The moral law had
expired -- like the Constitution.
Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well
spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for
decency. What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that
would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither.
Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. His
friends had been driven out of Washington or had taken to
fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the
future.
The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he
thought he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it
good history then, and he thought it better twenty years
afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it
happened, in the process of his devious education, this "Session"
of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and
his last dying testament as a humble member of the press. As
such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he gone on
reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The political
dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 The
system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the
eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.
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