The Education of Henry Adams
with a shudder as though he had himself fallen off his bicycle. If his
mind were really this sort of magnet, mechanically dispersing its lines
of force when it went to sleep, and mechanically orienting them when it
woke up--which was normal, the dispersion or orientation? The mind,
like the body, kept its unity unless it happened to lose balance, but
the professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself,
knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did
know--what the idiot could hardly do--that his normal condition was
idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice.
His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence; the
simultaneous action of different thought-centres without central
control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an acrobat,
with a dwarf on his back, crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and
commonly breaking his neck.
By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead--nothing but a
dissolving mind--and the historian felt himself driven back on thought
as one continuous Force, without Race, Sex, School, Country, or Church.
This has been always the fate of rigorous thinkers, and has always
succeeded in making them famous, as it did Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste
Comte. Their method made what progress the science of history knew,
which was little enough, but they did at last fix the law that, if
history ever meant to correct the errors she made in detail, she must
agree on a scale for the whole. Every local historian might defy this
law till history ended, but its necessity would be the same for man as
for space or time or force, and without it the historian would always
remain a child in science.
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a
unit--the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as
a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams
to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens
Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he
might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as
true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once
in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a
volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a
Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he proposed to fix
a position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of Henry
Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." With the help of
these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and
backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should
know better. Thereupon, he sailed for home.
CHAPTER XXX
VIS INERTIAE (1903)
WASHINGTON was always amusing, but in 1900, as in 1800, its
chief interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of New
York had become planetary--beyond control--while the task of
Washington, in 1900 as in 1800, was to control it. The success of
Washington in the past century promised ill for its success in the next.
To a student who had passed the best years of his life in
pondering over the political philosophy of Jefferson, Gallatin, and
Madison, the problem that Roosevelt took in hand seemed alive with
historical interest, but it would need at least another half-century to
show its results. As yet, one could not measure the forces or their
arrangement; the forces had not even aligned themselves except in
foreign affairs; and there one turned to seek the channel of wisdom as
naturally as though Washington did not exist. The President could do
nothing effectual in foreign affairs, but at least he could see
something of the field.
Hay had reached the summit of his career, and saw himself on
the edge of wreck. Committed to the task of keeping China "open," he
saw China about to be shut. Almost alone in the world, he represented
the "open door," and could not escape being crushed by it. Yet luck had
been with him in full tide. Though Sir Julian Pauncefote had died in
May, 1902, after carrying out tasks that filled an ex-private secretary
of 1861 with open-mouthed astonishment, Hay had been helped by the
appointment of Michael Herbert as his successor, who counted for double
the value of an ordinary diplomat. To reduce friction is the chief use
of friendship, and in politics the loss by friction is outrageous. To
Herbert and his wife, the small knot of houses that seemed to give a
vague unity to foreign affairs opened their doors and their hearts, for
the Herberts were already at home there; and this personal sympathy
prolonged Hay's life, for it not only eased the effort of endurance,
but it also led directly to a revolution in Germany. Down to that
moment, the Kaiser, rightly or wrongly, had counted as the ally of the
Czar in all matters relating to the East. Holleben and Cassini were
taken to be a single force in Eastern affairs, and this supposed
alliance gave Hay no little anxiety and some trouble. Suddenly
Holleben, who seemed to have had no thought but to obey with almost
agonized anxiety the least hint of the Kaiser's will, received a
telegram ordering him to pretext illness and come home, which he obeyed
within four-and-twenty hours. The ways of the German Foreign Office had
been always abrupt, not to say ruthless, towards its agents, and yet
commonly some discontent had been shown as excuse; but, in this case,
no cause was guessed for Holleben's disgrace except the Kaiser's wish
to have a personal representative at Washington. Breaking down all
precedent, he sent Speck von Sternburg to counterbalance Herbert.
