Part 17 (2/2)

The failure of the scientific scherant

The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless without e, sure to be frozen out

Education must fit the co its movement, and its fitness could be known only fro the educated of one's time--the men born in the thirties, and trained to professions

Within one's immediate acquaintance, three were typical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and Williae, education serving only for orna whom, in 1893, William C Whitney was far and away the ht prate about wealth till commonplace print was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Aot out of ht occasionally fear thehed or sneered at them, and never showed them respect Scarcely one of the very rich men held any position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been elected to an office, or even into a good club Setting aside the few, like Pierpont Morgan, whose social position had little to do with greater or less wealth, riches were in New York no object of envy on account of the joys they brought in their train, and Whitney was not even one of the very rich; yet in his case the envy was palpable There was reason for it Already in 1893 Whitney had finished with politics after having gratified every a the country almost at his will; he had throay the usual objects of political aarettes; had turned to other aed every appetite, won every object that New York afforded, and, not yet satisfied, had carried his field of activity abroad, until New York no longer knehat most to envy, his horses or his houses He had succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed

Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal; but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an Aht to be in order to count as success Even granting that it counted as eneral America contained scores of men worth fivethan those of their cooks, and to who money equivalent to education offerededucation equivalent to money Social position see A ineer, if fortunate e a value of ten dollars a day in the open er, with y and will, but no education beyond his special branch, would probably be worth at least ten times as much Society had failed to discover what sort of education suited it best Wealth valued social position and classical education as highly as either of these valued wealth, and the wo Adah he had been educated; while Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory, had failed; and Whitney, as no better educated than Adams, had achieved pheno in life as he did in 1854, he must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile use of the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish With these he could still make his way to any object within his vision, and would have a decisive advantage over nine rivals in ten Statesman or lawyer, chen, he would fear none

King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the indirect gain to Adao to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted into the little town of Santiago The picturesque Cuban society, which King kneell, wasthan any other that one had yet discovered in the whole broad world, butunless it were Cuban Spanish or the danza; and neither on his own nor on King's account did the visitor ask any loftier study than that of the buzzards floating on the trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas, or the colors of sea and shore at sunrise froh they were still twenty years old and revolution were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid, fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, e on one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant political convulsions taught least Since the time of Rameses, revolutions have raised more doubts than they solved, but they have so one's point of view, and the Cuban rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adaht that President Cleveland could have settled the Cuban question, without war, had he chosen to do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the Democratic Party, joined with the stress of econoold standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave no choice between parties The new American, whether consciously or not, had turned his back on the nineteenth century before he was done with it; the gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass could have no other outcome, and, as so often before, theto impede it, had the additional, brutal consequence of crushi+ng equally the good and the bad that stood in its way

The lesson was old--so old that it beca else since childhood, and wearied of it For yet another year Ada the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never been fairly involved in the generalfor their torpor After passing the winter with King in the West Indies, he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and found there little to study The Geysers were an old story; the Snake River posed no vital statistics except in its fordings; even the Tetons were as calm as they were lovely; while the wapiti and bear, innocent of strikes and corners, laid no traps In return the party treated them with affection Never did a band less bloody or bloodthirsty wander over the roof of the continent Hay loved as little as Adaaed, , and found the trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey Hallett Phillips hied the party loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so ist was reduced to shooting only for the table, and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the simple life Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had vanished; one saw no possible adventures except to break one's neck as in chasing an aniseed fox Only the ent ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociable bear

When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway syste, and no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography than with desperate thirst for exhausting the A a sweep of the Caribbean and clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least twenty thousandto think, when he got back to Washi+ngton in April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life--tropical islands, rade types

Infinitelyand incomparably more picturesque than civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's sixtieth year approached, the artist began to die; only a certain intense cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensual stih art were a trotting-ree prepared, for the old an; but one felt some perplexity to account for failure on the opposite orbut cerebral action was needed

Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arith that education would find the surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had ever approached Even the Governures, botto

At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Ford supplied any aps of ignorance, andthe plasters of fact One seees projected the part of the study lay in the attitude of the statisticians, who showed no enthusiastic confidence in their own figures They should have reached certainty, but they talked like other men who knew less The method did not result faith Indeed, every increase ofin new elenorant of algebra, fell into a superstitious terror of co caures, any one could set up or pull down a society One could frame no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus One revelled at will in the ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the future; but meanwhile these societies which violated every law, ated each other, but produced also fresh coation and developed mass with every complexity

The hu discovery of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as the conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle No one seemed very ht be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present Adams disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future society was beco his life so thin and fruitless Meanwhile he watched mankind march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tu from one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason but te to butchery, like Cain Since 1850, massacres had become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they summed up hundreds of thousands, as in Arain in Cuba, threatening in South Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet iht thereed of the coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Roht be natural and inevitable, but the ether archaic

