SOURCE: "Henry and Brooks Adams: Parallels to Two Generations," in The Southern Review, Vol. V, No. 2, Autumn, 1939, pp. 308-34.

[In the following excerpt, Blackmur explores the combined influence that brothers Henry and Brooks exerted over the study of history.]

The greater reputation and the imaginative character of his work have made Henry Adams' name more familiar and more significant than that of his brother Brooks. Actually each inseminated the other; their thought along certain lines was coöperative, and it is impossible to deal fairly with the political and energetic ideas which occupied Henry Adams towards the end of his life—from 1893 to the end—without considering them in connection with those of Brooks Adams. It is here proposed to lay down the pattern of that connection and to underline the significance of its product.

The relationship between the two brothers is probably best expressed by accepting the statements of each that he was much indebted to the other, and that each was irritated by the other. Each, we might say, irritated the other into intellectual motion. Friction ignites like materials best; if the mode is primitive, it is yet reliable. Similarly, complements are most often produced from unanimities struck, least often from disparities felt; which is the very feeling of obfuscation. The brothers made no war in their attitudes towards history and thought: each saw himself dappled in the other. The single predominance Henry had over Brooks was personal; that of the older brother; and was the effect of those initial years when Henry had taken Brooks in charge, not only holding but asserting responsibility for him, at Harvard and afterwards. Otherwise they were on a level, and played participating parts. Brooks we commonly think of as more brilliant and more erratic than Henry, but we do not therefore think of Henry as sounder or straighter in line. The distinction—and here we get our sense of the complementary—is that Brooks tended to leap ahead of the logic that carried him along, where Henry endeavored to work always into the imagination that sustained him. For Brooks, facts might lose themselves in the pattern of law, and the pattern exclude all that did not fit it. For Henry, facts as such were nothing; the value they illustrated, the meaning they illuminated, everything. Brooks conned his trade routes and the statistics of price, and produced a theory of economic force. Henry kept magnets on his desk and meditated the lines of force, attractive and repellent, between them as if they made the ineluctable image of value, or even principle, itself. Yet John La Farge could complain: "Adams, you reason too much." Yet Brooks could make in the second edition of The Emancipation of Massachusetts, a vivid dramatic picture of Moses as a focused image of force. It was a matter of emphasis; each brother was attracted to the other's mode of approach as securing what he himself lacked to make, say, reason divine, or divination reasonable.

It was Henry's luck, just the luck of being on the imaginative side of the equilibrium, to come nearer the double virtue than Brooks. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres has its value for us precisely because it is a work of divination dressed out or enacted in the mode of the rational imagination; which is to say, the value is lasting. The Law of Civilization and Decay, perhaps Brooks Adams' strongest book, has a different value, not imaginative at all, but speculative, logical, statistical: it is an example of the forcible application of a set of ideas to history—to life in perspective—valuable just so long as the reader can persuade himself to entertain that set of ideas. Brooks had imagination, like Henry, but he used it conceptually, before he wrote; Henry put his imagination in his book: so that the book seems finally, as we think of it, to divine its own substance. It is the difference between the artist and the lawyer, who may be equally eloquent; but of whom the second excites you to a verdict where the first persuades you of a substance. You use Brooks Adams and you proceed; you use Henry and he participates in your sensibility ever afterwards.

But this is to speak on the high level, without regard to the motives and manners that bring us there, or the chance that richens sensibility. There are quotidian levels in the intellectual life no less intellectual for that. The everyday work of the mind is much the same—conditioned by the job in hand and by the appropriate tradition—without regard to the high product, if any appear. Thus we find the "help" which Henry extended to Brooks only different in particulars from that which Brooks probably gave Henry: all help on the common level, and not at all, so far as the evidence goes, the high creative help to which Brooks attested in "The Heritage of Henry Adams." Each brother stood on his own feet, rather conspicuously so to an outsider, and each thought that he himself did all the leaning upon the other. The James brothers, William and Henry, could only with less justice have thought the same in their own case: The Sacred Fount might be held one of the Varieties of Religious Experience. What we have really, in either set of brothers, is something like a pair of perpendicular parallels making a pointed arch in infinity—with infinity, though always out of sight, never altogether far off.

Returning to our common level—to the evidence of help given Brooks by Henry—there are copies of the first and second editions of The Law of Civilization and Decay in the Massachusetts Historical Society, both annotated by Henry Adams. Both sets of annotations start out to do a complete job—a page by page examination and citation—and both peter out rapidly after the first chapter has been gone through. Two things are remarkable. One is that none of Henry's notes are meant to affect either the thesis of the book or its substantial development, but merely to elucidate and document. The other is the witness they afford to the tenacity with which Henry hung on to his classical reading. There are specific references to Juvenal, Josephus, Martial, Pliny, Tacitus, Varro, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Propertius, Petronius, Horace, and Lucian. Some of the notes run to inserts of several closely written pages on such subjects as the economic effects of the great Roman estates in the early empire (Latifundia perdidere Italiam), the Lex Julia, the cheapness of Roman legions, on money, taxes and the extent of wealth, and on the triumph of Civil over Military power as the crown of Civilization. There are besides, of course, many short notes of emendation and condensation. Some of these were used in the French translation, but the only important suggestion of which Brooks took advantage was that an entire chapter be given to art. The conclusion to the second edition is tantamount to such a chapter. Otherwise there are a few notes, here and there, far more characteristic of Henry's own interest and bias than of Brooks'. For instance, there is a note on page 186 of the second edition to the effect that when the imaginative mind is dominant, we have "cobblers interested in angels," while when the economic mind is dominant, religion becomes a trade and we see "every priest a huckster"; which is Henry's comment on Brooks' discussion of Lollardy and the discarding of the miracle as an economic medium "because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain return." Again, there is a note to page 365 in the same edition where Brooks compares the skepticism since 1789 in Paris with the skepticism of imperial Rome, of which the earlier produced a new religion and the latter has not. Apparently, wrote Henry, no further development of religion is possible in line with the further centralization which has occurred since 1789. There has been no invasion, no freshening of the blood, by emotional barbarians—though Nazi Germany in 1939 might offer a potential in that direction. One could have wished Henry had developed his notion as a kind of anachronistic footnote to his study of the Virgin of Chartres as an imaginative centralization of force.

