| CHAPTER XXIII
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| SILENCE (1894-1898)
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| The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed
much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort
such as no one had thought within its powers, the individual
crawled as he best could, through the wreck, and found many
values of life upset. But for connecting the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to 1897, had no value
in the drama of education, and might be left out. Much that had
made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the ruin,
and among the earliest wreckage had been the fortunes of Clarence
King. The lesson taught whatever the bystander chose to read in
it; but to Adams it seemed singularly full of moral, if he could
but understand it. In 1871 he had thought King's education ideal,
and his personal fitness unrivalled. No other young American
approached him for the combination of chances -- physical energy,
social standing, mental scope and training, wit, geniality, and
science, that seemed superlatively American and irresistibly
strong. His nearest rival was Alexander Agassiz, and, as far as
their friends knew, no one else could be classed with them in the
running. The result of twenty years' effort proved that the
theory of scientific education failed where most theory fails --
for want of money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he
thought, quite outside of every possible financial risk, had been
caught in the cogs, and held for months over the gulf of
bankruptcy, saved only by the chance that the whole class of
millionaires were more or less bankrupt too, and the banks were
forced to let the mice escape with the rats; but, in sum,
education without capital could always be taken by the throat and
forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it helped by the knowledge
that no one intended it, but that all alike suffered. Whether
voluntary or mechanical the result for education was the same.
The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to back it,
was flagrant.
| 1 | |
| The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless
without money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to
be frozen out. Education must fit the complex conditions of a new
society, always accelerating its movement, and its fitness could
be known only from success. One looked about for examples of
success among 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
William C. Whitney; all of whom owed their free hand to marriage,
education serving only for ornament, but among whom, in 1893,
William C. Whitney was far and away the most popular type.
| 2 | |
| Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was
exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very
rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York
might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed 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 ambition, and swung the country almost at
his will; he had thrown away the usual objects of political
ambition like the ashes of smoked cigarettes; had turned to other
amusements, satiated every taste, gorged 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
knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had
succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed.
| 3 | |
| 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
American education ought to be in order to count as success. Even
granting that it counted as money, its value could not be called
general. America contained scores of men worth five millions or
upwards, whose lives were no more worth living than those of
their cooks, and to whom the task of making money equivalent to
education offered more difficulties than to Adams the task of
making education equivalent to money. Social position seemed to
have value still, while education counted for nothing. A
mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if
fortunate might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open
market. An administrator, organizer, manager, with mediaeval
qualities of energy 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 women still
tended to keep the scales even. For anything Adams could see he
was himself as contented as though he had been educated; while
Clarence King, whose education was exactly suited to theory, had
failed; and Whitney, who was no better educated than Adams, had
achieved phenomenal success.
| 4 | |
| Had Adams in 1894 been starting 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, chemist or electrician,
priest or professor, native or foreign, he would fear none.
| 5 | |
| King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced
him to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted into the
little town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society, which
King knew well, was more amusing than any other that one had yet
discovered in the whole broad world, but made no profession of
teaching anything unless 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 from the height of the Gran Piedra; but, as
though 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, empires were
always falling 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 sometimes the merit of changing one's point of view, and the
Cuban rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams
to a Democratic administration. He thought 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 economical needs and
the gold 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, the movement, once accelerated by attempting to
impede it, had the additional, brutal consequence of crushing
equally the good and the bad that stood in its way.
| 6 | |
| The lesson was old -- so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex,
among the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never
been fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more
amusing for 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 Adams did, the labor of
skinning and butchering big game; he had even outgrown the
sedate, middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found
the trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips
himself, who managed the party loved to play Indian hunter
without hunting so much as a fieldmouse; Iddings the geologist
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 more intelligent ponies scented
an occasional friendly and sociable bear.
| 7 | |
| When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway
systems yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and
no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography
than with desperate thirst for exhausting the American field, he
set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean
and clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least twenty
thousand miles of American land and water.
| 8 | |
| He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life --
tropical islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde
types. Infinitely more amusing and 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 stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as
though art were a trotting-match. For this, one was in some
degree prepared, for the old man had been a stage-type since
drama began; but one felt some perplexity to account for failure
on the opposite or mechanical side, where nothing but cerebral
action was needed.
| 9 | |
| Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic,
plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find
the surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had
ever approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited
statistics, endless columns of figures, bottomless averages
merely for the asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington
Ford supplied any material that curiosity could imagine for
filling the vast gaps of ignorance, and methods for applying the
plasters of fact. One seemed for a while to be winning ground,
and one's averages projected themselves as laws into the future.
