Boston. Quincy had always been right, for Quincy represented a
moral principle -- the principle of resistance to Boston. His
Adams ancestors must have been right, since they were always
hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong, Quincy must
be right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came back on
the eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of
Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and
politician. He could under no circumstances have guessed what the
next fifty years had in store, and no one could teach him; but
sometimes, in his old age, he wondered -- and could never decide
-- whether the most clear and certain knowledge would have helped
him. Supposing he had seen a New York stock-list of 1900, and had
studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal, and steel
-- would he have quitted his eighteenth-century, his ancestral
prejudices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and
the rest, in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State
Street, and ask for the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and
a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank?

Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages,
looking back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.


CHAPTER II

BOSTON (1848-1854)

PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January 1,
1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in