CHAPTER XVI
THE PRESS (1868)
AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical
rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family
clambered down the side of their Cunard steamer into the
government tugboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at
the end of some North River pier. Had they been Tyrian traders of
the year B.C. 1000 landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar,
they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so
changed from what it had been ten years before. The historian of
the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist, started up an
unknown street, in company with the private secretary who had
become private citizen, in search of carriages to convey the two
parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous but
successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in
their native land.
How much its character had changed or was changing, they could
not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter,
the land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was
always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and
understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist
about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a
long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the
prairies, its few score of leaders far in advance and its
millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear,
somewhere in archaic time.
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