Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
page 334 of 594 (56%)
triumphant results of politics -- to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling
or even Mr. Sumner -- he could not honestly say that such an
education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable
heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing on
lower levels -- clever and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine
-- who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial
demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself which the
North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn.
What kind of political ambition was to result from this
destructive political education?

Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach
it. If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working,
new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An
eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of
Jay Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible. Practical
Americans laughed, and went their way. Society paid them to be
practical. Whenever society cared to pay Adams, he too would be
practical, take his pay, and hold his tongue; but meanwhile he
was driven to associate with Democratic Congressmen and educate
them. He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of
revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a college. The
Administration drove him, and thousands of other young men, into
active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want of
system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be
absurd. No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in
reform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics
DigitalOcean Referral Badge