was Quincy. No matter how much they had wished to enter State Street, they felt that State Street never would trust them, or they it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must hunger for it in vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as archangel with the flaming sword, to order them away from the door.
Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even when only ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his heart was stone, against State Street; his education was warped beyond recovery in the direction of puritan politics. Between him and his patriot grandfather at the same age, the conditions had changed little. The year 1848 was like enough the year 1776 to make a fair parallel. The parallel, as concerned bias of education, was complete when, a few months after the death of John Quincy Adams, a Convention of anti-slavery delegates met at Buffalo to organise a new party, and named candidates for the general election in November:–for President, Martin Van Buren; for Vice-President, Charles Francis Adams.
For any American boy, the fact that his father was running for office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement, but even apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road through life, was decisive for twenty years to come. There was never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth, or any earlier century, the stamp mattered less because it was standard, and everyone bore it; while men whose lives were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all, to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This was their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was easy, but the old puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it gave was forcible. The puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any previous century, would have led him into the Church: he inherited dogma and à priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back into puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.
Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was chiefly
