Time and patience
were the remedies.
The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis to his principles of geology. A mistake about
Evolution was not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would
destroy forever the last hope of employment in State Street. Six
months of patient labor would be thrown away if he did not
publish, and with it his whole scheme of making himself a
position as a practical man-of-business. If he did publish, how
could he tell virtuous bankers in State Street that moral and
absolute principles of abstract truth, such as theirs, had
nothing to do with the matter, and that they had better let it
alone? Geologists, naturally a humble and helpless class, might
not revenge impertinences offered to their science; but
capitalists never forgot or forgave.
With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of
1797-1821, and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the
North American for choice. He knew that two heavy, technical,
financial studies thus thrown at an editor's head, would probably
return to crush the author; but the audacity of youth is more
sympathetic -- when successful -- than his ignorance. The editor
accepted both.
When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
he were a debtor who had begged for an extension.
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