University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXXV
NUNC AGE (1905)

NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private
secretary landed at New York with the ex-Ministers
Adams and Motley, when they saw American society as
a long caravan stretching out towards the plains. As he came up
the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than either his
father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more striking than
ever—wonderful—unlike anything man had ever seen—and
like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the city
became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning.
Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have
asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown
great masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the
air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in
every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any
cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined,
power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything
but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous,
unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men,
and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding
a new type of man—a man with ten times the endurance,
energy, will and mind of the old type—for whom they were
ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements
or read the last week's newspapers, the new man seemed close at
hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength,
and his failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and
every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways
of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of
Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing
the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution,

but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come
or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years failure of Christianty
roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great
was in sight.

Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington
to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and
battling Trusts. With the Battle of Trusts, a student of mechanics
felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of politics or society,
but also as a measure of motion. The Trusts and Corporations
stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created
since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous
energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old
conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must
trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled
it under foot. As one of their earliest victims, a citizen of
Quincy, born in 1838, had learned submission and silence, for he
knew that, under the laws of mechanics, any change, within the
range of the forces, must make his situation only worse; but he
was beyond measure curious to see whether the conflict of forces
would produce the new man, since no other energies seemed left
on earth to breed. The new man could be only a child born of contact
between the new and the old energies.

Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown,
and neither had warped the umpire's judgment by its favors. If
ever judge had reason to be impartial, it was he. The sole object
of his interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one
watched, the less could be seen of him. Of the forces behind the
Trusts, one could see something; they owned a complete organization,
with schools, training, wealth and purpose; but of the forces
behind Roosevelt one knew little; their cohesion was slight; their
training irregular; their objects vague. The public had no idea
what practical system it could aim at, or what sort of men could
manage it. The single problem before it was not so much to control
the Trusts as to create the society that could manage the

Trusts. The new American must be either the child of the new
forces or a chance sport of nature. The attraction of mechanical
power had already wrenched the American mind into a crab-like
process which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts to restore to
even action, and he had every right to active support and sympathy
from all the world, especially from the Trusts themselves so
far as they were human; but the doubt persisted whether the force
that educated was really man or nature—mind or motion. The
mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to require
that the law of mass should rule. In that case, progress would continue
as before.

In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was
as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had
been to the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for holding
his tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no
more than for the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an approach
to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within
thirty years. At the calculated acceleration, the head of the
meteor-stream must very soon pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute
was idle, discussion was futile, and silence, next to good-temper,
was the mark of sense. If the acceleration, measured by the development
and economy of forces, were to continue at its rate
since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should be able to plot the
past and future orbit of the human race as accurately as that of
the November meteoroids.

Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as
the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators. Above
all, it was profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage effort.
On the other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and to economize
waste of mind. If it was not itself education, it pointed out
the economies necessary for the education of the new American.
There, the duty stopped.

There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a singular
sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly five thousand

feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses of seals,
where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in peace.
"Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have been
past believing that a dying seal could have transported itself over
fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface," but "the seal seems
often to crawl to the shore or the ice to die, probably from its instinctive
dread of its marine enemies." In India, Purun Dass, at
the end of statesmanship, sought solitude, and died in sanctity
among the deer and monkeys, rather than remain with man. Even
in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and
a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of
tone—but never hustled. For that reason, one's own passive
obscurity seemed sometimes nearer nature than John Hay's
exposure. To the normal animal the instinct of sport is innate,
and historians themselves were not exempt from the passion of
baiting their bears; but in its turn even the seal dislikes to be
worried to death in age by creatures that have not the strength
or the teeth to kill him outright.

On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a
glance that Hay must have rest. Already Mrs. Hay had bade him
prepare to help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the
Session should be over, and although Hay protested that the idea
could not even be discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that he
could not effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding without
struggle. He would equally have resigned office and retired, like
Purun Dass, had not the President and the press protested; but
he often debated the subject, and his friends could throw no light
on it. Adams himself, who had set his heart on seeing Hay close
his career by making peace in the East, could only urge that vanity
for vanity, the crown of peacemaker was worth the cross of martyrdom;
but the cross was full in sight, while the crown was still uncertain.
Adams found his formula for Russian inertia exasperatingly
correct. He thought that Russia should have negotiated
instantly on the fall of Port Arthur, January 1, 1905; he found

that she had not the energy, but meant to wait till her navy should
be destroyed. The delay measured precisely the time that Hay
had to spare.

The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the strength
to crawl on board ship, March 18, and before his steamer had
reached half her course, he had revived, almost as gay as when he
first lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four years earlier.
The clouds that gather round the setting sun do not always take a
sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch on mortality; or,
at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely sad. One walks with
one's friends squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye
with a smile. One has done it so often! Hay could scarcely pace
the deck; he nourished no illusions; he was convinced that he
should never return to his work, and he talked lightly of the death-sentence
that he might any day expect, but he threw off the coloring
of office and mortality together, and the malaria of power left
its only trace in the sense of tasks incomplete.

One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his
dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs
in a butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly
completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly every
old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little or
nothing to annoy his successor. He had brought the great Atlantic
powers into a working system, and even Russia seemed about to
be dragged into a combine of intelligent equilibrium based on an
intelligent allotment of activities. For the first time in fifteen hundred
years a true Roman pax was in sight, and would, if it succeeded,
owe its virtues to him. Except for making peace in Manchuria,
he could do no more; and if the worst should happen, setting
continent against continent in arms—the only apparent alternative
to his scheme—he need not repine at missing the catastrophe.

This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting
statesman feels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to
get out one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on

either side. Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy?
The Kaiser supplied him with these figures, just as the Cretic
approached Morocco. Every one was doing it, and seemed in a
panic about it. The chaos waited only for his landing.

Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at Nervi,
and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and
heard no call for action. Then they all went on to Nauheim without
relapse. There, after a few days, Adams left him for the regular
treatment, and came up to Paris. The medical reports promised
well, and Hay's letters were as humorous and light-handed as ever.
To the last he wrote cheerfully of his progress, and amusingly
with his usual light scepticism, of his various doctors; but when
the treatment ended, three weeks later, and he came on to Paris,
he showed, at the first glance, that he had lost strength, and the
return to affairs and interviews wore him rapidly out. He was
conscious of it, and in his last talk before starting for London and
Liverpool he took the end of his activity for granted. "You must
hold out for the peace negotiations," was the remonstrance. "I 've
not time!" he replied. "You 'll need little time!" was the rejoinder.
Each was correct.

There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than
the commonplace to express what is incapable of expression. "The
rest is silence!" The few familiar words, among the simplest in the
language, conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry, served Shakespeare,
and, as yet, no one has said more. A few weeks afterwards,
one warm evening in early July, as Adams was strolling down to
dine under the trees at Armenonville, he learned that Hay was
dead. He expected it; on Hay's account, he was even satisfied to
have his friend die, as we would all die if we could, in full fame, at
home and abroad, universally regretted, and wielding his power
to the last. One had seen scores of emperors and heroes fade into
cheap obscurity even when alive; and now, at least, one had not
that to fear for one's friend. It was not even the suddenness of the
shock, or the sense of void, that threw Adams into the depths of

Hamlet's Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity
in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile
climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to follow
—the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends had
begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive—no
attraction—to carry it on after the others had gone. Education
had ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter horizon
could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day—say
1938, their centenary—they might be allowed to return together
for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in
the light of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for
first time since man began his education among the carnivores,
they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could
regard without a shudder.