| CHAPTER XXXV
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| NUNC AGE (1905)
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| NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary
landed at New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when
they saw American society as a long caravan stretching out
towards the plains. As he came up the bay again, November 5,
1904, an older man than either his father or Motley in 1868, he
found the approach more striking than ever -- wonderful -- unlike
anything man had ever seen -- and like nothing he had ever much
cared to see. The outline of the city became frantic in its
effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to
have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The
cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam
against the sky. The city had the air and movement of hysteria,
and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm,
that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man,
speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New
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| York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed
into corporations, were demanding a new type of man -- a man with
ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type --
for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted
over the pavements or read the last week's newspapers, the new
man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the
end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic.
Every one saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A
traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club
window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome,
under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the
compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence
the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.
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| Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington
to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and
battling Trusts. With the Battle of Trusts, a student of
mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of
politics or society, but also as a measure of motion. The Trusts
and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that
had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their
vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary,
troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of
ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore
society to pieces and trampled it under foot. As one of their
earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had learned
submission and silence, for he knew that, under the laws of
mechanics, any change, within the range of the forces, must make
his situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curious to
see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man,
since no other energies seemed left on earth to breed. The new
man could be only a child born of contact between the new and the
old energies.
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| Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown,
and neither had warped the umpire's judgment by its favors. If
ever judge had reason to be impartial, it was he. The sole object
of his interest and sympathy was the new man, and the longer one
watched, the less could be seen of him. Of the forces behind the
Trusts, one could see something; they owned a complete
organization, with schools, training, wealth and purpose; but of
the forces behind Roosevelt one knew little; their cohesion was
slight; their training irregular; their objects vague. The public
had no idea what practical system it could aim at, or what sort
of men could manage it. The single problem before it was not so
much to control the Trusts as to create the society that could
manage the Trusts. The new American must be either the child of
the new forces or a chance sport of nature. The attraction of
mechanical power had already wrenched the American mind into a
crab-like process which Roosevelt was making heroic efforts to
restore to even action, and he had every right to active support
and sympathy from all the world, especially from the Trusts
themselves so far as they were human; but the doubt persisted
whether the force that educated was really man or nature -- mind
or motion. The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science,
seemed to require that the law of mass should rule. In that case,
progress would continue as before.
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| In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was
as useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had
been to the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for
holding his tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no
more than for the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an
approach to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove
itself within thirty years. At the calculated acceleration, the
head of the meteor-stream must very soon pass perihelion.
Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was futile, and silence,
next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If the acceleration,
measured by the development and economy of forces, were to
continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should
be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as
accurately as that of the November meteoroids.
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| Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as
the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators.
Above all, it was profoundly unmoral, and tended to discourage
effort. On the other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and
to economize waste of mind. If it was not itself education, it
pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the new
American. There, the duty stopped.
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| There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a
singular sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly
five thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses
of seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in
peace. "Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have
been past believing that a dying seal could have transported
itself over fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface," but
"the seal seems often to crawl to the shore or the ice to die,
probably from its instinctive dread of its marine enemies." In
India, Purun Dass, at the end of statesmanship, sought solitude,
and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys, rather than
remain with man. Even in America, the Indian Summer of life
should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and
infinite in wealth and depth of tone -- but never hustled. For
that reason, one's own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer
nature than John Hay's exposure. To the normal animal the
instinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves were not
exempt from the passion of baiting their bears; but in its turn
even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by creatures
that have not the strength or the teeth to kill him outright.
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| On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a
glance that Hay must have rest. Already Mrs. Hay had bade him
prepare to help in taking her husband to Europe as soon as the
Session should be over, and although Hay protested that the idea
could not even be discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that
he could not effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding
without struggle. He would equally have resigned office and
retired, like Purun Dass, had not the President and the press
protested; but he often debated the subject, and his friends
could throw no light on it. Adams himself, who had set his heart
on seeing Hay close his career by making peace in the East, could
only urge that vanity for vanity, the crown of peacemaker was
worth the cross of martyrdom; but the cross was full in sight,
while the crown was still uncertain. Adams found his formula for
Russian inertia exasperatingly correct. He thought that Russia
should have negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur,
January 1, 1905; he found that she had not the energy, but meant
to wait till her navy should be destroyed. The delay measured
precisely the time that Hay had to spare.
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| The close of the Session on March 4 left him barely the
strength to crawl on board ship, March 18, and before his steamer
had reached half her course, he had revived, almost as gay as
when he first lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four
years earlier. The clouds that gather round the setting sun do
not always take a sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch
on mortality; or, at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely
sad. One walks with one's friends squarely up to the portal of
life, and bids good-bye with a smile. One has done it so often!
Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourished no illusions; he
was convinced that he should never return to his work, and he
talked lightly of the death sentence that he might any day
expect, but he threw off the coloring of office and mortality
together, and the malaria of power left its only trace in the
sense of tasks incomplete.
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| One could honestly help him there. Laughing frankly at his
dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in
a butcher's shop, one could still remind him of what was solidly
completed. In his eight years of office he had solved nearly
every old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little
or nothing to annoy his successor. He had brought the great
Atlantic powers into a working system, and even Russia seemed
about to be dragged into a combine of intelligent equilibrium
based on an intelligent allotment of activities. For the first
time in fifteen hundred years a true Roman pax was in sight, and
would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to him. Except for making
peace in Manchuria, he could do no more; and if the worst should
happen, setting continent against continent in arms -- the only
apparent alternative to his scheme -- he need not repine at
missing the catastrophe.
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| This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting
statesman feels, and commonly with reason. One had no need to get
out one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on
either side. Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy?
The Kaiser supplied him with these figures, just as the Cretic
approached Morocco. Every one was doing it, and seemed in a panic
about it. The chaos waited only for his landing.
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| Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at
Nervi, and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no
effort and heard no call for action. Then they all went on to
Nanheim without relapse. There, after a few days, Adams left him
for the regular treatment, and came up to Paris. The medical
reports promised well, and Hay's letters were as humorous and
light-handed as ever. To the last he wrote cheerfully of his
progress, and amusingly with his usual light scepticism, of his
various doctors; but when the treatment ended, three weeks later,
and he came on to Paris, he showed, at the first glance, that he
had lost strength, and the return to affairs and interviews wore
him rapidly out. He was conscious of it, and in his last talk
before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his
activity for granted. "You must hold out for the peace
negotiations," was the remonstrance. "I've not time!" he replied.
"You'll need little time!" was the rejoinder. Each was correct.
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| There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than the
commonplace to express what is incapable of expression. "The rest
is silence!" The few familiar words, among the simplest in the
language, conveying an idea trite beyond rivalry, served
Shakespeare, and, as yet, no one has said more. A few weeks
afterwards, one warm evening in early July, as Adams was
strolling down to dine under the trees at Armenonville, he
learned that Hay was dead. He expected it; on Hay's account, he
was even satisfied to have his friend die, as we would all die if
we could, in full fame, at home and abroad, universally
regretted, and wielding his power to the last. One had seen
scores of emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when
alive; and now, at least, one had not that to fear for one's
friend. It was not even the suddenness of the shock, or the sense
of void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet's
Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its
favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile
climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to follow
-- the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends
had begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive
-- no attraction -- to carry it on after the others had gone.
Education had ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter
horizon could its values be fixed or renewed. Perhaps some day --
say 1938, their centenary -- they might be allowed to return
together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives
made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and
perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education
among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and
timid natures could regard without a shudder.
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| THE END
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