This was Senator Sumner;
and there, in fact, the young man's education began; there it
ended.
Going over the experience again, long after all the great
actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In
the effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would
have liked much to know whether he could have helped it. He had
necessarily followed Seward and his father; he took for granted
that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; he
supposed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled
all personal doubts. He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator
Sumner privately denounced the course, regarded Mr. Adams as
betraying the principles of his life, and broke off relations
with his family.
Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the
profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are
sudden strains that permanently warp the mind. He cared little or
nothing about the point in discussion; he was even willing to
admit that Sumner might be right, though in all great emergencies
he commonly found that every one was more or less wrong; he liked
lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he
felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened
a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life lasted, he
found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political
instinct, with out waiting further experiment -- as he took for
granted that arsenic poisoned -- the rule that a friend in power
is a friend lost.
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