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.