But wishes are prone to proliferation. What these notes show is the literal independence of Brooks' book and thought. They prove what Henry had already declared in a letter written when Brooks, apparently, sent him the proof sheets of the first edition in the spring of 1895. First he refused the dedication to himself—because it was not needed, because it might hint that the book was really his, and because "the book is wholly, absolutely, and exclusively yours. Not a thought in it has any parentage of mine." Later in the same letter he insists that Brooks strike all the egoism out of his preface that he could reach. "You should be able to get all the literary advantage that the pronouns /, me, and my can give, by restricting yourself to a definite scale, say once on an average of five lines." Henry Adams understood that the best criticism is primarily directed at craft, for there, in craft, all values lie. Perhaps also he had forgotten, in the instance, that he was no longer the professor and editor of twenty years earlier, no longer addressing his pupil and contributor, Cabot Lodge.

Reverting to our figure of the perpendicular parallels making a pointed arch in infinity, is not centralization the pointing word, the jointing notion, with which the brothers were, in their context, obsessed, and which gave them motive and manner for thinking in concert? They had seen in their own youth an unprecedented centralization of social power in the new hands of industry, and they saw it now, in their crop time or age, proceed at an accelerated pace to a still closer concentration in the hands of what we call the finance-capitalists, and what the Adams brothers called indifferently goldbugs, jews, or usurers. The sight was all the more poignant to them, and pressed harder upon their vigil, because it had occurred at the expense of everything they stood for and had hoped, almost by birthright, to participate in—-at least in America—a responsible, stable society governed by intelligence under the democratic vision. The Adamses were eighteenth-century men; rationalists; believers in knowledge and the discipline that flowed from knowledge; but American not English eighteenth century in their bias, and in America Massachusetts men not Virginian: that is to say moralists, inheritors of the Puritan scruple and the Christian ethic, quite used to wrestling equally with God and the Devil, but wrestling with the Idea, in their day, rather than the person of each. It was this modified inheritance and this reduced habit that kept them free of both intolerance and easy tolerance, of traditionalism and enthusiasm; which kept their minds open and active upon the old principles, maintaining sturdy integrities even in rebellion and dismay; but which yet, in dilution though it was and lacking, as we say, in personality, prevented them from finding twentieth-century society acceptable, live in it as they must and for the most part thoroughly did. The eighteenth-century mind unqualified did well enough; it merely became more worldly—lost the ability to care along with treasures to cherisli—like John Hay; but the eighteenth century infected with Massachusetts, so far as it claimed survival at all claimed care its own, and what it could not care for reacted violently against, including sometimes the burden of inheritance.

Thus the mind faced with an unacceptable order—an order irresponsible to eighteenth-century principles however modified by twentieth-century theory—bent in two directions, either to the past, not for escape but refreshment, or to a special and punitive picture of the present almost, so inviting is the prospect of inevitable destruction, as refreshing as the contemplation of the high past. No mind can avoid, at some point of dissatisfaction, resort to magic; for what is the resort to conscience, even, but the application of the extreme rationalized form of magic; but since magic is universal in thought, we need keep only one eye on it. Here we need merely observe that Brooks and Henry Adams chose that type of magic appropriate to their special heritage. To the new form of economic centralization which he called multiplicity Henry Adams responded by invoking the extreme imaginative centralization symbolized by the Virgin of Chartres, which he called unity: the invocation was an act of imagination. Brooks responded by demonstrating through what he understood to be the logic—the Laws—of history, that the new centralization was selfdestructive and represented civilization in an advanced state of decay; an act of intellect.

The brothers sympathized with each other's views—Henry perhaps sympathizing more with Brooks' destructive logic than Brooks was able to sympathize with Henry's refreshing imagination. We, today, may sympathize with both, as their predicament like their principles—their engaging values—remain some part of our own. We, the best of us, no more than they, seem able to bend either imagination or intellect directly to express the society in which we live, nor discern in what shape or pattern its unity lies. The difficulties are no less now than a generation ago; indeed, we may be pleased to call them greater; for the plain fact is that our society, measured by its own reduced aspirations, is unacceptable at more points to us than it was to the Adamses. The velocity of society has already become, as Henry Adams prophesied, too great for our intellects to cope with: we cower in a new and private dark as we barefaced move willy-nilly. Or so we choose to feel in most of our distinguished poetry and fiction and art. The mood was as common to the Adamses as to us; even a Bostonian in the mood would sympathize with what Henry wrote Brooks after a visit to Coutances in the fall of 1895:

I have rarely felt New England at its highest ideal power as it appeared to me, beatified and glorified, in the Cathedral of Coutances. Since then our ancestors have steadily declined and run out until we have reached pretty near the bottom. They have played their little part according to the schedule. They have lost their religion, their art and their military tastes. They cannot now comprehend the meaning of what they did at Mont St. Michel. They have kept only the qualities which were most useful, with a dull instinct recalling dead associations. So we get Boston.

What Brooks may have written Henry in private does not appear to have survived, but it could hardly have been more despondent, or put with more relish, than many of his published statements. An extreme instance may be found at the end of the preface to the second edition of The Law of Civilization and Decay:

In this last stage of consolidation, the economic, and, perhaps, the scientific intellect is propagated, while the imagination fades, and the emotional, the martial, and the artistic types of manhood decay. When a social velocity has been attained at which the waste of energetic material is so great that the martial and imaginative stocks fail to reproduce themselves, intensifying competition appears to generate two extreme economic types,—the usurer in his most formidable aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive on scanty nutriment. At length a point must be reached when pressure can go no further, and then, perhaps, one of two results may follow: A stationary period may supervene, which may last until ended by war, by exhaustion, or by both combined, as seems to have been the case with the Eastern Empire; or, as in the Western, disintegration may set in, the civilized population may perish, and a reversion may take place to a primitive form of organism.

