For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement,
but even apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's
road through life, was decisive for twenty years to come. There
was never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as
indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth or any
earlier century, the stamp mattered less because it was standard,
and every one bore it; while men whose lives were to fall in the
generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all, to get rid of
it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This was
their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was
easy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The
reason it gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought
higher and his moral standards better than those of his
successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral
standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian
morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless.
Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any
previous century, would have led him into the Church; he
inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time;
and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery
politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as
great as that of a religious war.

Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was
chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his
father alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully
through life's quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's
pilotage; but, for his father, the channel lay clear, while for
himself an unknown ocean lay beyond. His father's business in