University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXX
VIS INERTIAE (1903)

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'état. 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 concious
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?
Would n'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 Vendôme, 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 palæontological 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 of 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.