Brooks had discovered or developed a
law of history that civilization followed the exchanges, and
having worked it out for the Mediterranean was working it out for
the Atlantic. Everything American, as well as most things
European and Asiatic, became unstable by this law, seeking new
equilibrium and compelled to find it. Loving paradox, Brooks,
with the advantages of ten years' study, had swept away much
rubbish in the effort to build up a new line of thought for
himself, but he found that no paradox compared with that of daily
events. The facts were constantly outrunning his thoughts. The
instability was greater than he calculated; the speed of
acceleration passed bounds. Among other general rules he laid
down the paradox that, in the social disequilibrium between
capital and labor, the logical outcome was not collectivism, but
anarchism; and Henry made note of it for study.
By the time he got back to Washington on September 19, the
storm having partly blown over, life had taken on a new face, and
one so interesting that he set off to Chicago to study the
Exposition again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He
found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education
spread over chaos. Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year,
education went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell
into relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with
the problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it;
and when one sought rest at Chicago, educational game started
like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight among
thousands of its kind before one could mark its burrow.
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