The prospect seems inviting just so long as it seems inevitable. Intellect and imagination—the actuality of life—supervened upon the Adamses, as upon everybody. They were persuaded to react practically to the society about them, as no doubt they were "persuaded" to react to walnuts and kittens. Who intervenes, who persuades—what is the vis a tergo—what made Hamlet soliloquize—is of no importance except as a matter of principle; what counts is the value, and the value is all walnuts and kittens. Adams felt himself, once, "a kitten in walnuts," and may have felt himself something of the sort again when he wrote Brooks in the summer of 1905 to hold his tongue rather than make panacea. Panacea is all principle and no value.

Your social impasse [he went on] merely reflects the position of human thought altogether. No matter where you follow it, you reach the same diffusion. Chemistry would tell you the same; Physics the same; your own mind, the same. You will make matters worse by meddling with the United States Constitution or any other relic of ancient order. Within thirty years, man himself must make a big jump or break his neck. He must develope new mental powers or perish. He has set in motion energies which he cannot control. It is he, you must develope, not the law or the machine.

Man is the value and the valuer; society is moral; morals imaginative; and imagination, in the end, the sole persuader: its effort is, to keep up with what happens willy-nilly—with the product of the machine and the prediction, as Justice Holmes put it, of the law. The lag in general imagination is appreciable. We see today as ruin, always; we see everywhere about us, on this day, imagination turning to violence in its desperation to catch up: violence or retreat, for retreat is a kind of inner violence that must terminate equally in dismay. The individual who does keep up, or tries to keep up, does so most often by the partial subterfuge of forcing his imagination emphatically upon those aspects of life which only seem to have changed, but which beneath their current formularies have not stirred a hair to the weather: he is religious, he brings the past up to the present. He controls all that has not altered. It is his imagination that keeps us going whether we catch up or not. But he lacks both candor and sophistication: the candor to see new energies as transforming, not his principles, but his values; the sophistication to distinguish or to unite, as the case calls, the new effects and the old emotions. Hence he cannot see, even if he wants to, what it is which he wishes to catch up with. It is this lack, one observes—not either conservatism or reformism—that is the vitiating defect both of the Churchman and the old-fashioned liberal. Add candor, add sophistication, and in so far as your mixture is justly proportioned, you will have an imagination free enough, disponible enough, and with labor informed enough, to react directly and continuously upon society in motion, no matter what the velocity or what the bearing. The type is rare. It is always ahead of its generation; and indeed, regardless how far back you go for your example, ahead of any generation. The Montaigne of An Apology for Raimond Sebond is one example; André Gide may turn out another; and in our own country, barring those occasions when partisan zeal overtakes him, there is possibly Kenneth Burke. The type is rare, in pure form unavailable; for the mixture, or confederation of elements, is never altogether justly proportioned. It was not so in Henry Adams—rather less still in Brooks; we may put it—to make it simple—that Henry showed more sophistication than candor, and that in Brooks candor sometimes outran sophistication and came out bald. To say that is easy, if not quite simple; it is to say that Henry sometimes forgot what he was driving at, and that Brooks sometimes drove the point of his pen harder than its holder would bear. Thus Henry declined an honorary degree at Harvard on the ground of a sprained ankle. Thus Brooks, when President Eliot mildly observed to him after an address at the Law School that he apparently did not overcherish democracy, responded abruptly in his harsh, full-carrying voice: "Do you think I'm a damned fool?"

Such ease is facile—as President Eliot would have been the first to acknowledge; it explains nothing but itself. What is wanted here is not an explanation but a measure of dependability—of penetration—of value, in the persistent activity of the Adams mind. The matter of heresy, of deviation from its own norm, is trivial in perspective; the actual movement of mind within its field, the evidence of keeping up here, of lagging there, of going offside somewhere else, is precisely what we want to take count of. We should be preoccupied at this point with Henry Adams busy discerning values in American society and attempting to develop, not laws or machines, but the mind of the men who made them. There is no accurate measure for the activity of mind except through citation and summary based on the citation. The hundred and forty odd letters to Brooks from 1895 to 1914 which have survived, make, taken together with other cognate letters, a unified and consistent picture of Henry Adams' reaction to finance and politics in the large sense: they sit in the general, shifting picture, an emphasis of long moment—as it were accidentally predominant—in the vast mass of disparate interests that go to make up the unity of an active mind. We see, as we read, the portrait grow. That is, if we cite well, the summary will take care of itself.

The clue, the focus of vision, the attractive force—whatever it is that arrests attention upon a feature, is double, even multiple. Multiplicity, in character, is but the cumulus of felt duplicity: duplicity become pattern; spinning become weaving. As Adams said, "the scientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the scientific analysis commonly called Multiplicity." Character in action was like matter at heart—pure motion, as Adams thought, or, as it may better be put, pure pattern. One part of the clue is the fragment of vegetative pattern which Henry and Brooks saw together. "Apropos to our—or rather your—garden!" Henry wrote Brooks in the spring of 1898, and went on:

Reflecting at Cairo, Thebes, Baalbeck, Damascus, Smyrna, and Ephesus—alas I did not get to Antioch or Aleppo—on your wording of your Law, it seemed to me to come out, in its first equation thus, in the fewest possible words:

All Civilisation is Centralisation.

All Centralisation is Economy.

Therefore all Civilisation is the survival of the most economical (cheapest).

Darwin called it fittest, and one sense fittest is the fittest word. Unfortunately it is always relative, and therefore liable to misunderstanding.

