life was to get past the dangers of the slave-power, or to fix
its bounds at least. The task done, he might be content to let
his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered little to his
success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on
battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity.
The generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well
with the old forms of education; that which had its work to do
between 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new.

His father's character was therefore the larger part of his
education, as far as any single person affected it, and for that
reason, if for no other, the son was always a much interested
critic of his father's mind and temper. Long after his death as
an old man of eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject
with a good deal of difference in their points of view. To his
son Henry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the
other figures in the family group, was that, in his opinion,
Charles Francis Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind
that ever existed in the name. For a hundred years, every
newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious excuse,
derided or abused the older Adamses for want of judgment. They
abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never
attempted to assign values to either; that was the children's
affair; but the traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was
singular for mental poise -- absence of self-assertion or
self-consciousness -- the faculty of standing apart without
seeming aware that he was alone -- a balance of mind and temper
that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question
of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives,
from any source, even under great pressure. This unusual poise of