CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY (1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his Minister to England. Once more,
silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced
many centuries before: Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law
prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished
in April, 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new
life without education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had asked millions they would
have got no answers. No one could help. Looking back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years
afterwards, one could only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one of his sons, and he indicated
Henry as the only one who could be spared from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk
again without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in his
new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters. He was at least no public official, like the
thousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on
the President. He was not a vulture of carrion patronage. He knew that his father's appointment
was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship; he did not then know that Senator
Sumner had opposed it, or the reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could
have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest and most decisive being
that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his chief. That
Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard to find a fit
DIPLOMACY 111
appointment in the list of possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew
so well as this experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of fitness was his
consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better
support than Senator Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to give
him. In the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous risk, but never before had
they taken one so desperate.
The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the unfitness of any one; he knew too
little; and, in fact, no one, except perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary
of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive appointed the editor of a
Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally
known as Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping the
Minister. The Assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially
useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps he knew no name to suggest;
perhaps he knew too much of Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.
The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he knew not where to turn.
Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner
wrote letters, it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was engaged
in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors
except in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred
thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to
be beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments
form ranks before Boston State House in the April evenings and march southward, quietly
enough, with the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few signs or sounds of
excitement. He had time also to go down the harbor
112 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before being thrown, with a
hundred thousand more, into the furnace of the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of
fire. Few things were for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private secretary
crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for
Liverpool. This time the pitcher of education had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly
broken; and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without defence or arms.
The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the world of its humors; yet Minister
Adams sailed for England, May 1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would
have enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin-boy in a
rowboat.
Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr.
Adams the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained
secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private
secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra burden of many masters; he was the most
fortunate person in the party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never dictated,
never
disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister
Adams
remembered how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter, 1778, on the
little
frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a
diplomacy of
adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how John Quincy, in 1809, had
sailed
for Russia, with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar Alexander
single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as
successful.
He thought it natural that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also, with a
twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that he left not a friend behind him. No
doubt he
could
DIPLOMACY 113
depend on Seward, but on whom could' Seward depend? Certainly not on the Chairman of the
Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams had no friend in the Senate; he could hope for
no favors, and he asked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and
grandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty view, and for him answered
his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the young man realized what had
happened, he felt it as a betrayal. He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer
and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time America was posing as the
champion of legitimacy and order. Her representatives should know how to play their role; they
should wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861, the only rag of
legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on
the Court and Parliament of Great Britain.
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of the scholar and to turn him into a
harsh judge of his masters. If they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they
stood with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him quickly, they sent out their
new Minister to Russia in the same ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of
Cassius M. Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education profited less than the
private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though possibly some rivals. No
young man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from such lessons, any confidence in
himself, and it was notorious that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who felt,
or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government; fewest of all among those who
were in it. At home, for the most part, young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England
they might grumble or not; no one listened.
Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his chief. He knew surprisingly little, but
that much he did know. He never
114 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life.
The habit of reticence of talking without meaning is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He
was already an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to
London: a family of early Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena of lions, under the glad
eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar
Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance in the
Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the ceremony.
Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his son. What he or Mr. Seward
or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair of history and their errors concern historians. The
errors of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a large part of his education.
He thought on May ~o that he was going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years the chief
effort of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England into intelligent cooperation
with the objects and interests of America. His father was about to make a new effort, and this
time the chance of success was promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent obstacle
to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians,
instinctively English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself, as
one of the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere in the British
Islands.
On May 13, he met the official announcement that England recognized the belligerency of the
Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of
Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn the sooner the better that his ideas were the
reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in England literally no one doubted that Jefferson
Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all
DIPLOMACY 115
were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according
to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently
held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared. Lord John Russell, as Foreign
Secretary, had received the rebel emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency
before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the British Government in advance.
The recognition of independence would ,. then become an understood policy; a matter of time and
occasion.
Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this shock upon his son produced
only a dullness of comprehension a sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow.
Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The chances were great that the whole
family would turn round and go home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless
waves of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long leisure of later life, he grew
cold at the idea of his situation had his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be
unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for his trifling though it were was proved
by his unreflecting confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that his father might lose his
nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending
over several generations, he could not certainly point out another who could have stood such a
shock without showing it. He passed this long day,`` and tedious journey to London, without
once thinking of the possibility that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the Minister
thought, and certainly his thought was not less active than his son's, he showed no trace of
excitement. His manner was the same as ever; his mind and temper were as perfectly balanced; not
a word escaped; not a nerve twitched.
The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden could possibly recur. The worst
was in full sight. For once the private secretary knew his own business which was to imitate his
father
116 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of
Regent Street, in the midst of a London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he
preferred to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for
breakfast, rather than ask a question or express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously, was too
appalling to face. Had he known it better, he would only have thought it worse.
Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond retrieving or contesting. Socially,
under the best of circumstances, a newcomer in London society needs years to establish a
position, and Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his son had not even a
remote chance of beginning. Politically the prospect looked even worse, and for Secretary Seward
and Senator Sumner it was so; but for the Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly
where he stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one of the luckiest of
men, both in what he achieved and in what he escaped. The blow, which prostrated Seward and
Sumner, passed over him. Lord John Russell had acted had probably intended to act kindly by him
in forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three months, and would then have
broken him down. The British Ministers were a little in doubt still a little ashamed of themselves
and certain to wait the longer for their next step in proportion to the haste of their first.
This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles Francis Adams, but of his son
Henry's adventures in search of an education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor.
The father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's was absurd. Thanks to certain
family associations, Charles Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies;
the only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in their brief
intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street; and the
DIPLOMACY 117
British Government, well used to a liberal unpopularity abroad, even when officially rude
liked to be personally civil. All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a corner, and
are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing in especial to complain of; his position was
good while it lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such
compensations. Brought over in order to help his father, he could conceive no way of rendering
his father help, but he was clear that his father had got to help him. To him, the Legation was
social ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire solitude in the great society of
London was doubly desperate because his duties as private secretary required him to know
everybody and go with his father and mother everywhere they needed escort. He had no friend, or
even enemy, to tell him to be patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have broken out with
the reply that patience was the last resource of fools as well as of sages; if he was to help his
father at all, he must do it at once, for his father would never so much need help again. In fact he
never gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman, clerk, or a companion for the
younger children.
He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be useful. As he came to see the
situation closer, he began to doubt whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too
common in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most secretaries detested their chiefs,
and wished to be anything but useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son could
go only as an invited guest, the most instructive conversation he ever heard among the young men
of his own age who hung about the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel chien de pays!"
or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, mon cher!" No one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or
get information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who wet~ also slow to assume work not
specially ordered from their Courts. If the American Minister was in trouble today, the Russian
Ambassador was in trouble yesterday,
118 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
and the Frenchman would be in trouble to-morrow. It would all come in the day's work.
There was nothing professional in worry. Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats
were always picking them up.
This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found rich veins of jealousy running
between every chief and his staff. His social education was more barren still, and more trying to
his vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe with torture. He never
forgot the first two or three social functions he attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in Stratton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and hoped that no
one noticed him; another was a garden-party given by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of
Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister and Mrs. Adams were kept in conversation
by the old Duchess till every one else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set
to playing leapfrog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty years Henry Adams continued
to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another
nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision
in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled
nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This might seem
humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.
When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not yet won a private
acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run
appeared in the Times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for Bull Run was a
worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this is history and can be read by public schools if they
choose; but the curious and unexpected happened to the Legation, for the effect of Bull Run on
them was almost strengthening. They no longer felt doubt. For the next year they went on only
from week to
DIPLOMACY 119
week ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more than three months for their
limit. Europe was waiting to see them go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry
it.
