He thought it natural
that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also,
with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that
he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend on
Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams
had no friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he
asked none. He thought it right to play the adventurer as his
father and grandfather had done before him, without a murmur.
This was a lofty view, and for him answered his objects, but it
bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the young man
realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal. He modestly
thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer, and judged
his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time
America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order. Her
representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in
1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private
secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the
Court and Parliament of Great Britain.
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If
they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they
stood with their whole weight on his body.
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