Henry Adams

“ The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself. ”

“ Bright’s courage was almost as irrational as that of the rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the courage of a prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty nearly every man in England that could be reached by a blow, and when he could not reach the individual he struck the class, or when the class was too small for him, the whole people of England. At times he had the whole country on his back. He could not act on the defensive; his mind required attack. ”

“ By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathised with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to rebellion,—when foreign,—and it felt particular confidence in the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes,—foreign rebellion of English blood,—which came nearer ideal eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of rebel sympathisers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the Union. ”

“ The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of Bright’s courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern people themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing want of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such ignorance of the world. ”

“ Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. Whatever others thought, the cleverest Englishmen held that the national eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to correct it. The savage satires of Dickens and the gentler ridicule of Matthew Arnold against the British middle class were but a part of the rebellion, for the middle class were no worse than their neighbors in the eyes of an American in 1863 ”

“ We English are a nation of brutes, and ought to be exterminated to the last man.”
As the party rose from table and passed into the drawing-room, Adams said to Lowell that Bright was very fine. “Yes!” replied Lowell, “but too violent!”
Precisely this was the point that Adams doubted. Bright knew his Englishmen better than Lowell did,—better than England did. He knew what amount of violence in language was necessary to drive an idea into a Lancashire or Yorkshire head. He knew that no violence was enough to affect a Somersetshire or Wiltshire peasant. Bright kept his own head cool and clear. ”

“ It has beheld thirty million of men happy and prosperous, without emperors-without king (cheers) ,—without the surroundings of a court (renewed cheers) ,—without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue,—without State bishops and State priests, those vendors of the love that works salvation (cheers) ,—without great armies and great navies,—without a great debt and great taxes,—and Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this great experiment should succeed. ”

“ Had Bright said that the French, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a nation of brutes and ought to be exterminated, no one would have found fault; the whole human race, according to the highest authority, has been exterminated once already for the same reason, and only the rainbow protects them from a repetition of it. ”

“ This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first cause of this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No one understood why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent for London at the same time that he made so good a choice as Mr. Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to send to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason. Possibly Mason had a certain amount of common sense, but he seemed to have nothing else, and in London society he counted merely as one eccentric more. ”

“ Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself rather than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been unpleasantly common in the experience of the rebel agents. They were surrounded by cranks of the worst English species, who distorted their natural eccentricities and perverted their judgment. Roebuck may have been an extreme case, since he was actually in his dotage, yet this did not prevent the Lairds from accepting his lead, or the House from taking him seriously. Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England, to extreme confidence ”

“ From none of them could a young American afford to borrow ideas.
The private secretary, like every other Bostonian, began by regarding British eccentricity as a force. Contact with it, in the shape of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone, made him hesitate; he saw his own national type,—his father, Weed, Evarts, for instance,—deal with the British, and show itself certainly not the weaker; certainly sometimes the stronger. ”

“ KNOWLEDGE of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. ”

“ England devoted thirty years of arduous labor to clearing away only a part of the débris. A young American in 1863 could see little or nothing of the future. He might dream, but he could not foretell, the suddenness with which the old Europe, with England in its wake, was to vanish in 1870. ”

“ An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed, in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed artifice and hurt his oratory. ”

“ The universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most public confidence,—like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey,—took infinite pains to be neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. ”

“ In all England they could have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own case. No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet. the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let Roebuck represent them and take charge of their interests.
With Roebuck’s doings, the private secretary had no concern except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Commons on June 30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck’s motion to recognise the Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no anxiety, having Vicksburg already in its pocket, and Bright and Forster to say so ”