Welcome as Speck was in the same social intimacy, and valuable
as his presence was to Hay, the personal gain was trifling compared
with the political. Of Hay's official tasks, one knew no more than any
newspaper reporter did, but of one's own diplomatic education the
successive steps had become strides. The scholar was studying, not on
Hay's account, but on his own. He had seen Hay, in 1898, bring England
into his combine; he had seen the steady movement which was to bring
France back into an Atlantic system; and now he saw suddenly the
dramatic swing of Germany towards the west--the movement of all others
nearest mathematical certainty. Whether the Kaiser meant it or not, he
gave the effect of meaning to assert his independence of Russia, and to
Hay this change of front had enormous value. The least was that it
seemed to isolate Cassini, and unmask the Russian movement which became
more threatening every month as the Manchurian scheme had to be
revealed.
Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to
him by the Kaiser's coup d'etat. Carefully as he had tried to follow
the Kaiser's career, he had never suspected such refinement of policy,
which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's ability to the highest point,
and altogether upset the centre of statesmanship. That Germany could be
so quickly detached from separate objects and brought into an Atlantic
system seemed a paradox more paradoxical than any that one's education
had yet offered, though it had offered little but paradox. If Germany
could be held there, a century of friction would be saved. No price
would be too great for such an object; although no price could probably
be wrung out of Congress as equivalent for it. The Kaiser, by one
personal act of energy, freed Hay's hands so completely that he saw his
problems simplified to Russia alone.
Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The
history of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little but to
state one or two sides of the Russian problem. One's year of Berlin in
youth, though it taught no Civil Law, had opened one's eyes to the
Russian enigma, and both German and French historians had labored over
its proportions with a sort of fascinated horror. Germany, of all
countries, was most vitally concerned in it; but even a cave-dweller in
La Fayette Square, seeking only a measure of motion since the Crusades,
saw before his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a survey of future order or
anarchy that would exhaust the power of his telescopes and defy the
accuracy of his theodolites.
The drama had become passionately interesting and grew every
day more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed clear
signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte were
reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and students should have
no sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had private reasons for wishing
well to the Czar and his people. At much length, in several labored
chapters of history, he had told how the personal friendliness of the
Czar Alexander I, in 1810, saved the fortunes of J. Q. Adams, and
opened to him the brilliant diplomatic career that ended in the White
House. Even in his own effaced existence he had reasons, not altogether
trivial, for gratitude to the Czar Alexander II, whose firm neutrality
had saved him some terribly anxious days and nights in 1862; while he
had seen enough of Russia to sympathize warmly with Prince Khilkoff's
railways and de Witte's industries. The last and highest triumph of
history would, to his mind, be the bringing of Russia into the Atlantic
combine, and the just and fair allotment of the whole world among the
regulated activities of the universe. At the rate of unification since
1840, this end should be possible within another sixty years; and, in
foresight of that point, Adams could already finish--provisionally--his
chart of international unity; but, for the moment, the gravest doubts
and ignorance covered the whole field. No one--Czar or diplomat, Kaiser
or Mikado--seemed to know anything. Through individual Russians one
could always see with ease, for their diplomacy never suggested depth;
and perhaps Hay protected Cassini for the very reason that Cassini
could not disguise an emotion, and never failed to betray that, in
setting the enormous bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, he
regretted infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too. He
would almost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf. His
political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in the
single idea that Russia must fatally roll--must, by her irresistible
inertia, crush whatever stood in her way.
For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the
fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American intensity.
When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their
energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor
peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western
equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia knocking away the last blocks that
held back the launch of this huge mass into the China Sea. The vast
force of inertia known as China was to be united with the huge bulk of
Russia in a single mass which no amount of new force could henceforward
deflect. Had the Russian Government, with the sharpest sense of
enlightenment, employed scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs, and borrowed
all the resources of Europe, it could not have lifted such a weight;
and had no idea of trying.
These were the positions charted on the map of political unity
by an insect in Washington in the spring of 1903; and they seemed to
him fixed. Russia held Europe and America in her grasp, and Cassini
held Hay in his. The Siberian Railway offered checkmate to all possible
opposition. Japan must make the best terms she could; England must go
on receding; America and Germany would look on at the avalanche. The
wall of Russian inertia that barred Europe across the Baltic, would bar