University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVI
THE PRESS (1868)

AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the
tropical rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the
Motley family clambered down the side of their Cunard
steamer into the government tugboat, which set them ashore in
black darkness at the end of some North River pier. Had they
been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000, landing from a galley
fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the
shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years before.
The historian of the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist,
started up an unknown street, in company with the private secretary
who had become private citizen, in search of carriages to
convey the two parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was
arduous but successful. Towards midnight they found shelter
once more in their native land.

How much its character had changed or was changing, they
could not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that
matter, the land itself knew no more than they. Society in America
was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize
and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to
twist about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a
long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the prairies, its
few score of leaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants,
negroes, and Indians far in the rear, somewhere in archaic time.
It enjoyed the vast advantage over Europe that all seemed, for
the moment, to move in one direction, while Europe wasted most
of its energy in trying several contradictory movements at once;
but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or oriented
towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead.
Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the

head of the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where
the leaders could be found.

One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the
last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies—
coal, iron, steam—a distinct superiority in power over the old
industrial elements—agriculture, handwork, and learning; but
the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled
the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain,
to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail;
he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated
reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world
was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—
not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling
a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener
instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American
of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots
behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made
no complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse
off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their
heritage by his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he
was not himself at fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet
to any superiority of his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out
of the track, and must get back into it as best he could.

One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be
fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at his
father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he. All were
equally survivals from the forties—bric-à-brac from the time of
Louis. Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments that had been
more or less suited to the colonial architecture, but which never had
much value in Desbrosses Street or Fifth Avenue. They could
scarcely have earned five dollars a day in any modern industry.
The men who commanded high pay were as a rule not ornamental.
Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked social charm.
Doubtless the country needed ornament—needed it very badly

indeed—but it needed energy still more, and capital most of all,
for its supply was ridiculously out of proportion to its wants.
On the new scale of power, merely to make the continent habitable
for civilized people would require an immediate outlay that would
have bankrupted the world. As yet, no portion of the world except
a few narrow stretches of western Europe had ever been tolerably
provided with the essentials of comfort and convenience; to fit
out an entire continent with roads and the decencies of life would
exhaust the credit of the entire planet. Such an estimate seemed
outrageous to a Texan member of Congress who loved the simplicity
of nature's noblemen; but the mere suggestion that a sun
existed above him would outrage the self-respect of a deep-sea
fish that carried a lantern on the end of its nose. From the moment
that railways were introduced, life took on extravagance.

Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the Desbrosses
Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the effort to
see his own length. The new Americans, of whom he was to be
one, must, whether they were fit or unfit, create a world of their
own, a science, a society, a philosophy, a universe, where they had
not yet created a road or even learned to dig their own iron. They
had no time for thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond
their day's work; their attitude to the universe outside them was
that of the deep-sea fish. Above all, they naturally and intensely
disliked to be told what to do, and how to do it, by men who took
their ideas and their methods from the abstract theories of history,
philosophy, or theology. They knew enough to know that
their world was one of energies quite new.

All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as
little as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he
knew, the less he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and
seemed rather inclined to boast of it, at least on the stump; but
the leaders of industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other.
They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at

hand. They had been obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste
immense energy in settling what had been settled a thousand years
before, and should never have been revived. At prodigious expense,
by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leaving everything
but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing else had
a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having cleared
its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw itself on
that which stood first—its roads. The field was vast; altogether
beyond its power to control offhand; and society dropped every
thought of dealing with anything more than the single fraction
called a railway system. This relatively small part of its task was
still so big as to need the energies of a generation, for it required
all the new machinery to be created—capital, banks, mines,
furnaces, shops, power-houses, technical knowledge, mechanical
population, together with a steady remodelling of social and political
habits, ideas, and institutions to fit the new scale and suit the
new conditions. The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already
mortgaged to the railways, and no one knew it better than
the generation itself.

Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act
as though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the
new start. His brother Charles had determined to strike for the
railroads; Henry was to strike for the press; and they hoped to
play into each other's hands. They had great need, for they found
no one else to play with. After discovering the worthlessness of a
so-called education, they had still to discover the worthlessness of
so-called social connection. No young man had a larger acquaintance
and relationship than Henry Adams, yet he knew no one
who could help him. He was for sale, in the open market. So
were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and knew too that
they were cheap; to be bought at the price of a mechanic. There was
no concealment, no delicacy, and no illusion about it. Neither he
nor his friends complained; but he felt sometimes a little surprised
that, as far as he knew, no one, seeking in the labor market, ever

so much as inquired about their fitness. The want of solidarity
between old and young seemed American. The young man was
required to impose himself, by the usual business methods, as a
necessity on his elders, in order to compel them to buy him as an
investment. As Adams felt it, he was in a manner expected to
blackmail. Many a young man complained to him in after life
of the same experience, which became a matter of curious reflection
as he grew old. The labor market of good society was ill-organized.

Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor. A peculiar
and perplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had
changed much in ten years, it was not less perplexing. One no
longer dined at two o'clock; one could no longer skate on Back
Bay; one heard talk of Bostonians worth five millions or more as
something not incredible. Yet the place seemed still simple, and
less restless-minded than ever before. In the line that Adams had
chosen to follow, he needed more than all else the help of the press,
but any shadow of hope on that side vanished instantly. The less
one meddled with the Boston press, the better. All the newspapermen
were clear on that point. The same was true of politics.
Boston meant business. The Bostonians were building railways.
Adams would have liked to help in building railways, but had no
education. He was not fit.

He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations, renewing
friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years old, the
man who has not yet got further than to study the situation, is lost,
or near it. He could see nothing in the situation that could be of
use to him. His friends had won no more from it than he. His
brother Charles, after three years of civil life, was no better off
than himself, except for being married and in greater need of income.
His brother John had become a brilliant political leader on
the wrong side. No one had yet regained the lost ground of the
war.

He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the

simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had learned
so painfully in London was worse than useless in America where
every standard was different. Newport was charming, but it asked
for no education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer and
pleasanter, and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in that
society were a kind of social partnership, like the classes at college;
(not education but the subjects of education. All were doing the
same thing, and asking the same question of the future. None
could help. Society seemed founded on the law that all was for
the best New Yorkers in the best of Newports, and that all young
people were rich if they could waltz. It was a new version of the
Ant and Grasshopper.

At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or
had shown a sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward
Atkinson. Boston was cool towards sons, whether prodigals or
other, and needed much time to make up its mind what to do for
them—time which Adams, at thirty years old, could hardly
spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to hire an office
in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze there alone,
vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for Fortune to
knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the elevator;
or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in use. Whether
this course would have offered his best chance he never knew;
it was one of the points in practical education which most needed
a clear understanding, and he could never reach it. His father and
mother would have been glad to see him stay with them and begin
reading Blackstone again, and he showed no very filial tenderness
by abruptly breaking the tie that had lasted so long. After all, perhaps
Beacon Street was as good as any other street for his objects
in life; possibly his easiest and surest path was from Beacon
Street to State Street and back again, all the days of his years.
Who could tell? Even after life was over, the doubt could not be
determined.

In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path that
had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his brothers.
He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his peculiar
birthright. The mere thought of beginning life again in Mount
Vernon Street lowered the pulsations of his heart. This is a
story of education—not a mere lesson of life—and, with education,
temperament has in strictness nothing to do, although in
practice they run close together. Neither by temperament nor
by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted far away
and behind his companions there; no one trusted his temperament
or education; he had to go.

Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his plan
of joining the press, and selected Washington as the shortest road
to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside the social
pale. No Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced one's
self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of deplorably
bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances of ending
in the gutter were, at best, even. The risk was the greater in
Adams's case, because he had no very clear idea what to do when
he got there. That he must educate himself over again, for objects
quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old educations,
was the only certainty; but how he was to do it—how he was
to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist of the Capital
—he had not an idea, and no one to teach him. The question
of money is rarely serious for a young American unless he is
married, and money never troubled Adams more than others; not
because he had it, but because he could do without it, like most
people in Washington who all lived on the income of bricklayers;
but with or without money he met the difficulty that, after getting
to Washington in order to go on the press, it was necessary
to seek a press to go on. For large work he could count on the
North American Review, but this was scarcely a press. For current
discussion and correspondence, he could depend on the New
York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily, and no

