University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVIII
FREE FIGHT (1869–1870)

The old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal,
but the young New Englander was sometimes human.
Judge Hoar brought his son Sam to Washington, and Sam
Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the charm of Washington
spring. Education for education, none ever compared with
the delight of this. The Potomac and its tributaries squandered
beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here
and there a negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the
judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut
gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full
outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its
bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool
charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June
thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual,
animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same
intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that
marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it
were Greek and half human. He could not leave it, but loitered
on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer village
about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance
could not be questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to question
them.

In spite of the fatal deception—or undeception—about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington
had so much amused him that he had not a thought of change.
He loved it too much to question its value. What did he know
about its value, or what did any one know? His father knew
more about it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused
to find that his father, whose recollections went back to 1820,

betrayed for Washington much the same sentimental weakness,
and described the society about President Monroe much as his
son felt the society about President Johnson. He feared its effect
on young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two
of his brothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that
a life in Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it.

Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He
saw Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in
every tree. Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King
used to amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that
nature had made in attaining perfection. Except for two mistakes,
the earth would have been a success. One of these errors was the
inclination of the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of
the sexes, and the saddest thought about the last was that it
should have been so modern. Adams, in his splenetic temper,
held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked their worst
on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and sex was
a species of crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery
till life was as thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in the wrong.
The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a story of
education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his
time. Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except
in Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object.
Every one complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington,
there were no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept
its head better than its neighbors did, and very little time was
needed to prove it, even to Adams's confusion.

Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half
over, and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's
character showed themselves. They were startling—astounding
—terrifying. The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical
attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in September, 1869, has
never been cleared up—at least so far as to make it intelligible
to Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into

the belief that he could safely corner gold without interference
from the Government. He took a number of precautions, which
he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also testified,
to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have satisfied
so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any criminal
lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously,
that no such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead
that he had taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances
which did satisfy him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.

This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound
to start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances
from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could
have satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at
Quincy for want of some one to hire their services at three dollars
a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and
Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much
voracity as Jay Gould, or his âme damnée Jim Fisk, had ever
shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences. They
risked something; no one could say what; but the people about
the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.

The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most
efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work with.
Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold
Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up. The surface
was in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and they
paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House
Palace; but the New York side of the story helped Henry
little. He needed to penetrate the political mystery, and for this
purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At first he feared
that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the Congressional
Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew all that
was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by the
Government.

Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery,
and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making
sure that any mystery existed. All Adams's great friends—
Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings—were
precisely the persons most mystified. They knew less than Adams
did; they sought information, and frankly admitted that their
relations with the White House and the Treasury were not confidential.
No one volunteered advice. No one offered suggestion.
One got no light, even from the press, although press agents expressed
in private the most damning convictions with their usual
cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a quantity
of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.
Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and
could he nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the
point where any member of the Administration became visible.
Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself feared finding
out too much. He found out too much already, when he saw
in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching
his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and that Boutwell's
incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation. With the
conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public assured
every one else that the President himself was the savior of
the situation, and in private assured each other that if the President
had not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the
next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this
was wildly exciting to Adams. That Grant should have fallen,
within six months, into such a morass—or should have let
Boutwell drop him into it—rendered the outlook for the next
four years—probably eight—possibly twelve—mysterious, or
frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his wagon, as
Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country might
outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth century
were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched

executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and
people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool
of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young
man, fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected
to enter an honorable career in the press as the champion
and confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a life
of wasted energy, sweeping the stables of American society clean
of the endless corruption which his second Washington was quite
certain to breed.

By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an Assistant
Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar
Wall Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view,
Grant had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled
by Grant. One could hardly doubt that both of them were
astonished and disgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould
nor any other astute American mind—still less the complex
Jew—could ever have accustomed itself to the incredible and
inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and perhaps, on the
whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if victims they both
were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap which might
easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States Senate,
the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confusion,
cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scandalous
in a boarding-school of girls. For satirists or comedians, the
study was rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with
happy results, but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity
of London noticed with horror that the grossest satires on the
American Senator and politician never failed to excite the laughter
and applause of every audience. Rich and poor joined in throwing
contempt on their own representatives. Society laughed a
vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure. Nothing

remained for a young man without position or power except to
laugh too.

Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can
afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice;
it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always
laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and brief
time to seize it. Any one in power above him can extinguish the
chance. He is horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards. One
dull administration can rapidly drive out every active subordinate.
At Washington, in 1869–70, every intelligent man about the
Government prepared to go. The people would have liked to go
too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some laughed and
some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to content themselves
by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on
their railroads and foundries. They were strong enough to carry
even their politics. Only the helpless remained stranded in Washington.

