Society commonly abets them
and encourages their attitude of contempt. The society of
Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel
anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists
produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it
had the chance, and respected itself the more for the frailty.
Adams found even the Government at his service, and every one
willing to answer his questions. He worked, after a fashion; not
very hard, but as much as the Government would have required of
him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work defied
frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world ever
got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was he.
One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and this was
the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months to
an article on the finances of the United States, just then a
subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it,
he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous
editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good;
at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April. Of course
it was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were
still anonymous, and the author remained unknown.
The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
claim for credit.
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