He took them and played them for their
face-value; but once, when he had told, with his usual humor,
some stories of his political experience which were strong even
for the Albany lobby, the private secretary made bold to ask him
outright: "Then, Mr. Weed, do you think that no politician can be
trusted? " Mr. Weed hesitated for a moment; then said in his mild
manner: "I never advise a young man to begin by thinking so."
This lesson, at the time, translated itself to Adams in a moral
sense, as though Mr. Weed had said: "Youth needs illusions !" As
he grew older he rather thought that Mr. Weed looked on it as a
question of how the game should be played. Young men most needed
experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a general
rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles had better be
left aside; values were enough. Adams knew that he could never
learn to play politics in so masterly a fashion as this: his
education and his nervous system equally forbade it, although he
admired all the more the impersonal faculty of the political
master who could thus efface himself and his temper in the game.
He noticed that most of the greatest politicians in history had
seemed to regard men as counters. The lesson was the more
interesting because another famous New Yorker came over at the
same time who liked to discuss the same problem.
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