year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The
calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of
twentieth-century thought, but the story will show his reasons
for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics,
philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all
science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854
stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The education he
had received bore little relation to the education he needed.
Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at
all. He knew not even where or how to begin.


CHAPTER IV

HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)

ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time
down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and
felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience
was ended. Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a
period so long as four years without some sensation of loss --
some sentiment of habit -- but school was what in after life he
commonly heard his friends denounce as an intolerable bore. He
was born too old for it. The same thing could be said of most New
England boys. Mentally they never were boys. Their education as
men should have begun at ten years old. They were fully five
years more mature than the English or European boy for whom
schools were made. For the purposes of future advancement, as
afterwards appeared, these first six years of a possible
education were wasted in doing imperfectly what might have been