Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/169



Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris such a habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the instincts of native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided, eccentric, systematically unsystematic and logically illogical. The less one knew of it the better.

This heresy, which would scarcely have been allowed to penetrate a Boston mind,—it would indeed have been shut out by instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration,—rested on an experience which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to think conclusive—for him. That it should be conclusive—for anyone else never occurred to him, since he had no thought of educating anybody else. For him—alone—the less English education he got, the better!

For several years, under the keenest incitement to watchfulness, he observed the English mind in contact with itself and other minds. Especially with the American the contact was interesting because the limits and defects of the American mind were one of the favorite topics of the European. From the old-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an economic thinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line. The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognised it as at least a thought. The American mind