
mass. Was volume or intensity the stronger? What and where was the
vis nova that could hold its own before this prodigious ice-cap of
vis inertiae? What was movement of inertia, and what its laws?

Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he
took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to ask.
He found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men than he.
The dictionary said that inertia was a property of matter, by which
matter tends, when at rest, to remain so, and, when in motion, to
move on in a straight line. Finding that his mind refused to imagine
itself at rest or in a straight line, he was forced, as usual, to let
it imagine something else; and since the question concerned the mind,
and not matter, he decided from personal experience that his mind was
never at rest, but moved -- when normal -- about something it called
a motive, and never moved without motives to move it. So long as
these motives were habitual, and their attraction regular, the
consequent result might, for convenience, be called movement of
inertia, to distinguish it from movement caused by newer or higher
attraction; but the greater the bulk to move, the greater must be the
force to accelerate or deflect it.

This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student and
the professor had gone on complaining that minds were unequally
inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class of minds
responded only to habit; another only to novelty. Race classified
thought. Class-lists classified mind. No two men thought alike, and
no woman thought like a man.

Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying the
race in order to reconstruct it; but surely sex-inertia had never
been overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia, maternity and
reproduction are the most typical, and women's property of moving in
a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only
unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman
must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex
is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of
inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the
feminine mind. The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and
American history mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English
history handled them as timidly as though they were a new and
undescribed species; but if the problem of inertia summed up the
difficulties of the race question, it involved that of sex far more
deeply, and to Americans vitally. The task of accelerating or
deflecting the movement of the American woman had interest infinitely
greater than that of any race whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic
or African.

On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was
conscious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As he
grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their interest, but
that Early Women became a passion. Without understanding movement of
sex, history seemed to him mere pedantry. So insistent had he become
on this side of his subject that with women he talked of little else,
and -- because women's thought is mostly subconscious and
particularly sensitive to suggestion -- he tried tricks and devices
to disclose it. The woman seldom knows her own thought; she is as
curious to understand herself as the man to understand her, and
responds far more quickly than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes,
at dinner, one might wait till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as
possible, ask one's liveliest neighbor whether she could explain why
the American woman was a failure. Without an instant's hesitation,
she was sure to answer: "Because the American man is a failure!" She
meant it.

Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American
men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his
sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of
view of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the woman was
right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of
affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from truth, he owed
her at least that compliment. The habit led sometimes to perilous
personalities in the sudden give-and-take of table-talk. This spring,
just before sailing for Europe in May, 1903, he had a message from
his sister-in-law, Mrs. Brooks Adams, to say that she and her sister.
Mrs. Lodge, and the Senator were coming to dinner by way of farewell;
Bay Lodge and his lovely young wife sent word to the same effect;
Mrs. Roosevelt joined the party; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped
down to escape the solitude of his wife's absence. The party were too
intimate for reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby with
derision which stung him to pungent rejoinder: "The American man is a
failure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here more
sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay?
Wouldn't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the
President have a ghost of a chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him?
Do you want to stop at the Embassy, on your way home, and ask which
would run it best -- Herbert or his wife?" The men laughed a little
-- not much! Each probably made allowance for his own wife as an
unusually superior woman. Some one afterwards remarked that these
half-dozen women were not a fair average. Adams replied that the
half-dozen men were above all possible average; he could not lay his
hands on another half-dozen their equals.

Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The
cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was bitter
at heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family together,
and her children ran away like chickens with their first feathers;
the family was extinct like chivalry. She had failed not only to
create a new society that satisfied her, but even to hold her own in
the old society of Church or State; and was left, for the most part,
with no place but the theatre or streets to decorate. She might
glitter with historical diamonds and sparkle with wit as brilliant as
the gems, in rooms as splendid as any in Rome at its best; but she
saw no one except her own sex who knew enough to be worth dazzling,
or was competent to pay her intelligent homage. She might have her
own way, without restraint or limit, but she knew not what to do with
herself when free. Never had the world known a more capable or
devoted mother, but at forty her task was over, and she was left with
no stage except that of her old duties, or of Washington society
where she had enjoyed for a hundred years every advantage, but had
created only a medley where nine men out of ten refused her request
to be civilized, and the tenth bored her.

On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on
this, the opinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a State
Central Committee or a Railway President, is worth less than that of
any woman on Fifth Avenue. The inferiority of man on this, the most
important of all social subjects, is manifest. Adams had here no
occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since no woman in the world
would have paid the smallest respect to the opinions of all
professors since the serpent. His own object had little to do with
theirs. He was studying the laws of motion, and had struck two large
questions of vital importance to America -- inertia of race and
inertia of sex. He had seen Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff turn
artificial energy to the value of three thousand million dollars,
more or less, upon Russian inertia, in the last twenty years, and he
needed to get some idea of the effects. He had seen artificial energy
to the amount of twenty or five-and-twenty million steam horse-power
created in America since 1840, and as much more economized, which had
been socially turned over to the American woman, she being the chief
object of social expenditure, and the household the only considerable
object of American extravagance. According to scientific notions of
inertia and force, what ought to be the result?

