Reeve said it would bring
half-a-dozen libel suits on him. One knew that the power of Erie
was almost as great in England as in America, but one was hardly
prepared to find it controlling the Quarterlies. The English
press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the Erie scandal, as it
had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal of slavery,
but when invited to support those who were trying to abate these
scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North
American Review were running greater risks every day, and no one
thought of fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an
official document, should scare the Endinburgh Review into
silence for fear of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's
experience of English eccentricity, though it was large.
He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript
on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it.
The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as
to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an
active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but
to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English
character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to
understand it.
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