New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the death
of Henry J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was
out of the question both for political and personal reasons, and
because Whitelaw Reid had already undertaken that singularly
venturesome position, amid difficulties that would have swamped
Adams in four-and-twenty hours. Charles A. Dana had made
the Sun a very successful as well as a very amusing paper, but had
hurt his own social position in doing it; and Adams knew himself
well enough to know that he could never please himself and Dana
too; with the best intentions, he must always fail as a blackguard,
and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life
to the Sun. As for the New York Herald, it was a despotic empire
admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the
moment, the New York daily press offered no field except the
free-trade Holy Land of the Evening Post under William Cullen
Bryant, while beside it lay only the elevated plateau of the New
Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation. Much as Adams
liked Godkin, and glad as he was to creep under the shelter of
the Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware that he should
find there only the same circle of readers that he reached in the
North American Review.

The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington,
except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then
Attorney-General and living there, he would stand in solitude
much like that of London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in
Boston seemed to care for doing; he held out a hand to the young
man. Whether Boston, like Salem, really shunned strangers, or
whether Evarts was an exception even in New York, he had the
social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by nature, prodigal
in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born man-of-the-world,
Evarts gave and took liberally, without scruple, and accepted
the world without fearing or abusing it. His wit was the
least part of his social attraction. His talk was broad and free.
He laughed where he could; he joked if a joke was possible; he

was true to his friends, and never lost his temper or became ill-natured.
Like all New Yorkers he was decidedly not a Bostonian;
but he was what one might call a transplanted New Englander,
like General Sherman; a variety, grown in ranker soil. In the
course of life, and in widely different countries, Adams incurred
heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom he had no claim
and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps half-a-dozen
such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is a large number
as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily than when
Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.

Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep gratitude,
the more because his first struggle with a sleeping-car made
him doubt the value—to him—of a Pullman civilization; but
he was even more grateful for the shelter of Mr. Evarts's house
in H Street at the corner of Fourteenth, where he abode in safety
and content till he found rooms in the roomless village. To him
the village seemed unchanged. Had he not known that a great
war and eight years of astonishing movement had passed over it,
he would have noticed nothing that betrayed growth. As of old,
houses were few; rooms fewer; even the men were the same. No
one seemed to miss the usual comforts of civilization, and Adams
was glad to get rid of them, for his best chance lay in the eighteenth
century.

The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an
aspirant to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately
took him to the White House and presented him to President
Andrew Johnson. The interview was brief and consisted in the
stock remark common to monarchs and valets, that the young
man looked even younger than he was. The younger man felt
even younger than he looked. He never saw the President again,
and never felt a wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson was not the
sort of man whom a young reformer of thirty, with two or three
foreign educations, was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet, musing

over the interview as a matter of education, long years afterwards,
he could not help recalling the President's figure with a distinctness
that surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and
statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem
that had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no
doubt, were greater than others; but all were statesmen and all
were supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness.
To them the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was
their universe, a Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say
that he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern
system until he found that slavery could not stand a war.
Slavery was only a part of the Southern system, and the life
of it all—the vigor—the poetry—was its moral certainty of
self. The Southerner could not doubt; and this self-assurance
not only gave Andrew Johnson the look of a true President, but
actually made him one. When Adams came to look back on it
afterwards, he was surprised to realize how strong the Executive
was in 1868—perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly
he never again found himself so well satisfied, or so much
at home.

Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed
little changed in these eight years. He was the same—with a
difference. Perhaps he—unlike Henry Adams—had at last got
an education, and all he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself
to doing without it. Whatever the reason, although his manner
was as roughly kind as ever, and his talk as free, he appeared
to have closed his account with the public; he no longer seemed
to care; he asked nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support;
he talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his
discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in these last
days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in the
evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
drew near, wanting to feel that the great man—the only chief

he ever served even as a volunteer—recognized some personal
relation, he asked Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his
rooms, and play his game of whist there, as he did every night in
his own house. Mr. Seward came and had his whist, and Adams
remembered his rough parting speech: "A very sensible entertainment!"
It was the only favor he ever asked of Mr. Seward,
and the only one he ever accepted.

Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,
Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what
should have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State Department
had ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the Treasury
had taken its place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a man
new to politics—Hugh McCulloch—not a person of much importance
in the eyes of practical politicans such as young members
of the press meant themselves to become, but they all liked Mr.
McCulloch, though they thought him a stop-gap rather than a
force. Had they known what sort of forces the Treasury was to
offer them for support in the generation to come, they might have
reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams was
fated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he ever
cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the idea that
McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to represent
everything that one liked least. He was no politician, he had no
party, and no power. He was not fashionable or decorative. He
was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice
which the serf feels to his overseer; for he knew he must
obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only their helplessness
when they tempered obedience by mockery. The world,
after 1865, became a bankers' world, and no banker would ever
trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to Washington
with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at all, for
he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow five thousand
dollars of any bank in America. The banker never would trust
him, and he would never trust the banker. To him, the banking

mind was obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the more
surprise at finding McCulloch the broadest, most liberal, most
genial, and most practical public man in Washington.

There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
that time was very great. The whole financial system was in
chaos; every part of it required reform; the utmost experience,
tact, and skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No
one knew how well McCulloch did it until his successor took it in
charge, and tried to correct his methods. Adams did not know
enough to appreciate McCulloch's technical skill, but he was
struck at his open and generous treatment of young men. Of all
rare qualities, this was, in Adams's experience, the rarest. As a
rule, officials dread interference. The strongest often resent it
most. Any official who admits equality in discussion of his official
course, feels it to be an act of virtue; after a few months or years
he tires of the effort. Every friend in power is a friend lost. This
rule is so nearly absolute that it may be taken in practice as admitting
no exception. Apparent exceptions exist, and McCulloch
was one of them.

McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and infantile
jealousy which are the commoner results of early political
education. He had neither past nor future, and could afford to
be careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded by all the
active and intelligent young men in the country. Full of faith,
greedy for work, eager for reform, energetic, confident, capable,
quick of study, charmed with a fight, equally ready to defend or
attack, they were unselfish, and even—as young men went—
honest. They came mostly from the army, with the spirit of the
volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank Barlow, Frank Bartlett were
types of the generation. Most of the press, and much of the
public, especially in the West, shared their ideas. No one denied
the need for reform. The whole government, from top to bottom,
was rotten with the senility of what was antiquated and the instability
of what was improvised. The currency was only one

example; the tariff was another; but the whole fabric required
reconstruction as much as in 1789, for the Constitution had become
as antiquated as the Confederation. Sooner or later a shock
must come, the more dangerous the longer postponed. The Civil
War had made a new system in fact; the country would have to
reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.

One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough,
but no one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant,
universal nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests
upheld it. McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with
large good-nature and willing sympathy—outside of parties,
jobs, bargains, corporations or intrigues—which Adams never
was to meet again.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil
War had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the
volunteer type were not always docile under control, but they
were handy in a fight. Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted
as one of them. He found himself much at home with them—
more at home than he ever had been before, or was ever to be
again—in the atmosphere of the Treasury. He had no strong
party passion, and he felt as though he and his friends owned this
administration, which, in its dying days, had neither friends nor
future except in them.

These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme
Court was about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge
Curtis had been employed to argue against the constitutional
power of the Government to make an artificial standard of value
in time of peace. Evarts was anxious to fix on a line of argument
that should have a chance of standing up against that of Judge
Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He did not know which foot to
put forward. About to deal with Judge Curtis, the last of the
strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could risk no chances. In

doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to discuss, and
Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving,
dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.

Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all, more
solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to treat Mr.
Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts himself
expressed for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like most
young men, he was much of a doctrinaire, and the question was,
in any event, rather historical or political than legal. He could
easily maintain, by way of argument, that the required power had
never been given, and that no sound constitutional reason could
possibly exist for authorizing the Government to overthrow the
standard of value without necessity, in time of peace. The dispute
itself had not much value for him, even as education, but it
led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice himself. Following
up the subject for his letters to the Nation and his articles in the
North American Review, Adams grew to be intimate with the Chief
Justice, who, as one of the oldest and strongest leaders of the Free
Soil Party, had claims to his personal regard; for the old Free
Soilers were becoming few. Like all strong-willed and self-asserting
men, Mr. Chase had the faults of his qualities. He was never
easy to drive in harness, or light in hand. He saw vividly what
was wrong, and did not always allow for what was relatively right.
He loved power as though he were still a Senator. His position
towards Legal Tender was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury
he had been its author; as Chief Justice he became its enemy.
Legal Tender caused no great pleasure or pain in the sum of life
to a newspaper correspondent, but it served as a subject for letters,
and the Chief Justice was very willing to win an ally in the
press who would tell his story as he wished it to be read. The
intimacy in Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly, and the alliance was
no small help to the comforts of a struggling newspaper adventurer
in Washington. No matter what one might think of his

politics or temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high
senatorial rank, if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable
ally.

As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him.
As though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise,
dropped back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams
enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner
was fifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner
ever dreamed of, and he felt a sort of amused curiosity to be
treated once more as a child. At best, the renewal of broken relations
is a nervous matter, and in this case it bristled with thorns,
for Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not been the most
delicate of his ruptured relations, and he was liable to be sensitive
in many ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in constant
mind; yet it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a
new study of political humanity. The younger man knew that
the meeting would have to come, and was ready for it, if only as
a newspaper need; but to Sumner it came as a "surprise and a disagreeable
one, as Adams conceived. He learned something—
a piece of practical education worth the effort—by watching
Sumner's behavior. He could see that many thoughts—mostly
unpleasant—were passing through his mind, since he made no
inquiry about any of Adams's family, or allusion to any of his
friends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present.
To him, Adams in Washington should have seemed more or less
of a critic, perhaps a spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer
like scores of others; a politician without party; a writer without
principles; an office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this
was, for his purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and
would be likely to do him all the harm in his power. Adams accepted
it all; expected to be kept at arm's length; admitted that
the reasons were just. He was the more surprised to see that

Summer invited a renewal of old relations. He found himself
treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked to make
a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La
Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's
study and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were
sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses
of omniscience.

On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his
mind a pathological study. At times he inclined to think that
Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved
educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's
mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects
images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
The images from without, the objects mechanically perceived
by the senses, existed by courtesy until the mental surface was
ruffled, but never became part of the thought. Henry Adams
roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he would
have ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected,
as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner
was more aggressively egoistic than other Senators—Conkling,
for instance—but that with him the disease had affected the
whole mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, with other Senators
for the most part, it was still acute.

Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful;
perhaps quite the most useful of all these great authorities
who were the stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the
accumulated capital of a Silurian age. A few months or years
more, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town itself,
changing but not changed. La Fayette Square was society.
Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's nursery monument
to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found
all one's acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and

national government. Beyond the Square the country began. No
rich or fashionable stranger had yet discovered the town. No
literary or scientific man, no artist, no gentleman without office or
employment, had ever lived there. It was rural, and its society
was primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a
great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps
one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of
world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse
tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met
to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The
State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on
Fourteenth Street while Mr. Mullett was constructing his architectural
infant asylum next the White House. The value of real
estate had not increased since 1800, and the pavements were more
impassable than the mud. All this favored a young man who had
come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he could know
everybody; in two days everybody knew him.

After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered
an easy and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from
the safe shelter of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work
with—or against—he had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired
education was useless, and the other tenth harmful. He
would have to begin again from the beginning. He must learn to
talk to the Western Congressman, and to hide his own antecedents.
The task was amusing. He could see nothing to prevent him
from enjoying it, with immoral unconcern for all that had gone
before and for anything that might follow. The lobby offered a
spectacle almost picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were
more entertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew
more of life than all the departments of the Government together,
including the Senate and the Smithsonian. Society had not much
to give, but what it had, it gave with an open hand. For the moment,

politics had ceased to disturb social relations. All parties
were mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water.
The Government resembled Adams himself in the matter of education.
All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was
worse.