In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown
itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed. The
woman had been set free -- volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's perfect
gas; almost brought to the point of explosion, like steam. One had
but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of a hundred huge ocean
steamers, or walk through the Place Vendome, or join a party of
Cook's tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the woman had been set
free; but these swarms were ephemeral like clouds of butterflies in
season, blown away and lost, while the reproductive sources lay
hidden. At Washington, one saw other swarms as grave gatherings of
Dames or Daughters, taking themselves seriously, or brides fluttering
fresh pinions; but all these shifting visions, unknown before 1840,
touched the true problem slightly and superficially. Behind them, in
every city, town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types -- or
type-writers -- telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks,
factory-hands, running into millions of millions, and, as classes,
unknown to themselves as to historians. Even the schoolmistresses
were inarticulate. All these new women had been created since 1840;
all were to show their meaning before 1940.

Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
century of the Church; but this was probably survival, and gave no
hint of the future. The problem remained -- to find out whether
movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take direction
except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be solved in one
generation of American women, and was the most vital of all problems
of force.

The American woman at her best -- like most other women --
exerted great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive
type. She appeared as the result of a long series of discards, and
her chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When closely
watched, she seemed making a violent effort to follow the man, who
had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typical American man
had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his
living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an
hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he
could not admit emotions or anxieties or subconscious distractions,
more than he could admit whiskey or drugs, without breaking his neck.
He could not run his machine and a woman too; he must leave her; even
though his wife, to find her own way, and all the world saw her
trying to find her way by imitating him.

The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in
feminine history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her problem
had been always one of physical strength and it was as physical
perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman's
force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation
had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak
revolted all history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even
an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true
that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a
new field, and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded,
she must become sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy
of inertia to carry on the race.

The story was not new. For thousands of years women had
rebelled. They had made a fortress of religion -- had buried
themselves in the cloister, in self-sacrifice, in good works -- or
even in bad. One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's studies
in the fourth, as in Homeric and archaic time, showed her always busy
in the illusions of heaven or of hell -- ambition, intrigue,
jealousy, magic -- but the American woman had no illusions or
ambitions or new resources, and nothing to rebel against, except her
own maternity; yet the rebels increased by millions from year to year
till they blocked the path of rebellion. Even her field of good works
was narrower than in the twelfth century. Socialism, communism,
collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on
earth for every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which
capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the
future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.

From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of power
was blind. The Church had known more about women than science will
ever know, and the historian who studied the sources of Christianity
felt sometimes convinced that the Church had been made by the woman
chiefly as her protest against man. At times, the historian would
have been almost willing to maintain that the man had overthrown the
Church chiefly because it was feminine. After the overthrow of the
Church, the woman had no refuge except such as the man created for
himself. She was free; she had no illusions; she was sexless; she had
discarded all that the male disliked; and although she secretly
regretted the discard, she knew that she could not go backward. She
must, like the man, marry machinery. Already the American man
sometimes felt surprise at finding himself regarded as sexless; the
American woman was oftener surprised at finding herself regarded as
sexual.

No honest historian can take part with -- or against -- the
forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race
should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. No
doubt every one in society discussed the subject, impelled by
President Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the surface current of
social opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent
undercurrent of social action ran in the other; but the truth lay
somewhere unconscious in the woman's breast. An elderly man, trying
only to learn the law of social inertia and the limits of social
divergence could not compel the Superintendent of the Census to ask
every young woman whether she wanted children, and how many; he could
not even require of an octogenarian Senate the passage of a law
obliging every woman, married or not, to bear one baby -- at the
expense of the Treasury -- before she was thirty years old, under
penalty of solitary confinement for life; yet these were vital
statistics in more senses than all that bore the name, and tended
more directly to the foundation of a serious society in the future.
He could draw no conclusions whatever except from the birth-rate. He
could not frankly discuss the matter with the young women themselves,
although they would have gladly discussed it, because Faust was
helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing. The
Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether she were better
off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would rather be
victim to a man, a church, or a machine.

Between these various forms of inevitable inertia -- sex and
race -- the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit that --
ignorance against ignorance -- the Russian problem seemed to him
somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of race and
bulk would require an immense force to overcome it, but in time it
might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex could not be
overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force,
doubling every few years, was working irresistibly to overcome it.
One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest ignorance that had
already engulfed society. Few centres of great energy lived in
illusion more complete or archaic than Washington with its
simple-minded standards of the field and farm, its Southern and
Western habits of life and manners, its assumptions of ethics and
history; but even in Washington, society was uneasy enough to need no
further fretting. One was almost glad to act the part of horseshoe
crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was uniform -- that nothing
ever changed -- and that the woman would swim about the ocean of
future time, as she had swum in the past, with the gar-fish and the
shark, unable to change.