Your other formula is more difficult:

Under an economical centralisation, Asia is cheaper than Europe.

The world tends to economical centralisation.

Therefore Asia tends to survive, and Europe to perish.

The most brilliant part of your theory, however, is its application to thought as well as to economy. Nothing has struck me so much as its application to religions. The obvious economy of monotheism as compared with polytheism explains why the two sole monotheistic religions developed on the edges of the two great channels of trade, one at Jerusalem, the other at Mecca. You have already applied the theory to the reformation, but you have not casually, and, as it were carelessly thrown out the suggestion that atheism is still cheaper than reformed religion.

Part of the necessary comment here is contained in the next excerpt, from a letter written two years later from Washington, March 4, 1900. "As to your request about your book, I have nothing to suggest. I should try to eliminate from it everything that shows prejudice for or against any state of society. As it implies for its thesis the general law that mankind is irresponsible—a sort of vegetable growth—there is no reason for approving or disapproving his action." So much for comment; the letter proceeds: "If the imagination is too costly and wasteful for a true economic society, it is not the fault of the society. To me, the new economical law brings or ought to bring us back to the same state of mind as resulted from the old religious law,—that of profound helplessness and dependence on an infinite force that is to us incomprehensible and omnipotent." It should be observed that in an unpublished part of this letter, Adams remarked that the Adams dogmatism was certainly odious, and added, "but it was not extravagant until we made it a record. The world is going so fast, now, that dogmatism or marked individuality has become economically unprofitable and socially obstructive."

The attitude was as significant as the idea, and prior to it. The truth of Adams' observation is immaterial; the significance is in the feeling that it was both unprofitable and obstructive to show as different or to apply conviction. One felt weakness in difference, quicksand under conviction. Conformity was no better if there was no conviction to conform to, no individual to make the assent; conformity was a levelling down, out of sight and out of date: old age come on ahead of itself. Adams had written it all out to his brother in December, 1899, from Paris, and the passage is worth quoting, as an act of conformity in extremis.

I am sorry to hear of your anxieties. Whether they are harder to bear in one place than another I do not know. One always hopes that home is best in trouble; but I never found it to make much difference. What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by habit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile when gout racks us. We make clever speeches which rhyme with paresis,—or do not, for paresis has a short ê. We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action every day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relax with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect; so we affect to respect the conventions, and we ask only to be classed as a style.

Understanding, observation, memory are steady forms of gout; Adams might have crowned his dramatic fable, and without diluting an ounce of its persuasiveness, had he added the remarks on stoicism which he sent to Margaret Chanler ten years later from Paris, September 9, 1909. His friend Bay Lodge had recently died. "Well! being a poor bit of materialised Energetik, I have no resource but the old one, taught by one's brothers in childhood—to grin and bear it; nor is this refuge much ennobled by calling it stoicism. The defect in this old remedy is that it helps others not at all, and oneself only by a sort of moral suicide."

The stoic style wore better, like any mask, for being seen through; one could adjust one's inner features, without embarrassing one's privacy, to meet the smart of what one saw. Stoicism, then, was no protection beyond the small haven of manners; better, it was a weapon and a blind, to be used precisely by being thrown off—all the more disarmingly effective because, as a rule, no one realized until too late it was not still up.

From time to time Adams threw it off as discreetly and with as much form—the stoicism of art—as possible; and persuaded his brother to do likewise. Arguing, first, the advantage of holding one's tongue: "Yet silence is a sort of truth, and equally virulent," Adams went on, in a letter of November 1, 1910, from Paris: "Should I do better by jumping with the tide, and accepting communism and anarchism as our evident goal—not perhaps as the object of human and other energy, but as its legitimate end .. . ? Very clever men have done so, and are doing it. Why not we? Is there any form of doing it in good faith? St. Augustine and St. Jerome found a way. I can't."

This was written at the end, or nearly the end, of a long submission to the political dilemma of the times, Adams' times and our own. It is Adams' idiosyncrasy that he thought of St. Augustine, who envisaged the City of God, St. Jerome, who expounded the scriptures to widows and young ladies, and Symmachus—earlier in the same letter—who was a rock-bottom honest conservative and a great praiser of gone times: all men who got into trouble, with themselves and their friends, over their propulsive convictions. It may be our idiosyncrasy that we think of no one, and regard ourselves as self-propelled. Presumably, the idiosyncrasy of human intelligence itself is at stake. Yet the choice was clear and, as always, already made, beyond repair: open only to execution and interpretation. Twelve years earlier, in May, 1898, Adams was in Budapest, and wrote his brother Brooks what he saw: it was the same question that was implied. Budapest was the first place he had ever struck that really led to Russia and the future.

The present Hungary is the child of State-Socialism in a most intelligent and practical form. In principle there is no apparent limit to its application. . . . What is more curious, the result seems to be reasonably consistent with a degree of individual energy and character. As one form of future society, it deserves a little attention, especially in connection with Russia; and, as it represents to me the possible future with which I sincerely wish I may have nothing to do, I recommend it to your notice. To me it seems to demonstrate that the axiom of what we are civil enough to call progress, has got to be:—All monopolies will be assumed by the State; as a corollary to the proposition that the common interest is supreme over the individual.

Enough of that! I touch on it only with reference to the next Presidential campaign, which, if you feel obliged to take part in, you must lift off from silver, and lift in to Socialism. Not that I love Socialism any better than I do Capitalism, or any other Ism, but I know only one law of political or historical morality, and that is that the form of Society which survives is always in the Right; and therefore a statesman is obliged to follow it, unless he leads. Progress is Economy! Socialism is merely a new application of Economy, which must go on until Competition puts an end to further Economies, or the whole world becomes one Socialistic Society and rots out. One need not love Socialism in order to point out the logical necessity for Society to march that way; and the wisdom of doing it intelligently if it is to do it at all.

