Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/163

 lost hope. With loss of hope came the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every rag of defence and excuse, he. closed by leaving him loaded with connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous sentence:—"It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war!"

What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his education. Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have continued thus:—

"It would be superfluous;—1st. Because Earl Russell not only knows it already, but has meant it from the start;—2nd. Because it is the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying action;—3d. Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that 'this is war,' but is pointing it out to the world, to complete the record."

This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister announced that a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as clerk, the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety, merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy or rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order to make clear the issue. The war was Russell's war,—Adams only accepted it.

Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries that "instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure of the two iron clad vessels from Liverpool." The members of the modest Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretary conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel left on the Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the rebel right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he were ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and death like this; and though the private secretary should covet and attain every office in the gift of President or people, he would never again find education to compare with the life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half struggle in London, as it had racked and thumbscrewed him in its shifting phases; but its practical