University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)

AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy
to stop the activity of their twenty-million-horse-power
society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would
have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to
regard assassination as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis,
to be treated by a rest-cure. Three hideous political murders, that
would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown
scarcely a shadow on the White House.

The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death
of his son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that
of his chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his
recovery." The world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have
acquired the funeral habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him
yesterday, and he did not know me." Among the letters of condolence
showered upon him was one from Clarence King at Pasadena,
"heart-breaking in grace and tenderness—the old King
manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till nature and the
foe have done their struggle." The tragedy of King impressed him
Intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said—"the best
and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often
sickened me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind
luck; hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of
life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering,
alone and uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ça vous amuse, la vie?"

The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed
on the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's funeral,
and from the funeral service he had no gayer road to travel

than that which led to Washington, where a revolution had occurred
that must in any case have made the men of his age instantly
old, but which, besides hurrying to the front the generation
that till then he had regarded as boys, could not fail to break the
social ties that had till then held them all together.

Ça vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time, felt
half glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office, if only
to save himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all was pure
loss. On that side, his education had been finished at school. His
friends in power were lost, and he knew life too well to risk total
wreck by trying to save them.

As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To
them at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken
seriously in his old character, and could not be recovered in his new
one. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious
of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative
energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any
other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular
primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the
quality that mediæval theology assigned to God—he was pure
act. With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable
energy, in the White House, the relation of age to youth—of
teacher to pupil—was altogether out of place; and no other was
possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, while Adams's
ceased of itself. History's truths are little valuable now; but human
nature retains a few of its archaic, proverbial laws, and the wisest
courtier that ever lived—Lucius Seneca himself—must have
remained in some shade of doubt what advantage he should get
from the power of his friend and pupil Nero Claudius, until, as a
gentleman past sixty, he received Nero's filial invitation to kill
himself. Seneca closed the vast circle of his knowledge by learning
that a friend in power was a friend lost—a fact very much worth
insisting upon—while the gray-headed moth that had fluttered

through many moth-administrations and had singed his wings
more or less in them all, though he now slept nine months out of
the twelve, acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him
to the north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a sufficient
habitude of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from hovering
between them.

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived
by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he
was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always
tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse
reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced
as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or
knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs
of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent,
but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn
out most tempers in a month, and his first year of Presidency
showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The effect
of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
because it must represent the same process in society, and the
power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the control
of the infinite.

Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but this
is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths of
history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The personal
lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed no reason
why Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result was mathematically
certain. With Hay, it was only the steady decline of
strength, and the necessary economy of force; but with Lodge it
was law of politics. He could not help himself, for his position as
the President's friend and independent statesman at once was
false, and he must be unsure in both relations.

To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great—
much greater than that of the usual Senator—but it hung on his
position in Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive
patronage; and his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure.
Nowhere in America was society so complex or change so rapid.
No doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic
irritability—a sort of Bostonitis—which, in its primitive Puritan
forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors, and
thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M.
Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New
England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends
—such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington
—but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards
were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly
multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to
become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough—
State Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old Congregational
clergy another; Harvard College, poor in votes, but rich in
social influence, a third; the foreign element, especially the Irish,
held aloof, and seldom consented to approve any one; the new
socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to become more exclusive
than the Irish. New power was disintegrating society, and setting
independent centres of force to work, until money had all it could
do to hold the machine together. No one could represent it faithfully
as a whole.

Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but
the task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than
in that of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type for
study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting
of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge
was a creature of teaching—Boston incarnate—the child of his
local parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the
intent, though virtuous, was—as Adams admitted in his own case
—restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit,

an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory,
he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but
shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive
muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising
Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer
atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian
of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought—
saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste
—revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and
Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and
happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare—
standing first on the social, then on the political foot; now worshipping,
now banning; shocked by the wanton display of immorality,
but practising the license of political usage; sometimes
bitter, often genial, always intelligent—Lodge had the singular
merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like
crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and,
like his flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness
that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and
might have a future, if they could but divine it.

Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences
of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were
also at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust of English
thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-à-brac, sometimes
precious but never sure. For him, only the Greek, the Italian or
the French standards had claims to respect, and the barbarism of
Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his theory never
affected his practice. He knew that his artistic standard was the
illusion of his own mind; that English disorder approached nearer
to truth, if truth existed, than French measure or Italian line, or
German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conservative
Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very Christian,

but stupendously anarchistic. He loved the atrocities of
English art and society, as he loved Charles Dickens and Miss
Austen, not because of their example, but because of their humor.
He made no scruple of defying sequence and denying consistency
—but he was not a Senator.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are
apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care whether
his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared more than
he; but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they
were always liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion
yield suddenly under their feet. With this game an elderly friend
had long before carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There
was nothing in it for him but the amusement of the pugilist or
acrobat. The larger study was lost in the division of interests and
the ambitions of fifth-rate men; but foreign affairs dealt only with
large units, and made personal relation possible with Hay which
could not be maintained with Roosevelt or Lodge. As an affair
of pure education the point is worth notice from young men who
are drawn into politics. The work of domestic progress is done by
masses of mechanical power—steam, electric, furnace, or other
—which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals
who have shown capacity to manage it. The work of internal
government has become the task of controlling these men, who are
socially as remote as heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but
never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one
skinned them alive. Most of them have nothing to tell, but are
forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the development or
economy of power. They are trustees for the public, and whenever
society assumes the property, it must confer on them that title;
but the power will remain as before, whoever manages it, and will
then control society without appeal, as it controls its stokers and
pit-men. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but
of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of
force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer

between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and
the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially in
mediæval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth while
for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is only that,
in domestic politics, every one works for an immediate object,
commonly for some private job, and invariably in a near horizon,
while in foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over a field as wide
as the world. There the merest scholar could see what he was doing.
For history, international relations are the only sure standards of
movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adams
had always insisted that international relation was the only sure
base for a chart of history.

He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he
found it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as
much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and round
him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found
Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. The
Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world
which Congress would rather ignore; of obligations which Congress
repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress distrusts
and tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since the
first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the
Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to
extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls in Senators'
service.

This is a matter of history which any one may approve or
dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an
old scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865.
Hay had become the most imposing figure ever known in the
office. He had an influence that no other Secretary of State ever
possessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had
never imagined. He needed to write no state papers; he wanted no

help, and he stood far above counsel or advice; but he could instruct
an attentive scholar as no other teacher in the world could do; and
Adams sought only instruction—wanted only to chart the international
channel for fifty years to come; to triangulate the future;
to obtain his dimension, and fix the acceleration of movement
in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy
and physics; in finance and force.

Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at last
the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he had
achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the Senate,
with only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to renounce,
without equivalent, treaty rights which she had for fifty years
defended tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph in his negotiations
with the Senate enabled him to carry one step further
his measures for general peace. About England the Senate could
make no further effective opposition, for England was won, and
Canada alone could give trouble. The next difficulty was with
France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England assumed
the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected
the object—a combination which, as late as 1901, had been visionary.
The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring Germany
into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most unmanageable
of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and disarmed.
This was the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism; the
system of combinations, consolidations, trusts, realized at home,
and realizable abroad.

With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
century, had nothing to do, and made not the least pretence of
meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining governments,
like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely the socialist
scheme of Jaurès and Bebel. That John Hay, of all men, should
adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd than conservative
Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the only orthodoxy

in politics as in science. When one saw the field, one realized
that Hay could not help himself, nor could Bebel. Either Germany
must destroy England and France to create the next inevitable
unification as a system of continent against continent—or she
must pool interests. Both schemes in turn were attributed to the
Kaiser; one or the other he would have to choose; opinion was
balanced doubtfully on their merits; but, granting both to be
feasible, Hay's and McKinley's statesmanship turned on the
point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might be called the
Coal-power combination, rather than build up the only possible
alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging Germany in
Russia. Thus Bebel and Jaurès, McKinley and Hay, were partners.

The problem was pretty—even fascinating—and, to an old
Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a geometrical
demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life, it had all
sorts of ultimate values. Unless education marches on both feet
—theory and practice—it risks going astray; and Hay was probably
the most accomplished master of both then living. He knew
not only the forces but also the men, and he had no other thought
than his policy.

Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a
scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole educational
staff of the Government at a time when the Government
had just reached the heights of highest activity and influence.
Since 1860, education had done its worst, under the greatest masters
and at enormous expense to the world, to train these two
minds to catch and comprehend every spring of international
action, not to speak of personal influence; and the entire machinery
of politics in several great countries had little to do but supply
the last and best information. Education could be carried no
further.

With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its effects
on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his
ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing—

to be groping in darkness—to be falling forever in space; and the
worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed,
that no one knew more. He had, at least, the mechanical assurance
of certain values to guide him—like the relative intensities of
his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his Gun-powers—but
he conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every
relative value of persons, as well as he knew the inmost thoughts
of his own Government—had the Czar and the Kaiser and the
Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught him all they
knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew nothing
themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the student
measure his own.