Both were heartily tired of the
subject, and America seemed as tired as they. What was worse, the
redeeming energy of Americans which had generally served as the
resource of minds otherwise vacant, the creation of new force,
the application of expanding power, showed signs of check. Even
the year before, in 1891, far off in the Pacific, one had met
everywhere in the East a sort of stagnation -- a creeping
paralysis -- complaints of shipping and producers -- that spread
throughout the whole southern hemisphere. Questions of exchange
and silver-production loomed large. Credit was shaken, and a
change of party government might shake it even in Washington. The
matter did not concern Adams, who had no credit, and was always
richest when the rich were poor; but it helped to dull the
vibration of society.
However they studied it, the balance of profit and loss, on the
last twenty years, for the three friends, King, Hay, and Adams,
was exceedingly obscure in 1892. They had lost twenty years, but
what had they gained? They often discussed the question. Hay had
a singular faculty for remembering faces, and would break off
suddenly the thread of his talk, as he looked out of the window
on La Fayette Square, to notice an old corps commander or admiral
of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his cards or
his cocktail: "There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at
Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!" Or
what drew Adams's closer attention: "There goes old Boutwell
gambolling like the gambolling kid!" There they went! Men who had
swayed the course of empire as well as the course of Hay, King,
and Adams, less valued than the ephemeral Congressman behind
them, who could not have told whether the general was a Boutwell
or Boutwell a general.
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