University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER X
POLITICAL MORALITY (1862)

ON Moran's promotion to be Secretary, Mr. Seward inquired
whether Minister Adams would like the place of
Assistant Secretary for his son. It was the first—and
last—office ever offered him, if indeed he could claim what was
offered in fact to his father. To them both, the change seemed
useless. Any young man could make some sort of Assistant Secretary;
only one, just at that moment, could make an Assistant Son.
More than half his duties were domestic; they sometimes required
long absences; they always required independence of the Government
service. His position was abnormal. The British Government
by courtesy allowed the son to go to Court as Attaché,
though he was never attached, and after five or six years' toleration,
the decision was declared irregular. In the Legation, as private
secretary, he was liable to do Secretary's work. In society,
when official, he was attached to the Minister; when unofficial,
he was a young man without any position at all. As the years
went on, he began to find advantages in having no position at
all except that of young man. Gradually he aspired to become a
gentleman; just a member of society like the rest. The position
was irregular; at that time many positions were irregular; yet it
lent itself to a sort of irregular education that seemed to be the
only sort of education the young man was ever to get.

Such as it was, few young men had more. The spring and
summer of 1863 saw a great change in Secretary Seward's management
of foreign affairs. Under the stimulus of danger, he too got
education. He felt, at last, that his official representatives abroad
needed support. Officially he could give them nothing but despatches,
which were of no great value to any one; and at best the
mere weight of an office had little to do with the public. Governments
were made to deal with Governments, not with private

individuals or with the opinions of foreign society. In order to
affect European opinion, the weight of American opinion had to
be brought to bear personally, and had to be backed by the weight
of American interests. Mr. Seward set vigorously to work and
sent over every important American on whom he could lay his
hands. All came to the Legation more or less intimately, and
Henry Adams had a chance to see them all, bankers or bishops,
who did their work quietly and well, though, to the outsider, the
work seemed wasted and the "influential classes" more indurated
with prejudice than ever. The waste was only apparent; the work
all told in the end, and meanwhile it helped education.

Two or three of these gentlemen were sent over to aid the
Minister and to coöperate with him. The most interesting of these
was Thurlow Weed, who came to do what the private secretary
himself had attempted two years before, with boyish ignorance of
his own powers. Mr. Weed took charge of the press, and began, to
the amused astonishment of the secretaries, by making what the
Legation had learned to, accept as the invariable mistake of every
amateur diplomat; he wrote letters to the. London Times. Mistake
or not, Mr. Weed soon got into his hands the threads of management,
and did quietly and smoothly all that was to be done. With
his work the private secretary had no connection; it was he that
interested. Thurlow Weed was a complete American education
in himself. His mind was naturally strong and beautifully balanced;
his temper never seemed raffled; his manners were carefully
perfect in the style of benevolent simplicity, the tradition of
Benjamin Franklin. He was the model of political management
and patient address; but the trait that excited enthusiasm in a
private secretary was his faculty of irresistibly conquering confidence.
Of all flowers in the garden of education, confidence was
becoming the rarest; but before Mr. Weed went away, young
Adams followed him about not only obediently—for obedience
had long since become a blind instinct—but rather with sympathy
and affection, much like a little dog.

The sympathy was not due only to Mr. Weed's skill of management,
although Adams never met another such master, or any one
who approached him; nor was the confidence due to any display
of professions, either moral or social, by Mr. Weed. The trait
that astounded and confounded cynicism was his apparent unselfishness.
Never, in any man who wielded such power, did
Adams meet anything like it. The effect of power and publicity
on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends
by killing the victim's sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a
passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions
too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates;
and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a rare immune.
He thought apparently not of himself, but of the person he was
talking with. He held himself naturally in the background. He
was not jealous. He grasped power, but not office. He distributed
offices by handfuls without caring to take them. He had the
instinct of empire: he gave, but he did not receive. This rare
superiority to the politicians he controlled, a trait that private
secretaries never met in the politicians themselves, excited Adams's
wonder and curiosity, but when he tried to get behind it, and to
educate himself from the stores of Mr. Weed's experience, he found
the study still more fascinating. Management was an instinct
with Mr. Weed; an object to be pursued for its own sake, as one
plays cards; but he appeared to play with men as though they
were only cards; he seemed incapable of feeling himself one of
them. He took them and played them for their face-value; but
once, when he had told, with his usual humor, some stories of his
political experience which were strong even for the Albany lobby,
the private secretary made bold to ask him outright: "Then,
Mr. Weed, do you think that no politician can be trusted?" Mr.
Weed hesitated for a monent; then said in his mild manner: "I
never advise a young man to begin by thinking so."

