| CHAPTER XXVIII
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| THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
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| AMERICA has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the
activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans
ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle
Ages; and the world learns to regard assassination as a form of
hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest-cure.
Three hideous political murders, that would have fattened the
Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White
House.
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| The year 1901 was a year of tragedy that seemed to Hay to
centre on himself. First came, in summer, the accidental death of
his son, Del Hay. Close on the tragedy of his son, followed that
of his chief, "all the more hideous that we were so sure of his
recovery." The world turned suddenly into a graveyard. "I have
acquired the funeral habit." "Nicolay is dying. I went to see him
yesterday, and he did not know me." Among the letters of
condolence showered upon him was one from Clarence King at
Pasadena, "heart-breaking in grace and tenderness -- the old King
manner"; and King himself "simply waiting till nature and the foe
have done their struggle." The tragedy of King impressed him
intensely: "There you have it in the face!" he said -- "the best
and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably
beyond any of his contemporaries; with industry that has often
sickened me to witness it; with everything in his favor but blind
luck; hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy
of life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless
suffering alone and uncared-for, in a California tavern. Ca vous
amuse, la vie?"
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| The first summons that met Adams, before he had even landed on
the pier at New York, December 29, was to Clarence King's
funeral, and from the funeral service he had no gayer road to
travel than that which led to Washington, where a revolution had
occurred that must in any case have made the men of his age
instantly old, but which, besides hurrying to the front the
generation that till then he had regarded as boys, could not fail
to break the social ties that had till then held them all
together.
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| Ca vous amuse, la vie? Honestly, the lessons of education were
becoming too trite. Hay himself, probably for the first time,
felt half glad that Roosevelt should want him to stay in office,
if only to save himself the trouble of quitting; but to Adams all
was pure loss. On that side, his education had been finished at
school. His friends in power were lost, and he knew life too well
to risk total wreck by trying to save them.
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| As far as concerned Roosevelt, the chance was hopeless. To them
at sixty-three, Roosevelt at forty-three could not be taken
seriously in his old character, and could not be recovered in his
new one. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most
serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his
restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt,
more than any other man living within the range of notoriety,
showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate
matter -- the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God --
he was pure act. With him wielding unmeasured power with
immeasurable energy, in the White House, the relation of age to
youth -- of teacher to pupil -- was altogether out of place; and
no other was possible. Even Hay's relation was a false one, while
Adams's ceased of itself. History's truths are little valuable
now; but human nature retains a few of its archaic, proverbial
laws, and the wisest courtier that ever lived -- Lucius Seneca
himself -- must have remained in some shade of doubt what
advantage he should get from the power of his friend and pupil
Nero Claudius, until, as a gentleman past sixty, he received
Nero's filial invitation to kill himself. Seneca closed the vast
circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a
friend lost -- a fact very much worth insisting upon -- while the
gray-headed moth that had fluttered through many
moth-administrations and had singed his wings more or less in
them all, though he now slept nine months out of the twelve,
acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him to the
north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a sufficient habitude
of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from hovering between
them.
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| Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was
bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic,
chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse
reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced
as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or
knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs
of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent,
but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn
out most tempers in a month, and his first year of Presidency
showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble. The effect
of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents
because it must represent the same process in society, and the
power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the
control of the infinite.
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| Here, education seemed to see its first and last lesson, but
this is a matter of psychology which lies far down in the depths
of history and of science; it will recur in other forms. The
personal lesson is different. Roosevelt was lost, but this seemed
no reason why Hay and Lodge should also be lost, yet the result
was mathematically certain. With Hay, it was only the steady
decline of strength, and the necessary economy of force; but with
Lodge it was law of politics. He could not help himself, for his
position as the President's friend and independent statesman at
once was false, and he must be unsure in both relations.
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| To a student, the importance of Cabot Lodge was great -- much
greater than that of the usual Senator -- but it hung on his
position in Massachusetts rather than on his control of Executive
patronage; and his standing in Massachusetts was highly insecure.
Nowhere in America was society so complex or change so rapid. No
doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic
irritability -- a sort of Bostonitis -- which, in its primitive
Puritan forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors,
and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M.
Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New
England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends
-- such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington --
but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards were
various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly
multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to
become impossible. The old ones were quite difficult enough --
State Street and the banks exacted one stamp; the old
Congregational clergy another; Harvard College, poor in votes,
but rich in social influence, a third; the foreign element,
especially the Irish, held aloof, and seldom consented to approve
any one; the new socialist class, rapidly growing, promised to
become more exclusive than the Irish. New power was
disintegrating society, and setting independent centres of force
to work, until money had all it could do to hold the machine
together. No one could represent it faithfully as a whole.
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| Naturally, Adams's sympathies lay strongly with Lodge, but the
task of appreciation was much more difficult in his case than in
that of his chief friend and scholar, the President. As a type
for study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more
interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be
taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching -- Boston incarnate
-- the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition led
him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was -- as Adams
admitted in his own case -- restless. An excellent talker, a
voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a
clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly
at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with
painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another,
uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure
American; or a patriot in the still purer atmosphere of Irish,
Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian of Harvard College.
English to the last fibre of his thought -- saturated with
English literature, English tradition, English taste -- revolted
by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or
any other Continental standards, but at home and happy among the
vices and extravagances of Shakespeare -- standing first on the
social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning;
shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the
license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial,
always intelligent -- Lodge had the singular merit of
interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows,
black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his
flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that
he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and
might have a future, if they could but divine it.
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| Adams, too, was Bostonian, and the Bostonian's uncertainty of
attitude was as natural to him as to Lodge. Only Bostonians can
understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the
inconsequences of the Boston mind. His theory and practice were
also at variance. He professed in theory equal distrust of
English thought, and called it a huge rag-bag of bric-a-brac,
sometimes precious but never sure. For him, only the Greek, the
Italian or the French standards had claims to respect, and the
barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to Voltaire; but his
theory never affected his practice. He knew that his artistic
standard was the illusion of his own mind; that English disorder
approached nearer to truth, if truth existed, than French measure
or Italian line, or German logic; he read his Shakespeare as the
Evangel of conservative Christian anarchy, neither very
conservative nor very Christian, but stupendously anarchistic. He
loved the atrocities of English art and society, as he loved
Charles Dickens and Miss Austen, not because of their example,
but because of their humor. He made no scruple of defying
sequence and denying consistency -- but he was not a Senator.
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| Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they
are apt to be fatal to politicians. Adams had no reason to care
whether his standards were popular or not, and no one else cared
more than he; but Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in
which they were always liable to find the shifty sands of
American opinion yield suddenly under their feet. With this game
an elderly friend had long before carried acquaintance as far as
he wished. There was nothing in it for him but the amusement of
the pugilist or acrobat. The larger study was lost in the
division of interests and the ambitions of fifth-rate men; but
foreign affairs dealt only with large units, and made personal
relation possible with Hay which could not be maintained with
Roosevelt or Lodge. As an affair of pure education the point is
worth notice from young men who are drawn into politics. The work
of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power --
steam, electric, furnace, or other -- which have to be controlled
by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to
manage it. The work of internal government has become the task of
controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen
gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell
nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of
them have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their
dynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power. They
are trustees for the public, and whenever society assumes the
property, it must confer on them that title; but the power will
remain as before, whoever manages it, and will then control
society without appeal, as it controls its stokers and pit-men.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of
forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of
force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no
longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the
men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
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| This is a moral that man strongly objects to admit, especially
in mediaeval pursuits like politics and poetry, nor is it worth
while for a teacher to insist upon it. What he insists upon is
only that in domestic politics, every one works for an immediate
object, commonly for some private job, and invariably in a near
horizon, while in foreign affairs the outlook is far ahead, over
a field as wide as the world. There the merest scholar could see
what he was doing. For history, international relations are the
only sure standards of movement; the only foundation for a map.
For this reason, Adams had always insisted that international
relation was the only sure base for a chart of history.
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| He cared little to convince any one of the correctness of his
view, but as teacher he was bound to explain it, and as friend he
found it convenient. The Secretary of State has always stood as
much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and round
hm, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found
Congress more or less hostile ever since Congress first sat. The
Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a
world which Congress would rather ignore; of obligations which
Congress repudiates whenever it can; of bargains which Congress
distrusts and tries to turn to its advantage or to reject. Since
the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against
the Secretary of State whenever the Secretary has been obliged to
extend his functions beyond the appointment of Consuls in
Senators' service.