The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed
how he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury
every one who could interfere with his repose, and then locking
himself up in it, alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues
asked him in vain. Not a word could they get from him,
either in the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or information on
matters even of vital interest. The Treasury as an active influence
ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society
to drag his department out of the mire, as it was sure to do if he
waited long enough.

Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive
none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments
left to serve. He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition
was his horror; pure waste of energy; a union with Northern
Democrats and Southern rebels who never had much in common

with any Adams, and had never shown any warm interest about
them except to drive them from public life. If Mr. Boutwell
turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or contempt
that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State
Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness
as any newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could
cling to this last plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the
recognized champion of Mr. Fish in the New York press. He
never once thought of his disaster between Seward and Sumner
in 1861. Such an accident could not occur again. Fish and Sumner
were inseparable, and their policy was sure to be safe enough
for support. No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught
a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both
his friends.

This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he
approved; he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley,
and he was delighted; but when he renewed his relations with
Sumner in the winter of 1869–70, he began slowly to grasp the
idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he proposed
also to force on the Department. This was not all. Secretary
Fish seemed to have vanished. Besides the Department of
State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum
on Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign
Relations over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at
the Capitol; and, finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign
Office in the War Department, with President Grant himself
for chief, pressing a policy of extension in the West Indies which
no Northeastern man ever approved. For his life, Adams could
not learn where to place himself among all these forces. Officially
he would have followed the responsible Secretary of State,
but he could not find the Secretary. Fish seemed to be friendly
towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant, but he asserted as
yet no policy of his own. As for Grant's policy, Adams never had

a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he did know,
he was ready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came only
when he heard Sumner's views, which, as he had reason to know,
were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.

Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed.
To his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his
veto on all extension within the tropics; which cost the island
of St. Thomas to the United States, besides the Bay of Samana
as an alternative, and ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened
with incredulous stupor while Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating
and pressing every possible American claim against
England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the
United States.

Adams did not then know—in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him—what was going on behind the doors
of the White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft
Davis knew much more than he. The game of cross-purposes
was as impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy.
President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported,
Adams could not be expected to divine. One point alone seemed
clear to a man—no longer so very young—who had lately come
from a seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as
much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened
with the more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened
the gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object,
and Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and
Adams was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could
obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama
Claims, he drivelled. On the point of fact, Adams was as
peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only
wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr.
Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.

Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner
so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel
with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had
profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy.
Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or
intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a lightweight
cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he
knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party,
if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party
manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very
names were unknown to him.

Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then
it was not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcerting
than the complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards
told Adams, with the rather grim humor he sometimes indulged
in, that Grant took a dislike to Motley because he parted his hair
in the middle. Adams repeated the story to Godkin, who made
much play with it in the Nation, till it was denied. Adams saw
no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as good a right to
dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a part of it.
Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less
material than hair—on clothes, for example, according to Mr.
Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz—and nine
men in ten could hardly give as good a reason as hair for their
likes or dislikes. In truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because
they had nothing in common; and for the same reason he disliked
Sumner. For the same reason he would be sure to dislike Adams
if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish could not be quite sure
of Grant, except for the powerful effect which wealth had, or
appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.

The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but
another quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish

and Sumner, worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet,
the one whom he had most personal interest in cultivating
was Attorney-General Hoar. The Legal Tender decision, which
had been the first stumbling-block to Adams at Washington,
grew in interest till it threatened to become something more serious
than a block; it fell on one's head like a plaster ceiling, and
could not be escaped. The impending battle between Fish and
Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between
Hoar and Chief Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington
hoping to support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the
Senate, but he never dreamed that he would be required to help
in breaking down the Supreme Court. Although, step by step,
he had been driven, like the rest of the world, to admit that
American society had outgrown most of its institutions, he still
clung to the Supreme Court, much as a churchman clings to his
bishops, because they are his only symbol of unity; his last rag of
Right. Between the Executive and the Legislature, citizens could
have no Rights; they were at the mercy of Power. They had
created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power, and it
was little enough protection at best. Adams wanted to save the
independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not
conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.

Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review
an article on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a
volume just then published by Spaulding, the putative father of
the legal-tender clause in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who
alone sympathized with reform, saved from Boutwell's decree of
banishment such reformers as he could find place for, and he saved
Walker for a time by giving him the Census of 1870. Walker was
obliged to abandon his article for the North American in order
to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his notes, and
Adams completed the article.

He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.