This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral
sense, as though Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions!"

As he grew older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it
as a question of how the game should be played. Young men most
needed experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a
general rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles had better
be left aside; values were enough. Adams knew that he could
never learn to play politics in so masterly a fashion as this: his
education and his nervous system equally forbade it, although he
admired all the more the impersonal faculty of the political master
who could thus efface himself and his temper in the game. He
noticed that most of the greatest politicians in history had seemed
to regard men as counters. The lesson was the more interesting
because another famous New Yorker came over at the same time
who liked to discuss the same problem. Secretary Seward sent
William M. Evarts to London as law counsel, and Henry began
an acquaintance with Mr. Evarts that soon became intimate.
Evarts was as individual as Weed was impersonal; like most men,
he cared little for the game, or how it was played, and much for
the stakes, but he played it in a large and liberal way, like Daniel
Webster, "a great advocate employed in politics." Evarts was
also an economist of morals, but with him the question was rather
how much morality one could afford. "The world can absorb
only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One
sought education in order to adjust the dose.

The teachings of Weed and Evarts were practical, and the
private secretary's life turned on their value. England's power
of absorbing truth was small. Englishmen, such as Palmerston,
Russell, Bethell, and the society represented by the Times and
Morning Post, as well as the Tories represented by Disraeli,
Lord Robert Cecil, and the Standard, offered a study in education
that sickened a young student with anxiety. He had begun
—contrary to Mr. Weed's advice—by taking their bad faith for
granted. Was he wrong? To settle this point became the main
object of the diplomatic education so laboriously pursued, at a
cost already stupendous, and promising to become ruinous. Life

changed front, according as one thought one's self dealing with
honest men or with rogues.

Thus far, the private secretary felt officially sure of dishonesty.
The reasons that satisfied him had not altogether satisfied his
father, and of course his father's doubts gravely shook his own
convictions, but, in practice, if only for safety, the Legation put
little or no confidence in Ministers, and there the private secretary's
diplomatic education began. The recognition of belligerency,
the management of the Declaration of Paris, the Trent Affair,
all strengthened the belief that Lord Russell had started in May,
1861, with the assumption that the Confederacy was established;
every step he had taken proved his persistence in the same idea; he
never would consent to put obstacles in the way of recognition;
and he was waiting only for the proper moment to interpose. All
these points seemed so fixed—so, self-evident—that no one in
the Legation would have doubted or even discussed them except
that Lord Russell obstinately denied the whole charge, and persisted
in assuring Minister Adams of his honest and impartial
neutrality.

With the insolence of youth and zeal, Henry Adams jumped
at once to the conclusion that Earl Russell—like other statesmen
—lied; and, although the Minister thought differently, he had to
act as though Russell were false. Month by month the demonstration
followed its mathematical stages; one of the most perfect
educational courses in politics and diplomacy that a young man
ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly tutors in the world
were provided for him at public expense-Lord Palmerston,
Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr. Gladstone,
Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by the British Government;
William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, William Maxwell
Evarts, Thurlow Weed, and other considerable professors employed
by the American Government; but there was only one
student to profit by this immense staff of teachers. The private
secretary alone sought education.

