| CHAPTER XXX
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| VIS INERTIAE (1903)
| 0 | |
| 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.
| 1 | |
| 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.
| 2 | |
| 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.
| 3 | |
| 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.
| 4 | |
| 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.
| 5 | |
| 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.
| 6 | |
| 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.
| 7 | |
| 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.
| 8 | |
| 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 America across the Pacific;
and Hay's policy of the open door would infallibly fail.
| 9 | |
| Thus the game seemed lost, in spite of the Kaiser's brilliant
stroke, and the movement of Russia eastward must drag Germany
after it by its mere mass. To the humble student, the loss of
Hay's game affected only Hay; for himself, the game -- not the
stakes -- was the chief interest; and though want of habit made
him object to read his newspapers blackened -- since he liked to
blacken them himself -- he was in any case condemned to pass but
a short space of time either in Siberia or in Paris, and could
balance his endless columns of calculation equally in either
place. The figures, not the facts, concerned his chart, and he
mused deeply over his next equation. The Atlantic would have to
deal with a vast continental mass of inert motion, like a
glacier, which moved, and consciously moved, by mechanical
gravitation alone. Russia saw herself so, and so must an American
see her; he had no more to do than measure, if he could, the
mass. Was volume or intensity the stronger? What and where was
the vis nova that could hold its own before this prodigious
ice-cap of vis inertiae? What was movement of inertia, and what
its laws?
| 10 | |
| Naturally a student knew nothing about mechanical laws, but he
took for granted that he could learn, and went to his books to
ask. He found that the force of inertia had troubled wiser men
than he. The dictionary said that inertia was a property of
matter, by which matter tends, when at rest, to remain so, and,
when in motion, to move on in a straight line. Finding that his
mind refused to imagine itself at rest or in a straight line, he
was forced, as usual, to let it imagine something else; and since
the question concerned the mind, and not matter, he decided from
personal experience that his mind was never at rest, but moved --
when normal -- about something it called a motive, and never
moved without motives to move it. So long as these motives were
habitual, and their attraction regular, the consequent result
might, for convenience, be called movement of inertia, to
distinguish it from movement caused by newer or higher
attraction; but the greater the bulk to move, the greater must be
the force to accelerate or deflect it.
| 11 | |
| This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most
deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student
and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were
unequally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One
class of minds responded only to habit; another only to novelty.
Race classified thought. Class-lists classified mind. No two men
thought alike, and no woman thought like a man.
| 12 | |
| Race-inertia seemed to be fairly constant, and made the chief
trouble in the Russian future. History looked doubtful when asked
whether race-inertia had ever been overcome without destroying
the race in order to reconstruct it; but surely sex-inertia had
never been overcome at all. Of all movements of inertia,
maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women's
property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate,
uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence.
Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did
in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race
only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought
anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American
always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned
hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them as
timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if
the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race
question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to
Americans vitally. The task of accelerating or deflecting the
movement of the American woman had interest infinitely greater
than that of any race whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or
African.
| 13 | |
| On this subject, as on the Senate and the banks, Adams was
conscious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As
he grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their
interest, but that Early Women became a passion. Without
understanding movement of sex, history seemed to him mere
pedantry. So insistent had he become on this side of his subject
that with women he talked of little else, and -- because women's
thought is mostly subconscious and particularly sensitive to
suggestion -- he tried tricks and devices to disclose it. The
woman seldom knows her own thought; she is as curious to
understand herself as the man to understand her, and responds far
more quickly than the man to a sudden idea. Sometimes, at dinner,
one might wait till talk flagged, and then, as mildly as
possible, ask one's liveliest neighbor whether she could explain
why the American woman was a failure. Without an instant's
hesitation, she was sure to answer: "Because the American man is
a failure!" She meant it.
| 14 | |
| Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American
men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend
his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the
point of view of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the
woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the
trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from
truth, he owed her at least that compliment. The habit led
sometimes to perilous personalities in the sudden give-and-take
of table-talk. This spring, just before sailing for Europe in
May, 1903, he had a message from his sister-in-law, Mrs. Brooks
Adams, to say that she and her sister. Mrs. Lodge, and the
Senator were coming to dinner by way of farewell; Bay Lodge and
his lovely young wife sent word to the same effect; Mrs.