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| This is a matter of history which any one may approve or
dispute as he will; but as education it gave new resources to an
old scholar, for it made of Hay the best schoolmaster since 1865.
Hay had become the most imposing figure ever known in the office.
He had an influence that no other Secretary of State ever
possessed, as he had a nation behind him such as history had
never imagined. He needed to write no state papers; he wanted no
help, and he stood far above counsel or advice; but he could
instruct an attentive scholar as no other teacher in the world
could do; and Adams sought only instruction -- wanted only to
chart the international channel for fifty years to come; to
triangulate the future; to obtain his dimension, and fix the
acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he
was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and
force.
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| Hay had been so long at the head of foreign affairs that at
last the stream of events favored him. With infinite effort he
had achieved the astonishing diplomatic feat of inducing the
Senate, with only six negative votes, to permit Great Britain to
renounce, without equivalent, treaty rights which she had for
fifty years defended tooth and nail. This unprecedented triumph
in his negotiations with the Senate enabled him to carry one step
further his measures for general peace. About England the Senate
could make no further effective opposition, for England was won,
and Canada alone could give trouble. The next difficulty was with
France, and there the Senate blocked advance, but England assumed
the task, and, owing to political changes in France, effected the
object -- a combination which, as late as 1901, had been
visionary. The next, and far more difficult step, was to bring
Germany into the combine; while, at the end of the vista, most
unmanageable of all, Russia remained to be satisfied and
disarmed. This was the instinct of what might be named
McKinleyism; the system of combinations, consolidations, trusts,
realized at home, and realizable abroad.
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| With the system, a student nurtured in ideas of the eighteenth
century, had nothing to do, and made not the least presence of
meddling; but nothing forbade him to study, and he noticed to his
astonishment that this capitalistic scheme of combining
governments, like railways or furnaces, was in effect precisely
the socialist scheme of Jaures and Bebel. That John Hay, of all
men, should adopt a socialist policy seemed an idea more absurd
than conservative Christian anarchy, but paradox had become the
only orthodoxy in politics as in science. When one saw the field,
one realized that Hay could not help himself, nor could Bebel.
Either Germany must destroy England and France to create the next
inevitable unification as a system of continent against continent
-- or she must pool interests. Both schemes in turn were
attributed to the Kaiser; one or the other he would have to
choose; opinion was balanced doubtfully on their merits; but,
granting both to be feasible, Hay's and McKinley's statesmanship
turned on the point of persuading the Kaiser to join what might
be called the Coal-power combination, rather than build up the
only possible alternative, a Gun-power combination by merging
Germany in Russia. Thus Bebel and Jaures, McKinley and Hay, were
partners.
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| The problem was pretty -- even fascinating -- and, to an old
Civil-War private soldier in diplomacy, as rigorous as a
geometrical demonstration. As the last possible lesson in life,
it had all sorts of ultimate values. Unless education marches on
both feet -- theory and practice -- it risks going astray; and
Hay was probably the most accomplished master of both then
living. He knew not only the forces but also the men, and he had
no other thought than his policy.
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| Probably this was the moment of highest knowledge that a
scholar could ever reach. He had under his eyes the whole
educational staff of the Government at a time when the Government
had just reached the heights of highest activity and influence.
Since 1860, education had done its worst, under the greatest
masters and at enormous expense to the world, to train these two
minds to catch and comprehend every spring of international
action, not to speak of personal influence; and the entire
machinery of politics in several great countries had little to do
but supply the last and best information. Education could be
carried no further.
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| With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its
effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of
his ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing --
to be groping in darkness -- to be falling forever in space; and
the worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it
seemed, that no one knew more. He had, at least, the mechanical
assurance of certain values to guide him -- like the relative
intensities of his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his
Gun-powers -- but he conceived that had he known, besides the
mechanics, every relative value of persons, as well as he knew
the inmost thoughts of his own Government -- had the Czar and the
Kaiser and the Mikado turned schoolmasters, like Hay, and taught
him all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew
nothing themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could
the student measure his own.
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