So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved his father. For many months he
looked on himself as lost or finished in the character of private secretary; and as about to begin,
without further experiment, a final education in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac where he
would find most of his friends enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this idea
uppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn, and began the winter.
Any winter in London is a severe trial; one's first winter is the most trying; but the month of
December,
1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a glutton of gloom. One afternoon
when he was struggling to resist complete nervous depression in the solitude of Mansfield
Street, during the absence of the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's telegram
announcing
the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British mail-steamer was brought to the office. All three
secretaries,
public and private were there nervous as wild beasts under the long strain on their endurance and
all
three, though they knew it to be not merely their order of departure not merely diplomatic rupture
but
a declaration of war broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They saw it and
cheered
it! Since England was waiting only for its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike
first.
They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying I with Monckton Milnes at
Fryston in
Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it, is told in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E.
Forster who was
one of the Pryston party. The moment was for him the crisis of his diplomatic career; for the
secretaries it
was merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they were a military outpost
waiting orders
to quit an abandoned position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort
120 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog was never a rosy landscape, but
in 1861 the most hardened Londoner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source of
comfort denied to them he should not be private secretary long.
He was mistaken of course! He had been mistaken at every point of his education, and, on
this point, he kept up the same mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing but one of many affairs which
he had to copy in a delicate round hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal to
him which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these, and to him the most important, was
to put an end forever to the idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an independent and free citizen,
not in the employ of the Government, he had kept up his relations with the American press. He
had written pretty frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters in the New
York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with the two or three friendly newspapers in
London, the Daily News, the Star, the weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them news and
views that should have a certain common character, and prevent clash. He had even gone down to
Manchester to study the cotton famine, and wrote a long account of his visit which his brother
Charles had published in the Boston Courier. Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and
instantly came back upon him in the most crushing shape possible that of a long, satirical leader in
the London Times. Luckily the Times did not know its victim to be a part, though not an official,
of the Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he instantly learned the
narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who
had haunted London since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them all they
did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to tell Adams all he did not want to
know about the Times. For a
DIPLOMACY 121
moment Adams thought his "usefulness" at an end in other respects than in the press, but a
day or two more taught him the value` of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had not even a
club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the Times article; no one except Joe Parkes
ever spoke of it; and the world had other persons such as President Lincoln, Secretary Seward,
and Commodore Wilkes for constant and favorite objects of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but
he never tried to be useful again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education at least
had reached the point of seeing its own proportions. "Surtout point de zŠle!" Zeal was too
hazardous a profession for a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among Trent
Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters and meddled with no more newspapers, but
he was still young, and felt unkindly towards the editor of the London Times .
Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he felt little or no hope of repaying
these attentions; but the Trent Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its
surprise, still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this delay which he attributed to Mr.
Seward's good sense no reason for changing his opinion about the views of the British
Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his table, and go on copying papers, filing
letters, and reading newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the brutality of Mr.
Seward or vice versa. The heavy months dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without
improving his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to the end of life, he never
forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During this tedious winter and for many months
afterwards, the only gleams of sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the
guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix.
His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers, although old George Peabody and
his partner, Junius Morgan, were strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could
be
122 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper Grosvenor Street were certainly the
best in London; but none offered a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first time,
the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women to whom an
intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy,
and he had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to understand that a cub needed
shape. The kind of education he most required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell
Sturgis, a dozen years older than himself, could have good-naturedly trained a school of such,
without an effort, and with infinite advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this social polar winter, the
single source of warmth and light.
Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such pressure, life in it could be nothing
but united. All the inmates made common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was
merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the younger members of the
household, it was not quite so with the Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily,
they gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with American sources, British society
had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders
except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three generations with the
impenetrable stupidity of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own
interests, the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself that this new British prejudice
was natural. The private secretary suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had
something to do with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally the Englishman was
a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had Lincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the
average Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the
unassailable social position of
DIPLOMACY 123
Minister Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore him, since they could not
ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated;
politically he was negligible; he was there to be put aside. London and Paris imitated Lord John.
