Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/179

 and on the perilous race-inertia of Russia. "Could inertia on such a scale be broken up, or take new scale?" he asks dismayed; and we read the answer to-day. A minority ruling with iron hand; a majority accepting what comes to them, as they accept day and night and the seasons.

If there is not an understatement in the five hundred pages of the "Education," which thereby loses the power of persuasion, there is everywhere an appeal to man's austere equity and disciplined reason. Adams was not in love with reason. He said that the mind resorted to it for want of training, and he admitted that he had never met a perfectly trained mind. But it was the very essence of reason which made him see that friends were good to him, and the world not unkind; that the loveliness of the country about Washington gave him pleasure, even when he found "a personal grief in every tree"; and