Perhaps the most perplexing 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 of mass -- of volume and velocity
-- seemed to bring in new elements, and, at last, a scholar,
fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a
superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing
came out as it should. In principle, according to figures, 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, moral, arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated
each other, but produced also fresh complexities with every
propagation and developed mass with every complexity.
| 10 | |
| The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying
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 much concerned about this world or the future, unless
it might 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 becoming slight, yet he was
kept alive by irritation at finding his life so thin and
fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind march on, like a train of
pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling from one morass into
another, and at short intervals, for no reason but temper,
falling 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 Armenia; wars had been almost
continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in
South Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges
thought them all not merely unnecessary, but foolish -- induced
by greed of the coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the
Romans were still robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be
natural and inevitable, but the murder seemed altogether archaic.
| 11 | |
| At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of
Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral
improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press.
Possibly growth m human nature might show itself there. He found
no need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he
preferred on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances
of betterment; and he very gravely doubted, from his aching
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 image,
showed depth of faith or hope.
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| The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care
for; if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the
mass of mankind did care for, and why. Religion, 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 millions of chance images stored away
without order in the memory. One might as well try to educate a
gravel-pit. The task was futile, which disturbed a student less
than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he was becoming himself
ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated
pedagogue.
| 13 | |
| For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to
Europe with the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is
useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women;
and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough
with what are called historical sources to realize how few women
have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man
is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, 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 woman of the eighteenth; none of the female
descendants of Abigail 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 American man; she was probably much better
company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge 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 Adams's desk, and
crossed the street to Christ Church in Cambridge to get married.
With Lodge 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 much relation; and since Lodge had suffered
what Adams thought the misfortune of becoming not only a Senator
but a Senator from Massachusetts -- a singular 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 enemy; but apart from this
accident he valued Lodge highly, and in the waste places of
average humanity had been greatly 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 him under restraint.
| 14 | |
| Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so it
chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at
Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history
had a chapter with which he thought 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 system
turned into green and verdurous virgin forests merely through the
medium of younger eyes and fresher minds. His German bias must
have given 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 compliment which
would have seemed to the Senator lacking in taste or even in
sense when addressed to one of a class of men who passed life in
trying to persuade themselves and the public that they breathed
nothing 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, simple, interested,
cultivated, artistic, liberal -- genial.
| 15 | |
| 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 antiquarianism once for all, without
seeming conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington
with a new sense of history. Again he wandered south, and in
April returned to Mexico with the Camerons to study the charms of
pulque and Churriguerresque architecture. In May he ran through
Europe again with Hay, as far south as Ravenna. There came the
end of the passage. After thus covering 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.
| 16 | |
| For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams
wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan
or historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything
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 sympathy with
either. Even among the most powerful men of that generation 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 small society like that of Washington, led
an idle bystander to depend abjectly on intimacy of private
relation. One dragged one's self down the long vista of
Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's friends, and
avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown narrow
with 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 tumultuous struggle
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.
| 17 | |
| Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most
strongly the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos,
the man in the State Department seemed more important than the
man in the White House. Adams knew no one in the United States
fit to manage 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 himself had done nothing
that seemed so bad as this to one who had lived long enough to
distinguish 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
Department. One might have shrugged 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 much
worse than this had often turned out well enough; but John
Sherman must inevitably and tragically break down.
| 18 | |
| 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 matter improved by hints that the President might 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 Washington had become no longer
habitable. Nothing was left there but solitary contemplation of
Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely to be more amusing than
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. Sherman's ways which would surely
cause anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!
| 19 | |
| Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
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 recommend
it to the young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel
had become more and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost 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 who wants 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 humor; but it may
| 20 | |
| be worth knowing 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.
| 21 | |
| Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to
his years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him
the task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he
has a right to require amusement -- or at least education, since
this costs nothing to any one -- and that a world which cannot
educate, will not amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right
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 man
of sixty who wishes consideration had better hold his tongue.