He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the
banks and bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough
for a newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted
"intrinsic" value, gold and silver came equally welcome to a
writer who was paid half the wages of an ordinary mechanic.
He had no notion of attacking or defending Legal Tender; his
object was to defend the Chief Justice and the Court. Walker
argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the necessity
for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time the Act
was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections,
Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number
of the North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never
cared to abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of
the army and the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away
with Adams's restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained
loudly of this treatment, not without justice, but the article itself
had serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred
of Spaulding's contention that legal tender was necessary at the
time; and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with conviction.
The Chief Justice seemed to be pleased. The Attorney-General,
pleased or not, made no sign. The article had enough
historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of
Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not
its point in education. The point was that, in spite of the best
intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to
escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into opposition.
Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.

Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry
Adams went on, drifting further and further from the Administration.
He did this in common with all the world, including
Hoar himself. Scarcely a newspaper in the country kept discipline.
The New York Tribune was one of the most criminal. Dissolution
of ties in every direction marked the dissolution of temper, and
the Senate Chamber became again a scene of irritated egotism

that passed ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each other, and no
one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the Executive
and threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.

That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his
success at Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax
rule, must have had some meaning for Adams's education, if
Adams could only have understood what it was. He studied, but
failed. Sympathy with him was not their weakness. Directly,
in the form of help, he knew he could hope as little from them as
from Boutwell. So far from inviting attachment they, like other
New Englanders, blushed to own a friend. Not one of the whole
delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to help Adams or any
other young man who did not beg for it, although they would
always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics was
the earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to
learn from its study; but the situation struck him as curious—
so curious that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four
most powerful friends had matched themselves, two and two, and
were fighting in pairs to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with
foreign affairs and the judiciary as prizes! What value had the
fight in education?

Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander.
The stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe
Conkling or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value?
The statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or
Hoars or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could
produce. They trod with lofty contempt on other people's jobs,
especially when there was good in them. Yet the public thought
that Sumner and Conkling cost the country a hundred times more
than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old
Southern statesmen, who were also honest in money-matters, cost

the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt worried Adams
less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected the
whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers discussed
little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield, and
Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs,
and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence
by their insistence on points of morals. Society hesitated,
wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing
the weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite
of all such criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and
Blaine for the Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not
seeming to care for the question; until young men were forced to
see that either some new standard must be created, or none could
be upheld. The moral law had expired—like the Constitution.

Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well
spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency.
What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would
work, and men who could work it; but it found neither. Adams
had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. His friends
had been driven out of Washington or had taken to fisticuffs.
He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the future.

The result was a review of the Session for the July North American
into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought
he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good
history then, and he thought it better twenty years afterwards;
he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it happened, in
the process of his devious education, this "Session" of 1869–70
proved to be his last study in current politics, and his last dying
testament as a humble member of the press. As such, he stood by
it. He could have said no more, had he gone on reviewing every
session in the rest of the century. The political dilemma was
as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970. The system of 1789
had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of

a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given it up.
Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's
political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece
out—to patch—or, in vulgar language, to tinker—the political
machine as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of
system, might last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution
or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the
poorest in the world—the clumsiest—the most inefficient.

Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics—to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling
or even Mr. Sumner-he could not honestly say that such an
education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable
heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing
on lower levels—clever and amusing men like Garfield and
Blaine—who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial
demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself
which the North American Review would not have admitted. One
asked doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their
turn. What kind of political ambition was to result from this
destructive political education?

Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the attainment
of a working political system. Society needed to reach it. If
moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working,
new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An
eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay
Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans
laughed, and went their way. Society paid them to be practical.
Whenever society cared to pay Adams, he too would be practical,
take his pay, and hold his tongue; but meanwhile he was driven
to associate with Democratic Congressmen and educate them.
He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of revenue
reform, and turned his rooms into a college. The Administration
drove him, and thousands of other young men, into active enmity,

not only to Grant, but to the system or want of system, which
took possession of the President. Every hope or thought which
had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the
blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.

All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so
busy, so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew
Congressmen by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He
wrote for his various organs all sorts of attacks and defences.
He enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself as happy as
Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much happier than his friends Fish
or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or Attorney-General Hoar
or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to the woods,
which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de
Guérin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms more
voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the
judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams
astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent
to the Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught
glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage. At such moments
he pondered on the distant beauty of St. Peter's and the steps
of Ara Cœli.

Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to London
for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy,"
which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh
Review. It was the best piece of work he had done, but this was
not his reason for publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had
provoked a sort of revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well
as among some who were not so respectable; and the attack on
Erie was beginning to promise success. London was a sensitive
spot for the Erie management, and it was thought well to strike
them there, where they were socially and financially exposed.
The tactics suited him in another way, for any expression about

America in an English review attracted ten times the attention
in America that the same article would attract in the North
American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles
in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright; his highest
ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since,
in any case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase,
he was becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.