done perfectly in one, and in any case would have had small
value. The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more
than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and
Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College,
and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any
good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social
ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation
in the track. Any other education would have required a serious
effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there
because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal
of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they
wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to
make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy
had given to the College a character of moderation, balance,
judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent
traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that
its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such
a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In
effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of
Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical
blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped.

The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief
wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned
in it, teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams
debated whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his