confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one offered
suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although press
agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to
analyze. Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration,
and could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out
at the point where any member of the Administration became
visible. Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself feared
finding out too much. He found out too much already, when he saw
in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching
his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and that Boutwell's
incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation. With the
conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
assured every one else that the President himself was the savior
of the situation, and in private assured each other that if the
President had not been caught this time, he was sure to be
trapped the next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and
double. All this was wildly exciting to Adams. That Grant should
have fallen, within six months, into such a morass -- or should
have let Boutwell drop him into it -- rendered the outlook for
the next four years -- probably eight -- possibly twelve --
mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his
wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the
eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this,
which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems,
professions, and people, all the great active forces of society,
in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months
before, this innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of