The tourist-student, having duly reflected, asked the Senator
whether he should allow three generations, or more, to swing the
Russian people into the Western movement. The Senator seemed
disposed to ask for more. The student had nothing to say. For
him, all opinion founded on fact must be error, because the facts
can never be complete, and their relations must be always
infinite. Very likely, Russia would instantly become the most
brilliant constellation of human progress through all the ordered
stages of good; but meanwhile one might give a value as movement
of inertia to the mass, and assume a slow acceleration that
would, at the end of a generation, leave the gap between east and
west relatively the same.
This result reached, the Lodges thought their moral improvement
required a visit to Berlin; but forty years of varied emotions
had not deadened Adams's memories of Berlin, and he preferred, at
any cost, to escape new ones. When the Lodges started for
Germany, Adams took steamer for Sweden and landed happily, in a
day or two, at Stockholm.
Until the student is fairly sure that his problem is soluble, he
gains little by obstinately insisting on solving it. One might
doubt whether Mr. de Witte himself, or Prince Khilkoff, or any
Grand Duke, or the Emperor, knew much more about it than their
neighbors; and Adams was quite sure that, even in America, he
should listen with uncertain confidence to the views of any
Secretary of the Treasury, or railway president, or President of
the United States whom he had ever known, that should concern the
America of the next generation.
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