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The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
page 41 of 594 (06%)

As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father
gave him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston
library, and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his
Latin Grammar and listened to these four gentlemen discussing the
course of anti-slavery politics. The discussions were always
serious; the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously; and
they were habitual because Mr. Adams had undertaken to edit a
newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen, who came to discuss
its policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams was editing
the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, and made the boy
read texts for proof-correction. In after years his father
sometimes complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and
Massachusettensis, Henry had shown very little consciousness of
punctuation; but the boy regarded this part of school life only
as a warning, if he ever grew up to write dull discussions in the
newspapers, to try to be dull in some different way from that of
his great-grandfather. Yet the discussions in the Boston Whig
were carried on in much the same style as those of John Adams and
his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and the same
habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him for
his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no more
from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were all types
of the past.

Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still
directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors,
merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as
though they were clergymen and each profession were a church. In
politics the system required competent expression; it was the old
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