To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught.
Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel's metaphysical
doctrine of the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to
understand. Yet the stages of demonstration were clear. They
began in June, 1862, after the escape of one rebel cruiser, by the
remonstrances of the Minister against the escape of "No. 290,"
which was imminent. Lord Russell declined to act on the evidence.
New evidence was sent in every few days, and with it, on
July 24, was included Collier's legal opinion: "It appears difficult
to make out a stronger case of infringement of the Foreign Enlistment
Act, which, if not enforced on this occasion, is little better
than a dead letter." Such language implied almost a charge of
collusion with the rebel agents—an intent to aid the Confederacy.
In spite of the warning, Earl Russell let the ship, four days
afterwards, escape.

Young Adams had nothing to do with law; that was business of
his betters. His opinion of law hung on his opinion of lawyers.
In spite of Thurlow Weed's advice, could one afford to trust human
nature in politics? History said not. Sir Robert Collier seemed to
hold that Law agreed with History. For education the point was
vital. If one could not trust a dozen of the most respected private
characters in the world, composing the Queen's Ministry, one
could trust no mortal man.

Lord Russell felt the force of this inference, and undertook to
disprove it. His effort lasted till his death. At first he excused
himself by throwing the blame on the law officers. This was a
politician's practice, and the lawyers overruled it. Then he pleaded
guilty to criminal negligence, and said in his "Recollections":—
"I assent entirely to the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice of
England that the Alabama ought to have been detained during
the four days I was waiting for the opinion of the law officers.
But I think that the fault was not that of the commissioners of
customs, it was my fault as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs."
This concession brought all parties on common ground. Of course

it was his fault! The true issue lay not in the question of his fault,
but of his intent. To a young man, getting an education in politics,
there could be no sense in history unless a constant course of
faults implied a constant motive.

For his father the question was not so abstruse; it was a practical
matter of business to be handled as Weed or Evarts handled their
bargains and jobs. Minister Adams held the convenient belief
that, in the main, Russell was true, and the theory answered his
purposes so well that he died still holding it. His son was seeking
education, and wanted to know whether he could, in politics, risk
trusting any one. Unfortunately no one could then decide; no one
knew the facts. Minister Adams died without knowing them.
Henry Adams was an older man than his father in 1862, before
he learned a part of them. The most curious fact, even then, was
that Russell believed in his own good faith and that Argyll believed
in it also.

Argyll betrayed a taste for throwing the blame on Bethell, Lord
Westbury, then Lord Chancellor, but this escape helped Adams
not at all. On the contrary, it complicated the case of Russell.
In England, one half of society enjoyed throwing stones at Lord
Palmerston, while the other half delighted in flinging mud at Earl
Russell, but every one of every party united in pelting Westbury
with every missile at hand. The private secretary had no doubts
about him, for he never professed to be moral. He was the head
and heart of the whole rebel contention, and his opinions on neutrality
were as clear as they were on morality. The private secretary
had nothing to do with him, and regretted it, for Lord Westbury's
wit and wisdom were great; but as far as his authority went
he affirmed the law that in politics no man should be trusted.

Russell alone insisted on his honesty of intention and persuaded
both the Duke and the Minister to believe him. Every one in the
Legation accepted his assurances as the only assertions they
could venture to trust. They knew he expected the rebels to win
in the end, but they believed he would not actively interpose to

decide it. On that—on nothing else—they rested their frail
hopes of remaining a day longer in England. Minister Adams remained
six years longer in England; then returned to America to
lead a busy life till he died in 1886 still holding the same faith in
Earl Russell, who had died in 1878. In 1889, Spencer Walpole
published the official life of Earl Russell, and told a part of the
story which had never been known to the Minister and which
astounded his son, who burned with curiosity to know what his
father would have said of it.

The story was this: The Alabama escaped, by Russell's confessed
negligence, on July 28, 1862. In America the Union armies
had suffered great disasters before Richmond and at the second
Bull Run, August 29–30, followed by Lee's invasion of Maryland,
September 7, the news of which, arriving in England on September
14, roused the natural idea that the crisis was at hand.
The next news was expected by the Confederates to announce
the fall of Washington or Baltimore. Palmerston instantly, September
14, wrote to Russell: "If this should happen, would it
not be time for us to consider whether in such a state of things
England and France might not address the contending parties
and recommend an arrangement on the basis of separation?"

