Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the
young Englishmen of his time, he would have been lost; but the
custom of pounding up and down Rotten Row every day, on a hack,
was not a taste, and yet was all the sport he shared. Evidently
he must set to work; he must get a new education he must begin a
career of his own.
Nothing was easier to say, but even his father admitted two
careers to be closed. For the law, diplomacy had unfitted him;
for diplomacy he already knew too much. Any one who had held,
during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a
position at the centre of action, with his hands actually
touching the lever of power, could not beg a post of Secretary at
Vienna or Madrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the
next President should do him the honor to turn him out. For once
all his advisers agreed that diplomacy was not possible.
In any ordinary system he would have been called back to serve
in the State Department, but, between the President and the
Senate, service of any sort became a delusion. The choice of
career was more difficult than the education which had proved
impracticable. Adams saw no road; in fact there was none. All his
friends were trying one path or another, but none went a way that
he could have taken. John Hay passed through London in order to
bury himself in second-rate Legations for years, before he
drifted home again to join Whitelaw Reid and George Smalley on
the Tribune.
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