At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every ious press

Possibly growth in huht show itself there He found no need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of or of the shark, with its chances of better consciousness of religious void, whether any large fraction of society cared for a future life, or even for the present one, thirty years hence Not an act, or an expression, or an ie, showed depth of faith or hope

The object of education, therefore, was changed Forwhat the world had ceased to care for; if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the ion, politics, statistics, travel had thus far led to nothing Even the Chicago Fair had only confused the roads Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the es stored aithout order in the ravel-pit The task was futile, which disturbed a student less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was beco is ue

For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woe bade him follow her to Europe with the Senator and her two sons The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching hinorance crushes one who is fah hat are called historical sources to realize hooh aone or two like Mne, no woman has pictured herself The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woail Adams can ever be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much better company than the Arande and her husband, Senator since 1893, Adams's relations had been those of elder brother or uncle since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left his examination-papers on assistant Professor Adae to get e himself, as scholar, fellow instructor, co-editor of the North American Review, and political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had worked intimately, but with him afterwards as politician he had not ht thenot only a Senator but a Senator froular social relation which Adams had known only as fatal to friends--a superstitious student, intimate with the laws of historical fatality, would rather have recognized him only as an enehly, and in the waste places of average hureatly dependent on his house Senators can never be approached with safety, but a Senator who has a very superior wife and several superior children who feel no deference for Senators as such, may be approached at times with relative impunity while they keep hie suratitude, and so it chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Norht himself familiar, it was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do with knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture systeh the er eyes and fresher iven his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessential because un-German They breathed native air in the Normandy of 1200, a co in taste or even in sense when addressed to one of a class ofto persuade the less American than a blizzard; but this atmosphere, in the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the unconscious humor of the senatorial mind In the thirteenth century, by an unusual chance, even a Senator became natural, sienial

Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal; it threw off all association with the German lecture-room One could not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of mere antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it expelled archaic law and antiquarianis conscious of it; and Adaton with a new sense of history Again he wandered south, and in April returned to Mexico with the Cauerresque architecture In May he ran through Europe again with Hay, as far south as Ravenna There ca once more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the old trails, Adams went home October, with every one else, to elect McKinley President and start the world anew

For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Ada or after it, as partisan or historian, he never saw anything to ad he wanted to save; and in this respect he reflected only the public mind which balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both parties as to express no syeneration he knew none who had a good word to say for it No period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in American politics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of American society; but the natural result of such lack of interest in public affairs, in a ston, led an idle bystander to depend abjectly on inti vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's friends, and avoiding to look at anything else Thus life had grown narroith years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses round La Fayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in power except in the case of Mr Blaine whose tule for existence held him apart Suddenly Mr McKinley entered the White House and laid his hand heavily on this special group In a moment the whole nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the world Adams found himself alone John Hay took his orders for London

Rockhill departed to Athens Cecil Spring-Rice had been buried in Persia Cameron refused to remain in public life either at home or abroad, and broke up his house on the Square Only the Lodges and Roosevelts remained, but even they were at once absorbed in the interests of power Since 1861, no such social convulsion had occurred

Even this was not quite the worst To one whose interests lay chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this htuan chaos, the man in the State Department seemed more important than the man in the White House

Adae these matters in the face of a hostile Europe, and had no candidate to propose; but he was shocked beyond all restraints of expression to learn that the President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the State Department in order to make a place for Mr Hanna in the Senate Grant hi that seeuish between the ways of presidential jobbery, if not between the jobs John Sherman, otherwise admirably fitted for the place, a friendly influence for nearly forty years, was notoriously feeble and quite senile, so that the intrigue seemed to Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as of the State Departed one's shoulders had the President named Mr Hanna his Secretary of State, for Mr Hanna was a man of force if not of experience, and selections h; but John Sherically break down

The prospect for once was not less vile than the men One can bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all the petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers Nor was the ht call John Hay to the Department whenever John Sherman should retire Indeed, had Hay been even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, he would have put an end, once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his friend's part; but even without this last disaster, one felt that Washi+ngton had beco was left there but solitary contemplation of Mr McKinley's hich were not likely to bethan the ways of his predecessors; or of senatorial ways, which offered no novelty of what the French language expressively calls embetement; or of poor Mr Sheruish to his friends Oncewas easier! On and off, one had done the sa since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached the month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years' dogged effort to begin a new education, one could not reco The outlook lacked hope The object of travel had becohost of the Civil Law had been locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860 Noah's dove had not searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so little success Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove ants and finds rest; but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone and uneducated, who has lost his taste even for olives To this, also, the young may be driven, as education, end the lesson fails in hu to some of them that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year

Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that no h not original The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on hi its carrion, and that while he reht to require a to any one--and that a world which cannot educate, will not aht to exist than he Both views seem sound; but the world wearily objects to be called by epithets what society always admits in practice; for no one likes to be told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having nothing to say in its defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is pardonable in youth, the ue This truth also has the defect of being too true The rule holds equally for ht to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding Elderly people coh not to betray themselves