These statements perhaps represent Henry Adams' most candid—and least sophisticated—reaction to the political society of his time. They are not isolated statements—but chosen from many; nor are they shots in the superficial dark; nor middle-class maundering liberalism. If there was a myth to which Henry Adams surrendered himself, it was that he was by right, by duty—what he called corvée—and potentially by ability, a member of the governing class. The family gocart was properly the governing gocart. That what he thought of as the governing class was permanently out of power only made the problem more acute and intensified the responsibility of independent thought. In a way, the mind could better afford responsibility out of power than in. For the mind has always independent means, ample for every emergency except the management of irresponsible power; which is why in the careers of statesmen we see conviction disappear for the term of office, only to reappear in retirement quite unimpaired: a principle of comment altogether as applicable to Neville Chamberlain as to Léon Blum, to De Valera as to Roosevelt, to Lenin as to Cardenas. The power of office, let alone the power of the man, is seldom equal to the power confronted and as a rule disintegrates before it. Henry Adams in making out his rough socialist position was making out, as much as anything, a case for the only possible vitalization of the governing class that he could see. Every other position constituted a more or less abject surrender to the money power; a surrender upon which every president since Lincoln had battened, just as the money power had battened on presidents. Socialism as framed was meant precisely to control the money power through absorption. So far, Socialism was the only means of control that went further than compromise. No government that was at the conspicuous mercy of the bankers, as Grant's had been, and Cleveland's, and Roosevelt's, could fairly be said to govern. No nation that could be victimized by a pressure put upon gold in London or Paris could be said to be free. There was, in short, no such thing as political independence at home or abroad, unless there was financial independence.

For a long time Adams thought financial independence could be obtained through free silver or, perhaps, paper. That is, he thought the virulence of the goldbug could be destroyed by setting a silver beetle or a paper wasp—or both—at its side. But he never thought the problem could be solved the other way around (unless one solved it by calling it insoluble): by surrendering political power to the money power in the hope that financiers would suddenly become governors, that is to say, responsible. The protective system which the money power had forced into the tariff—to such an extent that the words had become synonymous—showed to him as "a display of frantic lust for unbridled and irresponsible power." Again, in a letter to Brooks from Paris, September 20, 1910, the following sentences occur:

Your argument, like mine, goes to wreck on our system of protection.... Railways, trusts, banking-system, manufacturers, capital and labor, all rest on the principle of monopoly which you are attacking in one of its outposts. . . . The suggestion that these great corporate organisms, which now perform all the vital functions of our social life, should behave themselves decently, gives away our contention that they have no right to exist. Nor am I prepared to admit that more decency can be attained through a legislature made up of similar people exercising similar illegal powers. . . . All we can hope to do is to teach men manners in wielding power, and I'll bet you ten to one, on the Day of Judgment, that we shall fail. St. Peter will feel our pockets at the door, and charge us prohibitive rates for the inside journey to the New Jerusalem.

Furthermore, Adams believed neither in the intelligence nor in the courage of the money power, a distrust he expressed most forcibly in his letter to Brooks from Washington, February 18, 1896.

You fear the usurer, but one of the profoundest of your many observations is that the usurer is an imbecile politician. The old mercantile pirate was a great one. Even the manufacturer was an able one. But the usurer is a coward and narrow-minded. All through the world's history, he has ended as a victim or as a tool. I have watched him the last year. He has no brains, no education and no courage. He is a liar and an area-thief, but not a conqueror or a pirate. He has, within six months, broken down in Armenia, Abyssynia, and even in Cuba and the Transvaal. He stands helpless today before every one of the great political and economical questions of the world. If these questions are to be settled at all, they must be settled by political processes.

Forty-odd years of further concentration of the money power have only added application to Adams' observations. Had it occurred to him to put it that as a tool the usurer is manipulated by his own folly—that is, by the operation of inadequate instincts—and that in his cowardice he is driven to stir up trouble, the story in that quarter would be complete. The same years and an analogous concentration of social and extrasocial energies controlled—or milked without control—by the usurers, have added little to the political story. The problem, the aggravations, and the solutions remain unaltered—even in urgency. It needs a date and an identification to mark the following as inappropriate to the American scene in the early summer of 1939 instead of the spring of 1906. "The President shows evident fatigue. Everyone seems to admit that both parties are wrecked. As long as Roosevelt is on their backs they will stay wrecked. Afterwards they will begin again, no doubt with a new socialist element, as in Europe. Fisher Ames, a hundred years ago, said that our system was a raft on the Connecticutt river. One's feet were always under water, but the raft couldn't sink." Hitler and Mussolini and Franco were unforeseeable; as manners worse than those of Wall Street and State Street were unimaginable. The point here is in Adams' doubtful emphasis on "a new socialist element." In a letter to Ward Thoron, July 3, 1911, he made—as he said, with folded hands and wearing yellow glasses—the emphasis clear: We have not yet recognized socialism as a religion; but we must. Religion was, for Adams, a means of focusing energy: energy seen as motive forces. Everything lay in the seeing.

On the practical level Adams saw it plain. It was no good, as he wrote Brooks, to stick to silver; to stick, that is, to the palliative reform of the money power, which would at best merely reduce the abuse of energy by doubling the means of irresponsible manipulation. In theory one would check the other, like Congress and the Supreme Court. The first thing was to get at the energy itself where it actually furnished handles—types of mind—for control; then to remove those controls from the possibility of abuse. There is a passage in the Education (pages 421-22), which may be accepted, as perhaps the letters cannot, as more than tentative, where Adams lifted off the means of silver and on to the means of socialism.

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 the heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if you 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.

What Adams is saying will become more pointed if three or four sentences from Brooks Adams' Theory of Social Revolutions are put beside it to show the same problem from another angle.