This letter, quite in the line of Palmerston's supposed opinions,
would have surprised no one, if it had been communicated to
the Legation; and indeed, if Lee had captured Washington, no
one could have blamed Palmerston for offering intervention.
Not Palmerston's letter but Russell's reply, merited the painful
attention of a young man seeking a moral standard for judging
politicians:—

Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical difficulty
in education which a mere student could never overcome; a difficulty
not in theory, or knowledge, or even want of experience,
but in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord Russell's course
had been consistent from the first, and had all the look of rigid
determination to recognize the Southern Confederacy "with a
view" to breaking up the Union. His letter of September 17
hung directly on his encouragement of the Alabama and his protection
of the rebel navy; while the whole of his plan had its root
in the Proclamation of Belligerency, May 13, 1861. The policy
had every look of persistent forethought, but it took for granted
the deliberate dishonesty of three famous men: Palmerston, Russell,
and Gladstone. This dishonesty, as concerned Russell, was
denied by Russell himself, and disbelieved by Argyll, Forster, and
most of America's friends in England, as well as by Minister
Adams. What the Minister would have thought had he seen
this letter of September 17, his son would have greatly liked to
know, but he would have liked still more to know what the Minister
would have thought of Palmerston's answer, dated September
23:—

The rôles were reversed. Russell wrote what was expected
from Palmerston, or even more violently; while Palmerston wrote
what was expected from Russell, or even more temperately. The
private secretary's view had been altogether wrong, which would
not have much surprised even him, but he would have been greatly
astonished to learn that the most confidential associates of these
men knew little more about their intentions than was known in
the Legation. The most trusted member of the Cabinet was Lord
Granville, and to him Russell next wrote. Granville replied at once
decidedly opposing recognition of the Confederacy, and Russell
sent the reply to Palmerston, who returned it October 2, with the
mere suggestion of waiting for further news from America. At
the same time Granville wrote to another member of the Cabinet,
Lord Stanley of Alderley, a letter published forty years afterwards
in Granville's "Life" (i, 442)—to the private secretary
altogether the most curious and instructive relic of the whole lesson
in politics:—

Out of a Cabinet of a dozen members, Granville, the best informed
of them all, could pick only three who would favor recognition.
Even a private secretary thought he knew as much as this,
or more. Ignorance was not confined to the young and insignificant,
nor were they the only victims of blindness. Granville's letter
made only one point clear. He knew of no fixed policy or conspiracy.
If any existed, it was confined to Palmerston, Russell,
Gladstone, and perhaps Newcastle. In truth, the Legation knew,
then, all that was to be known, and the true fault of education
was to suspect too much.

By that time, October 3, news of Antietam and of Lee's retreat
into Virginia had reached London. The Emancipation Proclamation

arrived. Had the private secretary known all that Granville
or Palmerston knew, he would surely have thought the danger
past, at least for a time, and any man of common sense would
have told him to stop worrying over phantoms. This healthy lesson
would have been worth much for practical education, but it
was quite upset by the sudden rush of a new actor upon the stage
with a rhapsody that made Russell seem sane, and all education
superfluous.

This new actor, as every one knows, was William Ewart Gladstone,
then Chancellor of the Exchequer. If, in the domain of
the world's politics, one point was fixed, one value ascertained,
one element serious, it was the British Exchequer; and if one man
lived who could be certainly counted as sane by overwhelming
interest, it was the man who had in charge the finances of England.
If education had the smallest value, it should have shown its
force in Gladstone, who was educated beyond all record of English
training. From him, if from no one else, the poor student could
safely learn.

Here is what he learned! Palmerston notified Gladstone, September
24, of the proposed intervention: "If I am not mistaken,
you would be inclined to approve such a course." Gladstone replied
the next day: "He was glad to learn what the Prime Minister
had told him; and for two reasons especially he desired that the
proceedings should be prompt: the first was the rapid progress of
the Southern arms and the extension of the area of Southern feeling;
the second was the risk of violent impatience in the cotton-towns
of Lancashire such as would prejudice the dignity and disinterestedness
of the proffered mediation."

