American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as
usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like
the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no
right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea
that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution,
and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after
Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
called -- and should actually and truly be -- the highest product
of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One
must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain
such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President
Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset
Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was
worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because
he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he
was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins.
Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the
stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that
of evolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing. One
could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future. It
was not even sensibly American. Not an official in it, except
perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in September,
suggested an American idea.

Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish
was almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values;
he was human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no