Since those are strongest through whom nature finds it, for the time being, easiest to vent her energy, and as the whole universe is in ceaseless change, it follows that the composition of ruling classes is never constant, but shifts to correspond with the shifting environment. When this movement is so rapid that men cannot adapt themselves to it, we call the phenomenon a revolution. .. . A ruling class is seldom conscious of its own decay, and most of the worst catastrophes of history have been caused by an obstinate resistance to change when resistance was no longer possible [page 132].

Social consolidation implies an equivalent capacity for administration. I take it to be an axiom, that perfection in administration must be commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered, otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the centripetal force, and the mass will disintegrate. In other words, civilization would dissolve. It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on admin-istrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened [page 204].

The rise of a new governing class is always synonymous with a social revolution and a redistribution of property [page 205].

The Adams brothers worked, as we have said, in vigorous parallel to make a pointed arch in infinity. Being short of it, infinity need not concern us except as a prospect. What the Adamses said in effect was: that in fact a revolution had taken place in both the structure and energetic development of American society; that the historical American political mode was inadequate to the task of administering the conflict of new forces; that the money power had taken advantage of the weakness of government to assert, and exert, for itself, irresponsible sovereign powers; and that the resumption of sovereignty by government could evidently only occur through a combination of political concentration equal to the energetic concentration and the rise of an administrative class capable of controlling the expression of energy through the political process. Henry Adams roughly and from time to time, with varying doubt and distrust, assented to socialism as the necessary means. Brooks Adams seemingly did not commit himself to the word; he was content to demonstrate that what we call capitalistic control was incompetent to its task—that whereas "through applied science infinite forces have been domesticated" yet "our laws and institutions have remained, in substance, constant," and that, "as a result, society has been squeezed, as it were, from its rigid eighteenth-century legal shell, and has passed into a fourth dimension of space, where it performs its most important functions beyond the cognizance of the law, which remains in a space of but three dimensions." (Theory of Social Revolutions, pages 11-12.) There is little difference in the substance of argument, and only a difference of a point or two in the angle of vision: the difference, as much as anything, in the degree of sophistication. Brooks Adams was a lawyer and tended to see the administrative problem of society as a matter of mechanical law: a generalization of facts. Henry Adams was in some species a man of imagination, and saw the administrative problem as analogous to the fictions of physics: as generalizations of facts in terms of a policy. Where one brother ignored the connections, the other insisted upon them. It will be made plain below how much the distinction was worth.

Here there is room for a perspective down the avenue of another fiction, already mentioned, to which the brothers resorted as they thought by necessity, and which they came to belabor rather than discard, since it could not be ignored: the fiction of money as stored energy. If the perspective is digressive, desultory, deraciné—so is the human mind that entertains it. Here it is, in the form of a sentence extracted from some fragmentary undated notes addressed to Brooks: "It seems to me, therefore, that what I miss is a paragraph explaining that, among the many forms of machinery which society has used for its concentrating process, money, like coal or iron, is particularly important, and like railroads, particularly sensitive to manipulation." These words appear to make a self-evident statement of fact; even the suggestion that it could be explained or developed in a paragraph seems innocuous—assuming that common sense were used, a mere modest understatement of the space needed. Regrettably Brooks Adams' response is unavailable; and there is no such paragraph in his published work. Nor should it have been expected; for the self-evidential veil becomes transparent to a sharp look and shows through to a substantial confusion. In the consideration of money as stored energy the important thing is the difference, not the similarity, between it and coal or iron or railroads: the difference is that money is a representative fiction not a substance, and as it varies infinitely in the degree of representativeness so it is subject to infinite manipulation. In times of what is called financial crisis such as 1893, 1907, 1929, or 1933, it is clear that the representative value is at its lowest and the manipulative value at the highest; in other words political sovereignty is vestigial—only enough to make money considered as negotiable contract enforceable at law—and extralegal sovereignty nearly omnipotent. The bankruptcy law is a palliative attempt to restore political sovereignty; which is cutthroat economy at best—and usually cuts the wrong throats. The trouble lies in the universally accredited fiction that money is itself a form of energy; society believes in money as it once believed in miracles—up to the point of desperation. One would say that money like miracles became too expensive the moment its control became irresponsible: when it ceased being representative and became privileged property: an incorporeal hereditament administered as a right: that is to say, when society ceased controlling a responsible fiction and lay helpless before what it took to be an irresponsible fact. If you find society from millionaire to mudslinger asserting that money and coal may have an equivalence in stored energy varying only with the relative efficiency of manipulation—the furnace or the banking system—it will do you no good to point out that where coal stores heat gold in itself is almost cold, colder than paper for example, and that no amount of efficiency will extract work from it without a preponderant supply of gratuitous faith. No one will believe you; and in practice—so prone are we to prefer the agency of the miraculous at the focus of reason—you will not believe yourself—not all the time; hardly ever at the moment of decision or action. It may be laid down as almost an axiom that the attractive force of society over the independent mind is greatest where expressed in fictions that have lost their basis in actual behavior and have become merely rational formulae. The mind, as Henry Adams said, resorts to reason for want of training; and the mind is trained least in the basis of the fictions upon which it depends, most in the rationale of their execution. Hence the best minds, accepting perforce for reaction the reasons of society, tend as La Farge said Adams did, to reason too much. Reason seems centripetal, in its long succumbing; direct reaction, in all its lonely valor, centrifugal.