Had the puzzled student seen this letter, he must have concluded
from it that the best educated statesman England ever
produced did not know what he was talking about, an assumption
which all the world would think quite inadmissible from a private
secretary—but this was a trifle. Gladstone having thus arranged,
with Palmerston and Russell, for intervention in the American

war, reflected on the subject for a fortnight from September 25
to October 7, when he was to speak on the occasion of a great
dinner at Newcastle. He decided to announce the Government's
policy with all the force his persona! and official authority could
give it. This decision was no sudden impulse; it was the result of
deep reflection pursued to the last moment. On the morning of
October 7, he entered in his diary: "Reflected further on what I
should say about Lancashire and America, for both these subjects
are critical." That evening at dinner, as the mature fruit of his
long study, he deliberately pronounced the famous phrase:—

... We know quite well that the people of the Northern States
have not yet drunk of the cup—they are still trying to hold it
far from their lips—which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless
must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery;
we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that
Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army;
they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is
more than either, they have made a nation. . . .

Looking back, forty years afterwards, on this episode, one
asked one's self painfully what sort of a lesson a young man should
have drawn, for the purposes of his education, from this world-famous
teaching of a very great master. In the heat of passion
at the moment, one drew some harsh moral conclusions: Were
they incorrect? Posed bluntly as rules of conduct, they led to the
worst possible practices. As morals, one could detect no shade of
difference between Gladstone and Napoleon except to the advantage
of Napoleon. The private secretary saw none; he accepted the
teacher in that sense; he took his lesson of political morality as
learned, his notice to quit as duly served, and supposed his education
to be finished.

Every one thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil.
Any intelligent education ought to end when it is complete. One
would then feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world.
The old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the actual

drama is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue. When
the curtain fell on Gladstone's speech, any student had the right
to suppose the drama ended; none could have affirmed that it was
about to begin; that one's painful lesson was thrown away.

Even after forty years, most people would refuse to believe it;
they would still insist that Gladstone, Russell, and Palmerston
were true villains of melodrama. The evidence against Gladstone
in special seemed overwhelming. The word "must" can never
be used by a responsible Minister of one Government towards
another, as Gladstone used it. No one knew so well as he that he
and his own officials and friends at Liverpool were alone "making
"a rebel navy, and that Jefferson Davis had next to nothing
to do with it. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he was the Minister
most interested in knowing that Palmerston, Russell, and
himself were banded together by mutual pledge to make the
Confederacy a nation the next week, and that the Southern leaders
had as yet no hope of "making a nation" but in them. Such
thoughts occurred to every one at the moment and time only
added to their force. Never in the history of political turpitude
had any brigand of modern civilization offered a worse example.
The proof of it was that it outraged even Palmerston, who immediately
put up Sir George Comewall Lewis to repudiate the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, against whom he turned his press at
the same time. Palmerston had no notion of letting his hand be
forced by Gladstone.

Russell did nothing of the kind; if he agreed with Palmerston,
he followed Gladstone. Although he had just created a new evangel
of non-intervention for Italy, and preached it like an apostle,
he preached the gospel of intervention in America as though he
were a mouthpiece of the Congress of Vienna. On October 13,
he issued his call for the Cabinet to meet, on October 23, for discussion
of the "duty of Europe to ask both parties, in the most
friendly and conciliatory terms, to agree to a suspension of arms."
Meanwhile Minister Adams, deeply perturbed and profoundly

anxious, would betray no sign of alarm, and purposely delayed to
ask explanation. The howl of anger against Gladstone became
louder every day, for every one knew that the Cabinet was called
for October 23, and then could not fail to decide its policy about
the United States. Lord Lyons put off his departure for America
till October 25 expressly to share in the conclusions to be discussed
on October 23. When Minister Adams at last requested
an interview, Russell named October 23 as the day. To the last
moment every act of Russell showed that, in his mind, the intervention
was still in doubt.