Every one waited to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast d‚bƒcle. All conceived that
the Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams would vanish with
the rest.
This situation made Minister Adams an exception among diplomats. European rulers for the
most part fought and treated as members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of
total extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe, for a year at least, regarded the
Washington Government as dead, and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better
received than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by little, in private, society took the
habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition, or an
eminent counsel retained for a foreign Government. He was to be received and considered; to be
cordially treated as, by birth and manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of
getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible advantage over a European diplomat.
Barriers of race, language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in order to
save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams apart. He was undistinguishable
from a Londoner. In society few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double
personality and corresponding double weight.
The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of the Trent Affair under the
sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes and William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him.
Both Milnes and Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be supported. They saw
what the private secretary in May had overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the
American Minister made a mistake, and, since his strength was
124 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
theirs, they lost no time in expressing to all the world their estimate of the Minister's
character. Between them the Minister was almost safe.
One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or Forster were the more valuable
ally, since they were influences of different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in
London, possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for in London society as
elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a large majority, and dull men always laughed at
Monckton Milnes. Every bore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the "cool of the
evening"; and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the
indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men of a great
many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind
his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence
which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought
poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches,
chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of
two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of
Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social position of his own that ended in a peerage, and
he had a house in Upper Brook Street to which most clever people w-ere exceedingly glad of
admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more
dangerous to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a strong critic, an art
connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of books, but above all he was a man of the world by
profession, and loved the contacts perhaps the collisions of society. Not even Henry Brougham
dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes was the good-nature of London;
the Gargantuan type of its refinement and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.
DIPLOMACY 125
Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or Venables, or Henry Reeve were
quite secondary, but William E. Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to
do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at
that time no social or political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a
tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen
and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal,
emotional, almost sentimental nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a
Quaker ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and emotional he must
have been, or he could never have persuaded a daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold,
without a trace of base metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union cause and made
himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sure to do, partly because of his Quaker
anti-slavery convictions, and partly because it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a
new member, he needed a field.
Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical sense and his personal energy
soon established him in leadership, and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament
as for work. With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England began to take heart.
Minister Adams had only to look on as his true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action,
and even the private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam of encouragement as he saw the
ring begin to clear for these burly Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely to be as brutal
as ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not exactly light-weights' but Bright and
Cobden were the hardest hitters in England, and with them for champions the Minister could
tackle even Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and even in Parliament they had
no large following. They were
126 THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
classed as enemies of order, anarchists, and anarchists they were if hatred of the so-called
established orders made them so. About them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly
the side of the Union against Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers to London society, they
were at home in the American Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking always with reckless
freedom. Cobden was the milder and more persuasive; Bright was the more dangerous to
approach; but the private secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them
talk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the House.
With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer quite helpless. For the second
time the British Ministry felt a little ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends gathered about the Legation who
were no fair-weather companions. The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned out
to be an annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the most valuable
friends the Minister found, both politically and socially, and the Duchess was as true as her
mother. Even the private secretary shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and never
forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after dinner engaged in instructing John
Stuart Mill about the peculiar merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's claret which led him to this singular
form of loquacity; he insisted that it was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting
to his point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in that respect the Duke
would perhaps have done better; but the secretary had to admit that though at other periods of life
he was sufficiently and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could never recall a single occasion
during this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.
DIPLOMACY 127
Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his elders; not among fashionable or
socially powerful people, either men or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for
Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made Devonshire House almost familiar,
and Lyulph Stanley's ardent Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of Alderley
whose house was one of the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was
always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir Charles
Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which young Adams was asked, and with which his
friendly relations never ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them. Sir
Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close alliance. By the time society
began to reopen its doors after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary
occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no more effort of any kind, but silently waited
the end. Whatever might be the advantages of social relations to his father and mother, to him the
whole business of diplomacy and society was futile. He meant to go home.
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