Roosevelt joined the party; and Michael Herbert shyly slipped
down to escape the solitude of his wife's absence. The party were
too intimate for reserve, and they soon fell on Adams's hobby
with derision which stung him to pungent rejoinder: "The American
man is a failure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my
sister here more sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie
worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator
against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance if
Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the
Embassy, on your way home, and ask which would run it best --
Herbert or his wife?" The men laughed a little -- not much! Each
probably made allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior
woman. Some one afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women
were not a fair average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men
were above all possible average; he could not lay his hands on
another half-dozen their equals.
| 15 | |
| Gay or serious, the question never failed to stir feeling. The
cleverer the woman, the less she denied the failure. She was
bitter at heart about it. She had failed even to hold the family
together, and her children ran away like chickens with their
first feathers; the family was extinct like chivalry. She had
failed not only to create a new society that satisfied her, but
even to hold her own in the old society of Church or State; and
was left, for the most part, with no place but the theatre or
streets to decorate. She might glitter with historical diamonds
and sparkle with wit as brilliant as the gems, in rooms as
splendid as any in Rome at its best; but she saw no one except
her own sex who knew enough to be worth dazzling, or was
competent to pay her intelligent homage. She might have her own
way, without restraint or limit, but she knew not what to do with
herself when free. Never had the world known a more capable or
devoted mother, but at forty her task was over, and she was left
with no stage except that of her old duties, or of Washington
society where she had enjoyed for a hundred years every
advantage, but had created only a medley where nine men out of
ten refused her request to be civilized, and the tenth bored her.
| 16 | |
| On most subjects, one's opinions must defer to science, but on
this, the opinion of a Senator or a Professor, a chairman of a
State Central Committee or a Railway President, is worth less
than that of any woman on Fifth Avenue. The inferiority of man on
this, the most important of all social subjects, is manifest.
Adams had here no occasion to deprecate scientific opinion, since
no woman in the world would have paid the smallest respect to the
opinions of all professors since the serpent. His own object had
little to do with theirs. He was studying the laws of motion, and
had struck two large questions of vital importance to America --
inertia of race and inertia of sex. He had seen Mr. de Witte and
Prince Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the value of three
thousand million dollars, more or less, upon Russian inertia, in
the last twenty years, and he needed to get some idea of the
effects. He had seen artificial energy to the amount of twenty or
five-and-twenty million steam horse-power created in America
since 1840, and as much more economized, which had been socially
turned over to the American woman, she being the chief object of
social expenditure, and the household the only considerable
object of American extravagance. According to scientific notions
of inertia and force, what ought to be the result?
| 17 | |
| In Russia, because of race and bulk, no result had yet shown
itself, but in America the results were evident and undisputed.
The woman had been set free -- volatilized like Clerk Maxwell's
perfect gas; almost brought to the point of explosion, like
steam. One had but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of a
hundred huge ocean steamers, or walk through the Place Vendome,
or join a party of Cook's tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the
woman had been set free; but these swarms were ephemeral like
clouds of butterflies in season, blown away and lost, while the
reproductive sources lay hidden. At Washington, one saw other
swarms as grave gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking
themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all
these shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true
problem slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city,
town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types -- or type-writers
-- telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands,
running into millions of millions, and, as classes, unknown to
themselves as to historians. Even the schoolmistresses were
inarticulate. All these new women had been created since 1840;
all were to show their meaning before 1940.
| 18 | |
| Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
century of the Church; but this was probably survival, and gave
no hint of the future. The problem remained -- to find out
whether movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take
direction except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be
solved in one generation of American women, and was the most
vital of all problems of force.
| 19 | |
| The American woman at her best -- like most other women --
exerted great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive
type. She appeared as the result of a long series of discards,
and her chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When
closely watched, she seemed making a violent effort to follow the
man, who had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typical
American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in
his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of
forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a
hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or
subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or
drugs, without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine
and a woman too; he must leave her; even though his wife, to find
her own way, and all the world saw her trying to find her way by
imitating him.
| 20 | |
| The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in
feminine history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her
problem had been always one of physical strength and it was as
physical perfection of force that her Venus had governed nature.
