Part 14 (1/2)

He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone If the banks and bankers wanted fiat h for a newspaper-old and silver caes of an ordinary al Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice and the Court Walker argued that, whatever al tender, there was no necessity for it at the time the Act was passed With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections, Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number of the North American Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the ary ran aith Ada complained loudly of this treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had serious historical value, for Walker deal tender was necessary at the time; and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with conviction The Chief Justice seemed to be pleased The Attorney General, pleased or not, h historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not its point in education The point was that, in spite of the best intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to escape further trouble, the article threw Adae hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable

hoar went on to de further and further from the Administration He did this in co hoar himself Scarcely a newspaper in the country kept discipline The New York Tribune was one of the most criminal Dissolution of ties in every direction marked the dissolution of teain a scene of irritated egotism that passed ridicule Senators quarrelled with each other, and no one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the Executive and threw every Depart others they quarrelled with hoar, and drove hilanders in great position who happened to be the two persons ton, should be the first victi for Adams's education, if Adams could only have understood what it was He studied, but failed Sympathy with him was not their weakness Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could hope as little fro attachlanders, blushed to own a friend

Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to help Adah they would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for The lesson of education was not there The selfishness of politics was the earliest of all political education, and Ada to learn from its study; but the situation struck hi upon it His four most powerful friends hadin pairs to a finish; Sun affairs and the judiciary as prizes! What value had the fight in education?

Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander The stage-type of states or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but as his value? The statess or hoars or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could produce They trod with lofty conteood in the cost the country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, ere also honest in money-matters, cost the country a civil war This painful moral doubt worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected the whole field of politics for twenty years The newspapers discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield, and Blaine If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs, and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence by their insistence on points of morals Society hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially following the strong In spite of all such criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the Presidency, and voted for the to care for the question; until young men were forced to see that either some new standard must be created, or none could be upheld The moral law had expired--like the Constitution

Grant's aded every rule of ordinary decency, but scores of pro men, who so The world cared little for decency What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed His friends had been driven out of Washi+ngton or had taken to fisticuffs He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the future

The result was a review of the Session for the July North A he thought he had observed and all he had been told He thought it good history then, and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint As it happened, in the process of his devious education, this ”Session” of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of the press As such, he stood by it He could have said noevery session in the rest of the century The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 The systehteenth-century fabric of a priori, or iven it up Grant's administration ies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out--to patch--or, in vulgar language, to tinker--the political machine as often as it broke down Such a systeht last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world--the cluain was an education, but what it orth he could not guess Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most triu or even Mr Sumner--he could not honestly say that such an education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable heights, orth anything

There weremen like Garfield and Blaine--who took no little pleasure in e about Grant himself which the North American Revieould not have admitted One asked doubtfully as likely to become of these men in their turn What kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive political education?

Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the attain political system Society needed to reach it

If , new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented An eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible Practical Ahed, and went their way Society paid them to be practical Whenever society cared to pay Adaue; but ressmen and educate them He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of revenue refore The Ad men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want of systeht which had brought Adaton proved to be absurd No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business

All this was excessively a Adams never had been so busy, so interested, so ressmen by scores and newspaper-ans all sorts of attacks and defences He enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset cox; much happier than his friends Fish or J D cox, or Chief Justice Chase or Attorney General hoar or Charles Su came, he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guerin called ”the vast maternity” of nature showed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate

Senators were less ornawood or even the judas-tree

They were, as a rule, less good co what a purified charreatest possible distance, as one caught glie At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of St Peter's and the steps of Ara Coeli

Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to London for the season He had finished his New York ”Gold Conspiracy,”

which he h Review It was the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for publishi+ng it in England The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of revolt a soinning to proeht well to strike them there, where they were socially and financially exposed The tactics suited hilish review attracted ten times the attention in America that the same article would attract in the North American Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in full Adahest ae, since in any case, his pay was nothing Under the excite a pirate himself, and liked it

CHAPTER XIX

CHAOS (1870)

ONE fine May afternoon in 1870 Ada more than ever at the marvels of life Nine years had passed since the historic entrance of May, 1861 Outwardly London was the sae Palotten; but Disraeli and Gladstone were still much alive One's friends were ht was in the Cabinet; W E Forster was about to enter it; reforress shone so fair Evolution froreatest of prophets in the most evolutionary of worlds Gladstone had overthrown the Irish Church; was overthrowing the Irish landlords; was trying to pass an Education Act I over every country road Even America, with her Erie scandals and Alabaation, Motley ruled; the long Adaotten; the rebellion had passed into history In society no one cared to recall the years before the Prince of Wales The smart set had come to their own Half the houses that Ada in 1870 Death had ravaged one's circle of friends Mrs Milnes Gaskell and her sister Miss Charlotte Wynn were both dead, and Mr Jaer in Parliament

That field of education seeular frahteenth-century than ever--al-wheels of evolution Experience ceased to educate

London taught less freely than of old That one bad style was leading to another--that the older hton's breakfast-table showed gaps hard to fill--that there were fewer men one wanted to meet--these, and a hundred more such reent activity

For English refor The reforms were themselves mediaeval The Education Bill of his friend W E Forster seeainst all education he had use for He resented change He would have kept the Pope in the Vatican and the Queen at Windsor Castle as historical monuments He did not care to Americanize Europe The Bastille or the Ghetto was a curiosity worth a great deal of money, if preserved; and so was a Bishop; so was Napoleon III The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt Adaht of revolution or restlessness or reforaiety

Had he not been born in 1838 under the shadow of Boston State House, and been brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have cast off his old skin, and h House, in partnershi+p with the American woman and the Jew banker Common-sense dictated it; but Adalo-Saxon custo himself as already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no idea ofup with a neorld He saw nothing ahead of him The world was never more calm He wanted to talk with Ministers about the Alabama Claims, because he looked on the Claims as his own special creation, discussed between hi before they had been discussed by Government; he wanted to make notes for his next year's articles; but he had not a thought that, within three rave came one day, more contentious, contemptuous, and paradoxical than ever, because Napoleon III seerave said that ”Germany would beat France into scraps” if there ar Adaainst catastrophes No one else expected great changes in Europe Palgrave was always extree was incautious--violent!

In this year of all years, Adaan sloith the pleasant sense of faht the coal-smoke of Cheapside and revelled in the architecture of Oxford Street May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis as it did to the returned American The country never smiled its velvet smile of trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so lucky as to be asked on a country visit He loved it all--everything--had always loved it!

He felt alht he owned the St Jaation