Henry Adams reasoned too much about money; it was a lifelong habit begun during the financial crisis after the Civil War—reflected in his three essays: "The Bank of England Restriction," "The Legal-Tender Act," and "The New York Gold Conspiracy"—and pursued necessarily in his account of the struggle over the United States Bank in the Life of Gallatin, and also, of course, in the relevant chapters in the History. What we are concerned with here has nothing to do with any historical question of financial policy; we are concerned just with the effect upon Adams of his obsession from 1895 to 1910 with the international exchanges and the manipulation of prices by the bankers and brokers: with the intellectual effect, that is, of his excessive addiction to the fiction of money as stored energy. In extreme form the effect showed in sentences like the following: "The imminent peril of the finances of the world weighs on my mind more than anything else. I do not see how Russia, which is quite mad and without a government, can avoid a bankruptcy which will, for the time, drag France, England, Germany under water, as well as ourselves." Again: "If Gage can let her [England] have a hundred millions of gold now, he can carry her and Russia over, till the gold mines are re-opened. Otherwise I can see no chance that England can maintain her credit, and for at least five years she has kept her head above water only by credit. She has been insolvent since 1895."

The secret of Adams' exaggerated fears—which commonly overtook him, as he said, every fall—lay entirely in the circumstance that he reasoned, almost unquestioningly, on other men's premises—the very men whom he hated and distrusted most, the brokers and usurers of New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. He took foreign exchange, trade balances, and the supply of gold with the utmost seriousness as the very outward form of the fluid energy he was most concerned to handle. The usurped power of a monstrous administrative fiction seemed to him, as it every day seems to everybody, its convulsions no less acceptable than those of the weather, the necessary and sovereign power. Had he reflected at the right moments—the exact moments when society failed of its logical collapse—it must have appeared that the "finances of the world" alone were in peril of life; the money power might ruin society but could not destroy it; for at the moment of destruction belief in the money power faltered short of the enacting trust. Historically the reflection was common, and always sound; Adams himself had made it of post-Napoleonic England, of Madison's finance of 1815, and of the Legal Tender crisis after the Civil War. His brother Brooks had made it all along in his discussions of usury from Rome to the Rothschilds. But he did not catch up with his own history during the American financial impasse from 1893 to 1905. The Klondike and South Africa acted as brakes to the movement of thought exactly as they perpetuated, by staving off gold-bankruptcy, the goldbug himself. The rescue of the bankers, no matter how often enacted, seemed the salvation of society—which, indeed, to the bankers it was. Had the rescue been political, as in 1933, instead of metallic as in 1898, or military as in 1914 and now again perhaps as in 1939, it would have been more difficult to confuse the fate of society with the solvency of its masters. As Mill told the young man who portrayed England in ruins, there is an inexhaustible amount of ruin in society. It is the instruments of control that are subject to destruction, never the energy controlled that dies; for the instruments are all fictions—conventions, contracts—and all invariably come to be framed against the public interest. If stoicism, as Adams said, is moral suicide, social suicide consists in putting up with fictions whose sole sanction lies in the credulity they command when the faith that inspired them is gone.

Adams knew all about the gone faith, but he put up with the persistent form as the path of least resistance: the path of inattention which consists in absorption in logical reason. Hence he saw, rightly, society everywhere committing suicide, or, worse, achieving apathy, according to the rules of its logic: for the most part in dogmatic ignorance of its action. Money was everywhere held the cohesive of civilization and lessened every other value, stultifying the energies it fed on. The movement of money was life. Whether you liked it or not, the movement of international exchanges and the disequilibria called trade balances, showed you what movement there was. If you could trace the motion, you could leave what moved—and what ran the motor—out of account. So Adams thought; and for about ten years he tried to think in the terms on which businessmen believed they acted; very much as "everybody" tried to think in America from 1929 to 1934. He tackled the trade balances in particular and attempted to make them tell a connected and complete story. Mr. Worthington C. Ford, then statistician of the State Department, tried to help him, for five years through 1898 supplying him with the best figures and the best comment obtainable. Breakfast or dinner two or three times a week while Adams was in Washington gave opportunity for conversation devoted exclusively to the exchanges of money and trade. The story was disconnected, incomplete, and pointed always to chaos.

"The whole thing is one vast structure of debt and fraud. The Church never was as rotten as the stock-exchange now is. The State never could be as hollow a fraud as our system of credit." "The single point which now stands ahead of us as the centre of the next chaos . . . is the money-lending system which has ruled us so long." More specifically on the interpretation of trade balances:

The substance is that in twenty five years a favorable balance of 25 [millions] has been converted into an unfavorable balance of 150. . . . Last year we ran twenty millions or more behind the average of the previous five years. . . . We have just made a gift of five millions to Wall Street to carry us for three months. We propose to contract our basis of credit, if necessary, two hundred and fifty millions or more to save the Treasury at the expense of our industries. .. . In London they told me that this process could hardly last beyond April. To give a date for future events is always dangerous, but to me it seems clear that we are already keeping ourselves afloat only by the most desperate expedients, and that, if we carry over till the next harvest we shall be lucky—or unlucky, for I do not know which dilemma is worst.

So to Mr. Ford, February 9, 1897. By the end of November, 1898, the story had evidently changed—in immediate direction if not in goal. The collapse of Spain had left, both Henry and Brooks Adams saw, America economically supreme: an economic revolution of the first magnitude. It seemed to Henry that there was a choice open, and he wrote to Mr. Ford:

The effect of the vast inflow of wealth on our domestic social condition, is another matter about which I prefer to shut my cowardly eyes. The future must bury its own dead, me among the rest. Sooner or later we must all rot, I suppose, and in the meanwhile our society can get no small amusement out of its ripeness. There will be a rich field for intelligent socialist changes, and a still richer one for thievery and private greed.

Writing again to Mr. Ford a few weeks later, December 19, 1898, Adams got away from the immediate and subjective relation to money and into the more objective reach of historical thought:

The economical theory of history requires the extinction of the wasteful, and the substitution of the cheaper forms of life, until the forms become too cheap to survive; but we have reached the point where cheapness can only be reached by a social system growing rapidly more and more socialistic. Plutocracies are wasteful, and yet we are building up the greatest plutocracies that ever existed. If you are right, government has now got to feed on accumulated capital, which will speedily bring about the Russian millenium of a centralised, despotic socialism.

