with political assassination as though they had lived under Nero.
The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as
though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.

Nothing annoyed America more than to be told this simple and
obvious--in no way unpleasant--truth; therefore one sat silent as
ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the
Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi and an interview with St.
Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most
satisfactory--or sufficient--ever offered; worth fully forty years'
more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St.
Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect
of all these fresh crosslights on the old Assistant Professor of
1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he had taught
them and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn
five-and-twenty years afterwards--between the twelfth century of
his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College,
weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had
occasionally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his
life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and Soc:--

Hic Jacet
Homunculus Scriptor
Doctor Barbaricus
Henricus Adams
Adae Filius et Evae
Primo Explicuit
Socnam

The Latin was as twelfth century as the law, and he meant as satire
the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of
Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as
a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole
point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and
Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc.
Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and that
politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's scholars
turned to the Law School, because one could see no other path to a
profession.

The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any other
single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its
own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and
solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned
to Paris