Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/295

 like the loyalty of a highly cultivated churchman to his Church. He saw all the failings of the party, and still more keenly those of the partisans; hut he could not live outside. To Adams a western democrat or a western republican, a city democrat or a city republican, a W. C. Whitney or a J. G. Elaine, were actually the same man, as far as their usefulness to the objects of King, Hay or Adams was concerned. They graded themselves as friends or enemies, not as republicans or democrats. To Hay, the difference was that of being respectable or not.

Since 1877, King, Hay and Adams had been inseparable. Step by step, they had gone on in the closest sympathy, rather shunning than inviting public position, until, in 1892, none of them held any post at all. With great effort, in Hayes's administration, all King's friends, including Abram Hewitt and Carl Schurz, had carried the bill for uniting the Surveys and had placed King at the head of the Bureau; but King waited only to organise the Service, and then resigned, in order to seek his private fortune in the west. Hay, after serving as Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary Evarts during a part of Hayes's administration, then also insisted on going out, in order to write with Nicolay, the Life of Lincoln. Adams had held no office, and when his friends asked the reason, he could not go into long explanations, but preferred to answer simply that no President had ever invited him to fill one. The reason was good, and was also conveniently true but left open an awkward doubt of his morals or capacity. Why had no President ever cared to employ him? The question needed a volume of intricate explanation. There never was a day when he would have refused to perform any duty that the government imposed on him, but the American government never to his knowledge imposed duties. The point was never raised with regard to him, or to anyone else. The government required candidates to offer; the business of the Executive began and ended with the consent or refusal to confer. The social formula carried this passive attitude a shade further. Any public man who may for years have used some other man's house as his own, when promoted to a position of patronage commonly feels himself obliged to inquire, directly or indirectly, whether his friend wants anything; which is equivalent to a civil act of divorce, since he feels awkward in the old relation. The handsomest formula, in an impartial