Seneca closed the vast
circle of his knowledge by learning that a friend in power was a
friend lost -- a fact very much worth insisting upon -- while the
gray-headed moth that had fluttered through many
moth-administrations and had singed his wings more or less in
them all, though he now slept nine months out of the twelve,
acquired an instinct of self-preservation that kept him to the
north side of La Fayette Square, and, after a sufficient habitude
of Presidents and Senators, deterred him from hovering between
them.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always
deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an
advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was
bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic,
chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse
reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced
as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or
knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs
of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
Roosevelt enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent,
but he lived naturally in restless agitation that would have worn
out most tempers in a month, and his first year of Presidency
showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble.
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