which would have been quite unreasonable scarcely entered his
mind. This was the thought of going westward and growing up with
the country. That he was not in the least fitted for going West
made no objection whatever, since he was much better fitted than
most of the persons that went. The convincing reason for staying
in the East was that he had there every advantage over the West.
He could not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enormous
tribute to Boston and New York. One's position in the East was
the best in the world for every purpose that could offer an
object for going westward. If ever in history men had been able
to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance, the
citizens of the great Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when
their railway systems were already laid out. Neither to a
politician nor to a business-man nor to any of the learned
professions did the West promise any certain advantage, while it
offered uncertainties in plenty.

At any other moment in human history, this education, including
its political and literary bias, would have been not only good,
but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men
so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with
it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted. He
saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. He
finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding
fault with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than
his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had
known at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years
later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of
the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boy
of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the