Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/119

 Very slowly, but quite steadily, they gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with American sources, British society had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the republican leaders except Summer. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself that this new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to do with it. The copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had Lincoln find Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the unassailable social position of Minister Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the example. Personally the minister was to be kindly treated; politically he was negligeable; he was there to be put aside. London and Paris imitated Lord John. Everyone waited to see Lincoln and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the Washington government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams would vanish with the rest.

This situation made Minister Adams an exception among diplomates. European rulers for the most part fought and treated as members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of total extinction; but the governments and society of Europe, for a year at least, regarded the Washington government as dead, and its ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better received than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by little, in private, society took the habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomate but rather as a member of opposition, or an eminent counsel retained for a foreign government. He was to be received and considered; to be cordially treated as, by birth and manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of getting behind a stupidity gave the minister every possible advantage over a European diplomate. Barriers of race, language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomates apart in order to save governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams apart. He was undistin-