It seems superfluous to remark on the application of these sentences to the deficit-budgetary system current by force since 1930; but if Adams could ignore his own conclusions in practice, so can we. His letter immediately returns to the consideration of trade balances.

The British trade return for November is again deplorable, and that for the eleven months is awful. France, this year, is apparently running behind. Russia can no longer borrow in Europe, and wants to borrow of us, with the pledge to spend all the loan here. In short, I have terrible qualms about the bottom of that European money bar'l as our next general election approaches.... The problem is certainly calculated to set the whole menagerie to chewing its tails in religious silence.

The point of the intellectual consequences of Adams' addiction to the fiction of money as stored energy should be by now clear. Precisely as the system failed in responsible representation so did the deductions logically drawn from watching its operation. Logic like instinct is only good in closed circuits of circumstances—those which formulated the logic or accreted the instinct—and in altered circumstances neither is apt except to the unchanged residues. So long as Adams applied the logic of the money system he was unable adequately to react to the energies of which the system had usurped the control: the actual energies in coal and rail-road and dynamo; and the partial reaction alone afforded came out wrong or desperate or blank. Precisely, on the other hand, as he ignored the system—ignored the whole comedy of the everyday considerations upon which men apparently acted—he came out astonishingly close to seeing the terms and scope of the political problem of his day and our own: the problem of administering infinite and diverse energies by finite mind so as to make a social unity. Thus in the letters we see the alternate crotchety pessimism of dismayed reason and the exhilaration of direct reaction which is quite beyond pessimism or reason or dismay. By April, 1906, the last operative traces of the addiction to the money fiction were gone; what remained were but the signs of quotidian discomfiture at the itch. Give up the jabber about MONEY, he wrote his brother Brooks on the 12th of that month. "What I see is POWER. Abolish money; power remains."

In such guise, with metonymous thinking put aside, the problem, if not the solution, was mud-plain. On March 23, 1906, he wrote Gaskell in much the same terms he had written to Brooks a year before on the necessity of developing new mental powers to encompass the new machines. Repetition is the simplest and most emphatic emphasis and is the least expensive persuader we can employ here.

What is the end of doubling up our steam and electric power every five years to infinity if we don't increase our thought power? As I see it, the society of today shows no more thought power than in our youth, though it showed precious little then. To me, the whole lesson lies in this experiment. Can our society double up its mind-capacity? It must do it or die; and I see no reason why it may not widen its consciousness of complex conditions far enough to escape wreck; but it must hurry. Our power is always running ahead of our mind.

It must still hurry. The usurped predominance of money over power persisted, and persists; it is still necessary to reduce the terms of administrative measures, however otherwise conceived—in the public interest, say—to the terms of the money interest before they can be effectuated. Political thought remains permissive rather than sovereign; stultified at heart. Brooks Adams, in "The Heritage of Henry Adams," published in 1919 as an introduction to Henry's "Letter to Teachers" and "Phase," felt compelled to deal with the usurper as practical sovereign. "Great Britain and America," he said, "like the parts of some gigantic saurian which has been severed in a prehistoric contest, seem half unconsciously to be trying to unite in an economic organism, perhaps to be controlled by a syndicate of bankers who will direct the movements of the putative governments of this enormous aggregation of vested interests independent of the popular will."

The arc of digression is closed, and we are returned with all the more force to what underlay it all along: the effort to give up the jabber about money, and seize on power. Because money had usurped power, money must needs be dethroned before political sovereignty could be restored. Because the new energies had led of necessity to new and intense concentrations—industrial cities, monopolies, powerhouses—only by an equivalent concentration of political power could sovereignty—even if otherwise achieved—be administered. To repeat all consciously and with even more emphasis in this repetition than the last, as there is more repeated—the necessities were equal by observation. Put morally, which is here to say politically, the whole necessity was to recognize your fate in order to achieve your character. It was not a matter of logic, which may always be satisfied, but of need, which is always come short of. The proximate satisfaction of need, as Adams saw it predicted by the character of society, could only be secured by state monopoly of all private monopolies and all aggregates of energy which tended towards private monopoly. Monopoly is the very name for public interest. The strategy and tactics of public monopoly constitute the administrative theory called socialism or communism—though they had as well, until they acquire religious aspirations or imaginative vision, be called the theory of government, without qualification. This language will not of course be found either in Adams' letters or in his books; but it may be argued that it flows naturally from the consideration of the material cited from Henry and Brooks: it is the summary that it makes for itself.

It should be added that this account of the Adams brothers' direct response to the politico-economic impasse of their times and ours is not in any way meant to express their predilection. It does not follow that one desiderates what one perceives to be predetermined. Brooks, as we said, did not use the word socialism; he distrusted the innate as well as the practical ability of any form of democratic electorate almost as much as he distrusted the intelligence of the bankers; he claimed that his thought expressed the necessity of mechanical law. Henry resorted to the word and program of socialism because he thought they expressed the natural and necessary next stage of society, and not because he liked the prospect. He did not; he disliked and detested it only less than he did the prospect of the usurer. Both socialism and usury represented forms of rot; both were levellers, disintegrators, cheapeners of the energies they sought to control; both prevented the imagination—or so he most often thought. Socialism was one peg cheaper than the bourgeoisie—where usury was, as plutocracy, the extreme of waste. Usury was usurpation; socialism was politics. With the strong political bias which he had inherited and cultivated as a corvée, he made the choice of socialism. "The socialist society of the immediate future," he wrote Gaskell in March, 1910, "is the end of possible evolution or forward movement on any lines now known to us." Knowing that, he could not do other than think it through.

That was the corvée of the politically minded man. Being also an imaginative man and greatly desirous of being a scientific historian, his next effort was to find some concept of physical energy which should lift the socialist phase of society to the imaginative plane where it might show its meaning as unity, even if the meaning were fatal. For there must be a policy of the imagination no less than a policy of the state.