THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE (1902)
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 him, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.