The Education of Henry Adams
to do it. A Pennsylvanian not only could do it, but did it willingly,
practically, and intelligently.
Never in the range of human possibilities had a Cameron
believed in an Adams--or an Adams in a Cameron--but they had curiously
enough, almost always worked together. The Camerons had what the
Adamses thought the political vice of reaching their objects without
much regard to their methods. The loftiest virtue of the Pennsylvania
machine had never been its scrupulous purity or sparkling professions.
The machine worked by coarse means on coarse interests, but its
practical success had been the most curious subject of study in
American history. When one summed up the results of Pennsylvanian
influence, one inclined to think that Pennsylvania set up the
Government in 1789; saved it in 1861; created the American system;
developed its iron and coal power; and invented its great railways.
Following up the same line, in his studies of American character, Adams
reached the result--to him altogether paradoxical--that Cameron's
qualities and defects united in equal share to make him the most useful
member of the Senate.
In the interest of studying, at last, a perfect and favorable
specimen of this American type which had so persistently suppressed his
own, Adams was slow to notice that Cameron strongly influenced him, but
he could not see a trace of any influence which he exercised on
Cameron. Not an opinion or a view of his on any subject was ever
reflected back on him from Cameron's mind; not even an expression or a
fact. Yet the difference in age was trifling, and in education slight.
On the other hand, Cameron made deep impression on Adams, and in
nothing so much as on the great subject of discussion that year--the
question of silver.
Adams had taken no interest in the matter, and knew nothing
about it, except as a very tedious hobby of his friend Dana Horton; but
inevitably, from the moment he was forced to choose sides, he was sure
to choose silver. Every political idea and personal prejudice he ever
dallied with held him to the silver standard, and made a barrier
between him and gold. He knew well enough all that was to be said for
the gold standard as economy, but he had never in his life taken
politics for a pursuit of economy. One might have a political or an
economical policy; one could not have both at the same time. This was
heresy in the English school, but it had always been law in the
American. Equally he knew all that was to be said on the moral side of
the question, and he admitted that his interests were, as Boston
maintained, wholly on the side of gold; but, had they been ten times as
great as they were, he could not have helped his bankers or croupiers
to load the dice and pack the cards to make sure his winning the
stakes. At least he was bound to profess disapproval--or thought he
was. From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly
with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all
others--masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals.
Morality is a private and costly luxury. The morality of the silver or
gold standards was to be decided by popular vote, and the popular vote
would be decided by interests; but on which side lay the larger
interest? To him the interest was political; he thought it probably his
last chance of standing up for his eighteenth-century principles,
strict construction, limited powers, George Washington, John Adams, and
the rest. He had, in a half-hearted way, struggled all his life against
State Street, banks, capitalism altogether, as he knew it in old
England or new England, and he was fated to make his last resistance
behind the silver standard.
For him this result was clear, and if he erred, he erred in
company with nine men out of ten in Washington, for there was little
difference on the merits. Adams was sure to learn backwards, but the
case seemed entirely different with Cameron, a typical Pennsylvanian, a
practical politician, whom all the reformers, including all the
Adamses, had abused for a lifetime for subservience to moneyed
interests and political jobbery. He was sure to go with the banks and
corporations which had made and sustained him. On the contrary, he
stood out obstinately as the leading champion of silver in the East.
The reformers, represented by the Evening Post and Godkin, whose
personal interests lay with the gold standard, at once assumed that
Senator Cameron had a personal interest in silver, and denounced his
corruption as hotly as though he had been convicted of taking a bribe.
More than silver and gold, the moral standard interested Adams.
His own interests were with gold, but he supported silver; the Evening
Post's and Godkin's interests were with gold, and they frankly said so,
yet they avowedly pursued their interests even into politics; Cameron's
interests had always been with the corporations, yet he supported
silver. Thus morality required that Adams should be condemned for going
against his interests; that Godkin was virtuous in following his
interests; and that Cameron was a scoundrel whatever he did.
Granting that one of the three was a moral idiot, which was it:--Adams
or Godkin or Cameron? Until a Council or a Pope or a Congress or the
newspapers or a popular election has decided a question of doubtful
morality, individuals are apt to err, especially when putting money
into their own pockets; but in democracies, the majority alone gives
law. To any one who knew the relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin,
the idea of a popular vote between them seemed excessively humorous;
yet the popular vote in the end did decide against Cameron, for Godkin.
The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr.
Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his interests, or
his antipathies; but the true American, slow to grasp new and
complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover where his greater
interest lay. As usual, the banks taught him. In the course of fifty
years the banks taught one many wise lessons for which an insect had to
be grateful whether it liked them or not; but of all the lessons Adams
learned from them, none compared in dramatic effect with that of July
22, 1893, when, after talking silver all the morning with Senator
Cameron on the top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka
Pass, they reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters
from his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because the
community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.
If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a
lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he was
himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had struck
him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first thought was
of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a sleepless night, but
although his mind tried to wrestle with the problem how any man could
be ruined who had, months before, paid off every dollar of debt he knew
himself to owe, he gave up that insoluble riddle in order to fall back
on the larger principle that beggary could be no more for him than it
was for others who were more valuable members of society, and, with
that, he went to sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started
for Quincy where he arrived August 7.
As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years
old, the shock of finding one's self suspended, for several months,
over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how
to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the
situation dawned on him that the banks had lent him, among others, some
money--thousands of millions were--as bankruptcy--the same--for which
he, among others, was responsible and of which he knew no more than
they. The humor of this situation seemed to him so much more pointed
than the terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he
had been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend, he had nothing
to lose that he cared about, but the banks stood to lose their
existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was
their life. For the first time he had the banks in his power; he could
afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position,
though few laughed. All sat down on the banks and asked what the banks
were going to do about it. To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but
the more he saw of it, the less he understood it. He was quite sure
that nobody understood it much better. Blindly some very powerful
energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams
went to his bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit,
the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted
the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the
banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Each
wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he
could find no answer to the question which was responsible for getting
the other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same
interest and socially the same person. Evidently the force was one; its
operation was mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its power;
but no one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as an
emotion--a panic--that meant nothing.
Men died like flies under the strain, and Boston grew suddenly
old, haggard, and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at
last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education,
interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it were worth
finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the first time since
1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the
world. Great changes had taken place since 1870 in the forces at work;
the old machine ran far behind its duty; somewhere--somehow--it was
bound to break down, and if it happened to break precisely over one's
head, it gave the better chance for study.
For the first time in several years he saw much of his brother
Brooks in Quincy, and was surprised to find him absorbed in the same
perplexities. Brooks was then a man of forty-five years old; a strong
writer and a vigorous thinker who irritated too many Boston conventions
ever to suit the atmosphere; but the two brothers could talk to each
other without atmosphere and were used to audiences of one. Brooks had
discovered or developed a law of history that civilization followed the
exchanges, and having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working
it out for the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things
European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new
equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks, with the
advantages of ten years' study, had swept away much rubbish in the
effort to build up a new line of thought for himself, but he found that
no paradox compared with that of daily events. The facts were
constantly outrunning his thoughts. The instability was greater than he
calculated; the speed of acceleration passed bounds. Among other
general rules he laid down the paradox that, in the social
disequilibrium between capital and labor, the logical outcome was not
collectivism, but anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.
By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the
storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and one
so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the Exposition
again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of
study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos.
Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year, education went mad. The