Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/298

 ance, stood in much the same frame of mind. Everywhere was slack-water. Hay himself was almost as languid and indifferent as Adams. Neither had occupation. Both had finished their literary work. The Life of Lincoln had been begun, completed and published hand in hand with the History of Jefferson and Madison, so that between them they had written nearly all the American history that was to write. The inter mediate period needed intermediate treatment; the gap between James Madison and Abraham Lincoln could not be judicially filled by either of them. Both were heartily tired of the subject, and America seemed as tired as they. What was worse, the redeeming energy of Americans which had generally served as the resource of minds otherwise vacant, the creation of new force, the application of expanding power, showed signs of check. Even the year before, in 1891, far off in the Pacific, one had met everywhere in the east a sort of stagnation—a creeping paralysis,—complaints of shipping and producers,—that spread though out the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange and silver-production loomed large. Credit was shaken, and a change of party-government might shake it even in Washington. The matter did not concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always richest when the rich were poor; but it helped to dull the vibration of society.

However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the last twenty years, for the three friends, King, Hay and Adams, was exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years, but what had they gained? They often discussed the question. Hay had a singular faculty for remembering faces, and would break off suddenly the thread of his talk, as he looked out of the window on La Fayette Square, to notice an old Corps-commander or Admiral of the Civil War, tottering along to the Club for his cards or his cocktail:—"There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at Blankburg! think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!" Or what drew Adams's closer attention:—"There goes old Boutwell gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they went! men who had swayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King and Adams, less valued than the ephemeral Congressman behind them, who could not have told whether the General was a Boutwell or Boutwell a General. Theirs was the highest known success, and one asked what it was worth to them. Apart from personal vanity,