To any one who knew
the relative popularity of Cameron and Godkin, the idea of a
popular vote between them seemed excessively humorous; yet the
popular vote in the end did decide against Cameron, for Godkin.
The Boston moralist and reformer went on, as always, like Dr.
Johnson, impatiently stamping his foot and following his
interests, or his antipathies; but the true American, slow to
grasp new and complicated ideas, groped in the dark to discover
where his greater interest lay. As usual, the banks taught him.
In the course of fifty years the banks taught one many wise
lessons for which an insect had to be grateful whether it liked
them or not; but of all the lessons Adams learned from them, none
compared in dramatic effect with that of July 22, 1893, when,
after talking silver all the morning with Senator Cameron on the
top of their travelling-carriage crossing the Furka Pass, they
reached Lucerne in the afternoon, where Adams found letters from
his brothers requesting his immediate return to Boston because
the community was bankrupt and he was probably a beggar.
If he wanted education, he knew no quicker mode of learning a
lesson than that of being struck on the head by it; and yet he
was himself surprised at his own slowness to understand what had
struck him. For several years a sufferer from insomnia, his first
thought was of beggary of nerves, and he made ready to face a
sleepless night, but although his mind tried to wrestle with the
problem how any man could be ruined who had, months before, paid
off every dollar of debt he knew himself to owe, he gave up that
insoluble riddle in order to fall back on the larger principle
that beggary could be no more for him than it was for others who
were more valuable members of society, and, with that, he went to
sleep like a good citizen, and the next day started for Quincy
where he arrived August 7.
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