Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/309

 As a starting-point for a new education at fifty-five years old, the shock of finding oneself suspended, for several months, over the edge of bankruptcy, without knowing how one got there, or how to get away, is to be strongly recommended. By slow degrees the situation dawned on him that the Banks had lent him, among others, some money, thousands or millions were,—as bankruptcy,—the same; for which he, among others, was responsible and of which he knew no more than they. The humor of this situation seemed to him so much more pointed than the terror, as to make him laugh at himself with a sincerity he had been long strange to. As far as he could comprehend, he had nothing to lose that he cared about, but the Banks stood to lose their existence. Money mattered as little to him as to anybody, but money was their life. For the first time he had the Banks in his power; he could afford to laugh; and the whole community was in the same position, though few laughed. All sat down on the Banks and asked what the Banks were going to do about it. To Adams the situation seemed farcical, but the more he saw of it, the less he understood it. He was quite sure that nobody under stood it much better. Blindly some very powerful energy was at work, doing something that nobody wanted done. When Adams went to his Bank to draw a hundred dollars of his own money on deposit, the cashier refused to let him have more than fifty, and Adams accepted the fifty without complaint because he was himself refusing to let the Banks have some hundreds or thousands that belonged to them. Each wanted to help the other, yet both refused to pay their debts, and he could find no answer to the question which was responsible for getting the other into the situation, since lenders and borrowers were the same interest and socially the same person. Evidently the force was one; its operation was mechanical; its effect must be proportional to its power; but no one knew what it meant, and most people dismissed it as an emotion,—a panic,—that meant nothing.

Men died like flies under the strain and Boston grew suddenly old, haggard and thin. Adams alone waxed fat and was happy, for at last he had got hold of his world and could finish his education, interrupted for twenty years. He cared not whether it were worth finishing, if only it amused; but he seemed, for the first time since 1870, to feel that something new and curious was about to happen to the world. Great