would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither.
Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. His
friends had been driven out of Washington or had taken to
fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the
future.

The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he
thought he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it
good history then, and he thought it better twenty years
afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it
happened, in the process of his devious education, this "Session"
of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and
his last dying testament as a humble member of the press. As
such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he gone on
reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The political
dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 The
system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the
eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.
Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant's administration
marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's political energies must
henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out -- to patch --
or, in vulgar language, to tinker -- the political machine as
often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might
last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil
war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in
the world -- the clumsiest -- the most inefficient

Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most