Once admitted that the machine must be
efficient, society might dispute in what social interest it
should be run, but in any case it must work concentration. Such
great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but
nothing in politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease
with which he and his silver friends slipped across the chasm,
and alighted on the single gold standard and the capitalistic
system with its methods; the protective tariff; the corporations
and trusts; the trades-unions and socialistic paternalism which
necessarily made their complement; the whole mechanical
consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of
the class into which Adams was born, but created monopolies
capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.
Society rested, after sweeping into the ash-heap these cinders
of a misdirected education. After this vigorous impulse, nothing
remained for a historian but to ask -- how long and how far!
CHAPTER XXIII
SILENCE (1894-1898)
The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed
much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort
such as no one had thought within its powers, the individual
crawled as he best could, through the wreck, and found many
values of life upset. But for connecting the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the four years, 1893 to 1897, had no value
in the drama of education, and might be left out.
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