Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/228

 afterwards, he could not keep recalling the President's figure with a distinctness that surprised him. The old-fashioned southern senator and statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were greater than others, but all were statesmen and all were supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of Tightness. To them the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their universe, a southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the southern system until he found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery was only a part of the southern system, and the life of it all,—the vigor,—the poetry,—was its moral certainty of self. The southerner could not doubt; and this self-assurance not only gave Andrew Johnson the look of a true President, but actually made him one. When Adams came to look back on it after wards, he was surprised to realise how strong the Executive was in 1868,—perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly he never again found himself so well satisfied, or so much at home.

Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed little changed in these eight years. He was the same—with a difference. Perhaps he,—unlike Henry Adams,—had at last got an education, and all he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself to doing without it. Whatever the reason, although his manner was as roughly kind as ever, and his talk as free, he appeared to have closed his account with the public; he no longer seemed to care; he asked nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support; he talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in these last days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in the evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end drew near, wanting to feel that the great man,—the only chief he ever served even as a volunteer,—recognised some personal relation, he asked Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his rooms, and play his game of whist there, as he did every night in his own house. Mr. Seward came and had his whist, and Adams remembered his rough parting-speech: "A very sensible entertainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of Mr. Seward, and the only one he ever accepted.