Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/240

 ington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to organise a government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organise his departments. The task of bringing the government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the confusion, especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was considerable, but the general disposition was good, and everyone had echoed the famous phrase:—Let us have Peace.

Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public spirit. Newspaper men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; senators had less; and cabinet-officers had none at all. Indeed one day when Adams was pleading with a cabinet-officer for patience and tact in dealing with representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman of 1869;—he saw little or nothing of later ones;—but he knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask:—"If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent reason. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Elaine and even McKinley and John Hay were to feel. The most troublesome