the White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis
knew much more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as
impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy.
President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported, Adams
could not be expected to divine. One point alone seemed clear to
a man -- no longer so very young -- who had lately come from a
seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as much as
any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the
gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and
Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams
was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could
obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama
Claims, he drivelled. On the point of fact, Adams was as
peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only
wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr. Fish
did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so
mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with
Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no
one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be
whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were
concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to
challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was
a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from
his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party manager he had not
the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were unknown to
him.

Between these great forces, where was the Administration and