When Minister Adams, at the interview, suggested that an
explanation was due him, he watched Russell with natural interest,
and reported thus:—

. . . His lordship took my allusion at once, though not without
a slight indication of embarrassment. He said that Mr. Gladstone
had been evidently much misunderstood. I must have seen in the
newspapers the letters which contained his later explanations. That
he had certain opinions in regard to the nature of the struggle in
America, as on all public questions, just as other Englishmen had,
was natural enough. And it was the fashion here for public men to
express such as they held in their public addresses. Of course it was
not for him to disavow anything on the part of Mr. Gladstone; but
lie had no idea that in saying what he had, there was a serious intention
to justify any of the inferences that had been drawn from it of
a disposition in the Government now to adopt a new policy. . . .

A student trying to learn the processes of politics in a free government
could not but ponder long on the moral to be drawn from
this "explanation" of Mr. Gladstone by Earl Russell. The point
set for study as the first condition of political life, was whether
any politician could be believed or trusted. The question which a
private secretary asked himself, in copying this despatch of October
24, 1862, was whether his father believed, or should believe, one
word of Lord Russell's "embarrassment." The "truth" was not
known for thirty years, but when published, seemed to be the reverse
of Earl Russell's statement. Mr. Gladstone's speech had

been drawn out by Russell's own policy of intervention and had
no sense except to declare the "disposition in the Government now
to adopt" that new policy. Earl Russell never disavowed Gladstone,
although Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall Lewis
instantly did so. As far as the curious student could penetrate the
mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed Earl Russell's intent.

As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would
decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively
honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might
be ignored as a delusion. Therefore the student felt compelled
to reach some sort of idea that should serve to bring the case within
a general law. Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He
bluntly told Russell that while he was "willing to acquit" Gladstone
of "any deliberate intention to bring on the worst effects,"
he was bound to say that Gladstone was doing it quite as certainly
as if he had one; and to this charge, which struck more sharply at
Russell's secret policy than at Gladstone's public defence of it,
Russell replied as well as he could:—

. . . His lordship intimated as guardedly as possible that Lord
Palmerston and other members of the Government regretted the
speech, and Mr. Gladstone himself was not disinclined to correct,
as far as he could, the misinterpretation which had been made of it.
It was still their intention to adhere to the rule of perfect neutrality
in the struggle, and to let it come to its natural end without the
smallest interference, direct or otherwise. But he could not say what
circumstances might happen from month to month in the future.
I observed that the policy he mentioned was satisfactory to us, and
asked if I was to understand him as saying that no change of it was
now proposed. To which he gave his assent. . . .

Minister Adams never knew more. He retained his belief that
Russell could be trusted, but that Palmerston could not. This was
the diplomatic tradition, especially held by the Russian diplomats.
Possibly it was sound, but it helped in no way the education of
a private secretary. The cat's-paw theory offered no safer clue,

than the frank, old-fashioned, honest theory of villainy. Neither
the one nor the other was reasonable.

No one ever told the Minister that Earl Russell, only a few
hours before, had asked the Cabinet to intervene, and that the
Cabinet had refused. The Minister was led to believe that the
Cabinet meeting was not held, and that its decision was informal.
Russell's biographer said that, "with this memorandum [of Russell's,
dated October 13] the Cabinet assembled from all parts
of the country on October 23; but . . . members of the Cabinet
doubted the policy of moving, or moving at that time." The Duke
of Newcastle and Sir George Grey joined Granville in opposition.
As far as known, Russell and Gladstone stood alone. "Considerations
such as these prevented the matter being pursued any
further."

Still no one has distinctly said that this decision was formal; perhaps
the unanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet unnecessary;
but it is certain that, within an hour or two before or after
this decision, "his lordship said [to the United States Minister]
that the policy of the Government was to adhere to a strict neutrality
and to leave this struggle to settle itself." When Mr.
Adams, not satisfied even with this positive assurance, pressed for
a categorical answer: "I asked him if I was to understand that
policy as not now to be changed; he said: Yes!"

John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of Gladstone,"
forty years afterwards, would have interested the Minister,
as well as his private secretary: "If this relation be accurate," said
Morley of a relation officially published at the time, and never
questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary did not construe strict
neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call good offices." For
a vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's construction of neutrality
mattered little to the student, who asked only Russell's intent, and
cared only to know whether his construction had any other object
than to deceive the Minister.

