The Education of Henry Adams

VIS INERTIAE (1903)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.