The woman's force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her
axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea
that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palaeontological
falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed
at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted
from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay
for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the
bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the
race.
| 21 | |
| The story was not new. For thousands of years women had
rebelled. They had made a fortress of religion -- had buried
themselves in the cloister, in self-sacrifice, in good works --
or even in bad. One's studies in the twelfth century, like one's
studies in the fourth, as in Homeric and archaic time, showed her
always busy in the illusions of heaven or of hell -- ambition,
intrigue, jealousy, magic -- but the American woman had no
illusions or ambitions or new resources, and nothing to rebel
against, except her own maternity; yet the rebels increased by
millions from year to year till they blocked the path of
rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrower than in the
twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism,
philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for
every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which capitalism
had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the future
reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.
| 22 | |
| From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of
power was blind. The Church had known more about women than
science will ever know, and the historian who studied the sources
of Christianity felt sometimes convinced that the Church had been
made by the woman chiefly as her protest against man. At times,
the historian would have been almost willing to maintain that the
man had overthrown the Church chiefly because it was feminine.
After the overthrow of the Church, the woman had no refuge except
such as the man created for himself. She was free; she had no
illusions; she was sexless; she had discarded all that the male
disliked; and although she secretly regretted the discard, she
knew that she could not go backward. She must, like the man,
marry machinery. Already the American man sometimes felt surprise
at finding himself regarded as sexless; the American woman was
oftener surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual.
| 23 | |
| No honest historian can take part with -- or against -- the
forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human
race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital
statistics. No doubt every one in society discussed the subject,
impelled by President Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the
surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one
direction as the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the
other; but the truth lay somewhere unconscious in the woman's
breast. An elderly man, trying only to learn the law of social
inertia and the limits of social divergence could not compel the
Superintendent of the Census to ask every young woman whether she
wanted children, and how many; he could not even require of an
octogenarian Senate the passage of a law obliging every woman,
married or not, to bear one baby -- at the expense of the
Treasury -- before she was thirty years old, under penalty of
solitary confinement for life; yet these were vital statistics in
more senses than all that bore the name, and tended more directly
to the foundation of a serious society in the future. He could
draw no conclusions whatever except from the birth-rate. He could
not frankly discuss the matter with the young women themselves,
although they would have gladly discussed it, because Faust was
helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing. The
Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether she were
better off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would
rather be victim to a man, a church, or a machine.
| 24 | |
| Between these various forms of inevitable inertia -- sex and
race -- the student of multiplicity felt inclined to admit that
-- ignorance against ignorance -- the Russian problem seemed to
him somewhat easier of treatment than the American. Inertia of
race and bulk would require an immense force to overcome it, but
in time it might perhaps be partially overcome. Inertia of sex
could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an
immense force, doubling every few years, was working irresistibly
to overcome it. One gazed mute before this ocean of darkest
ignorance that had already engulfed society. Few centres of great
energy lived in illusion more complete or archaic than Washington
with its simple-minded standards of the field and farm, its
Southern and Western habits of life and manners, its assumptions
of ethics and history; but even in Washington, society was uneasy
enough to need no further fretting. One was almost glad to act
the part of horseshoe crab in Quincy Bay, and admit that all was
uniform -- that nothing ever changed -- and that the woman would
swim about the ocean of future time, as she had swum in the past,
with the gar-fish and the shark, unable to change.
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