In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and possibly

Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his personal
friend Mr. Adams; but to one who is still in the world even if not
of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell totally deceived
the private secretary, whatever he may have done to the Minister.
The policy of abstention was not settled on October 23. Only the
next day, October 24, Gladstone circulated a rejoinder to G. C.
Lewis, insisting on the duty of England, France, and Russia to
intervene by representing, "with moral authority and force, the
opinion of the civilized world upon the conditions of the case."
Nothing had been decided. By some means, scarcely accidental,
the French Emperor was led to think that his influence might
turn the scale, and only ten days after Russell's categorical
"Yes!" Napoleon officially invited him to say "No!" He was
more than ready to do so. Another Cabinet meeting was called
for November 11, and this time Gladstone himself reports the
debate:—

Nov. 11. We have had our Cabinet to-day and meet again tomorrow.
I am afraid we shall do little or nothing in the business of
America. But I will send you definite intelligence. Both Lords
Palmerston and Russell are right.

Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely fighting
out his battle. However, though we decline for the moment, the
answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave the matter
very open for the future.

Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about America
public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not take it
as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may themselves act
in the matter. It will be clear that we concur with them, that the
war should cease. Palmerston gave to Russell's proposal a feeble
and half-hearted support.

Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who
looked on at this scene, was dead, the private secretary of 1862
read these lines with stupor, and hurried to discuss them with
John Hay, who was more astounded than himself. All the world

had been at cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and
the situation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions,
had known none of the facts. One would have done better to
draw no conclusions at all. One's diplomatic education was a
long mistake.

These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on
September 14, under the impression that the President was about
to be driven from Washington and the Army of the Potomac dispersed,
suggested to Russell that in such a case, intervention might
be feasible. Russell instantly answered that, in any case, he wanted
to intervene and should call a Cabinet for the purpose. Palmerston
hesitated; Russell insisted; Granville protested. Meanwhile the
rebel army was defeated at Antietam, September 17, and driven
out of Maryland. Then Gladstone, October 7, tried to force
Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as a fait accompli.
Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir George Cornewall
Lewis to contradict Gladstone and treated him sharply in the
press, at the very moment when Russell was calling a Cabinet to
make Gladstone's words good. On October 23, Russell assured
Adams that no change in policy was now proposed. On the same
day he had proposed it, and was voted down. Instantly Napoleon
III appeared as the ally of Russell and Gladstone with a proposition
which had no sense except as a bribe to Palmerston to replace
America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence on Europe, and
to replace England in her old sovereignty of the seas, if Palmerston
would support France in Mexico. The young student of diplomacy,
knowing Palmerston, must have taken for granted that
Palmerston inspired this motion and would support it; knowing
Russell and his Whig antecedents, he would conceive that Russell
must oppose it; knowing Gladstone and his lofty principles,
he would not doubt that Gladstone violently denounced the
scheme. If education was worth a straw, this was the only arrangement
of persons that a trained student would imagine

possible, and it was the arrangement actually assumed by nine
men out of ten, as history. In truth, each valuation was false,
Palmerston never showed favor to the scheme and gave it only
"a feeble and half-hearted support." Russell gave way without
resolutely fighting out "his battle," The only resolute, vehement,
conscientious champion of Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson
Davis was Gladstone.

Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders,
but to him the best part of life was thrown away if he learned such
a lesson wrong. Henry James had not yet taught the world to read
a volume for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his burning-glass
turned on alternate sides of the same figure. Psychological study
was still simple, and at worst—or at best—English character
was never subtile. Surely no one would believe that complexity
was the trait that confused the student of Palmerston, Russell, and
Gladstone. Under a very strong light human nature will always
appear complex and full of contradictions, but the British statesman
would appear, on the whole, among the least complex of men.

Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by
contrast, be called complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone
deceived only by their simplicity. Russell was the most interesting
to a young man because his conduct seemed most statesmanlike.
Every act of Russell, from April, 1861, to November,
1862, showed the clearest determination to break up the Union.
The only point in Russell's character about which the student
thought no doubt to be possible was its want of good faith. It was
thoroughly dishonest, but strong. Habitually Russell said one
thing and did another. He seemed unconscious of his own contradictions
even when his opponents pointed them out, as they
were much in the habit of doing, in the strongest language. As
the student watched him deal with the Civil War in America,
Russell alone showed persistence, even obstinacy, in a definite
determination, which he supported, as was necessary, by the usual
definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of the falsehoods;

on the contrary, he was vain of his own insight in detecting
them; but he was wholly upset by the idea that Russell should
think himself true.

Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old
school, clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods—
dishonest but strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no
objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else
honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought
him true, but officially, in practice, treated him as false. Punch,
before 1862, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and
afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education stopped
there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered a rational
explanation of Earl Russell.

Palmerston was simple—so simple as to mislead the student
altogether—but scarcely more consistent. The world thought
him positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be cautious,
careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for pugnacious
and quarrelsome; the "Lives" of Russell, Gladstone, and
Granville show him to have been good-tempered, conciliatory,
avoiding quarrels. He surprised the Minister by refusing to pursue
his attack on General Butler. He tried to check Russell. He
scolded Gladstone. He discouraged Napoleon. Except Disraeli
none of the English statesmen were so cautious as he in talking
of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods; made no professions;
concealed no opinions; was detected in no double-dealing. The
most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long education was that,
after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust, and detraction of
Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit himself in error,
and to consent in spirit—for by that time he was nearly as dead
as any of them—to beg his pardon.

Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions.
The highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a reduction

to the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could reach in
1862 would have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone admitted,
avowed, proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which brought
all reason and all hope of education to a still-stand:—

I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially since
it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had outlived half
a century. ... I declared in the heat of the American struggle that
Jefferson Davis had made a nation. . . . Strange to say, this declaration,
most unwarrantable to be made by a Minister of the Crown
with no authority other than his own, was not due to any feeling of
partisanship for the South or hostility to the North. ... I really,
though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to
all America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end. . . .
That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the facts was
the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive the gross impropriety
of such an utterance from a Cabinet Minister of a power allied
in blood and language, and bound to loyal neutrality; the case being
further exaggerated by the fact that we were already, so to speak,
under indictment before the world for not (as was alleged) having
strictly enforced the laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruisers.
My offence was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness,
and with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it, that
my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very severe blame.
It illustrates vividly that incapacity which my mind so long retained,
and perhaps still exhibits, an incapacity of viewing subjects all
round. ...

Long and patiently—more than patiently—sympathetically,
did the private secretary, forty years afterwards in the
twilight of a life of study, read and re-read and reflect upon this
confession. Then, it seemed, he had seen nothing correctly at the
time. His whole theory of conspiracy—of policy—of logic and
connection in the affairs of man, resolved itself into "incredible
grossness." He felt no rancor, for he had won the game; he forgave,
since he must admit, the "incapacity of viewing subjects all
round" which had so nearly cost him life and fortune; he was willing

even to believe. He noted, without irritation, that Mr. Gladstone,
in his confession, had not alluded to the understanding
between Russell, Palmerston, and himself; had even wholly left
out his most "incredible" act, his ardent support of Napoleon's
policy, a policy which even Palmerston and Russell had supported
feebly, with only half a heart. All this was indifferent.
Granting, in spite of evidence, that Gladstone had no set plan of
breaking up the Union; that he was party to no conspiracy; that
he saw none of the results of his acts which were clear to every one
else; granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last
to conclude—that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell
was verging on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve
—what sort of education should have been the result of it? How
should it have affected one's future opinions and acts?

Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are
rough; its judgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not
have affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of
the individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
individual—a single will or intention—bent on breaking up
the Union "as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister
would still have found his interest in thinking Russell friendly
and Palmerston hostile. The individual would still have been
identical with the mass. The problem would have been the same;
the answer equally obscure. Every student would, like the private
secretary, answer for himself alone.