This truth also has the defect of being too true. The rule holds
equally for men of half that age Only the very young have the
right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people
commonly know enough not to betray themselves.
| 22 | |
| Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on
one point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in
others. Of all characteristics in human nature, this has been one
of the most abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the
long history of human expression, has been said by the fool or
unsaid by the wise, shows that, for once, no difference of
opinion has ever existed on this. "Even a fool," said the wisest
of men, "when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise," and still
more often, the wisest of men, when he spoke the highest wisdom,
has been counted a fool. They agreed only on the merits of
silence in others. Socrates made remarks in its favor, which
should have struck the Athenians as new to them; but of late the
repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlyle vociferated his
admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best form of
expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of
expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most
noble to the end. Alfred de Vigny's dying wolf remarked: --
| 23 | |
"A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse."
"When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies,
Only silence is strong, -- all the rest is but lies."
| 24 | |
| Even Byron, whom a more brilliant era of genius seemed to have
decided to be but an indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm
that --
| 25 | |
"The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen
Than the volcano's fierce eruptive crest;"
| 26 | |
| with other verses, to the effect that words are but a "temporary
torturing flame"; of which no one knew more than himself. The
evidence of the poets could not be more emphatic: --
| 27 | |
"Silent, while years engrave the brow!
Silent, -- the best are silent now!"
| 28 | |
| Although none of these great geniuses had shown faith in
silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of them,
and all philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at
sixty, had ever been known to attain knowledge; but that a very
few were believed to have attained ignorance, which was in result
the same. More than this, in every society worth the name, the
man of sixty had been encouraged to ride this hobby -- the
Pursuit of Ignorance in Silence -- as though it were the easiest
way to get rid of him. In America the silence was more oppressive
than the ignorance; but perhaps elsewhere the world might still
hide some haunt of futilitarian silence where content reigned --
although long search had not revealed it -- and so the pilgrimage
began anew!
| 29 | |
| The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in
London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about
it; education could not be expected there; but there Adams
arrived, April 21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many
days, for Queen Victoria still reigned and one saw little change
in St. James's Street. True, Carlton House Terrace, like the
streets of Rome, actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till
one felt like Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a
"bloodless fear"; but in spring London is pleasant, and it was
more cheery than ever in May, 1897, when every one was welcoming
the return of life after the long winter since 1893. One's
fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes, were again in flood.
| 30 | |
| This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family
jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No
wrinkled Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled
Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and that even
penitence was a sort of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris,
and set up a household at St. Germain where he taught and learned
French history for nieces who swarmed under the venerable cedars
of the Pavillon d'Angouleme, and rode about the green
forest-alleys of St. Germain and Marly. From time to time Hay
wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the
summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who slowly began to feel
at home in France as in other countries he had thought more
homelike. At length, like other dead Americans, he went to Paris
because he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till the
Hays came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a
stanch and strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to
Egypt.
| 31 | |
| Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and
what they said had as little to do with education as possible,
until one evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the
Nile from Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to
announce the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the
greatest stride in education since 1865, but what did it teach?
One leant on a fragment of column in the great hall at Karnak and
watched a jackal creep down the debris of ruin. The jackal's
ancestors had surely crept up the same wall when it was building.
What was his view about the value of silence? One lay in the
sands and watched the expression of the Sphinx. Brooks Adams had
taught him that the relation between civilizations was that of
trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven, down the coast. He
tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus. He went over to
Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the harbor of
Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied the
great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian.
His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long
enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of
thought along the great highways of exchange.
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