As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he
could not foresee that science and society would desert him in
paying it. He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in
good faith. The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will
should take its place, founded deeply in interest and law. This
was the result of five or six years in England; a result so
British as to be almost the equivalent of an Oxford degree.
Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir
Charles who left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams
turned resolutely to business, and attacked the burning question
of specie payments. His principles assured him that the honest
way to resume payments was to restrict currency. He thought he
might win a name among financiers and statesmen at home by
showing how this task had been done by England, after the
classical suspension of 1797-1821. Setting himself to the study
of this perplexed period, he waded as well as he could through a
morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates, until he learned to
his confusion that the Bank of England itself and all the best
British financial writers held that restriction was a fatal
mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was to
let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done.
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