they have sometimes been
exasperating, they have always been salutary. During four generations the
men of this family have loved and served America as much as they have
scolded her. More cannot be said, except that they have commonly given, on
both counts, more than they have received. Theirs is therefore the
blessing, and ours the benefit.

Among other things, we have to thank them for some diaries and
autobiographies which have been notable for frank self-revelation. Henry
Adams would of course have stoutly denied that any such impertinence as
self-revelation was either intended or achieved in the _Education_. There
is no evidence that he ever kept a diary (all things considered, the burden
of proof is not on us!); but it is not to be supposed that he would have
published it in any case. A man who regarded himself as of no more
significance than a chance deposit on the surface of the world might indeed
write down an intimate record of his soul's doings as an exercise in cosmic
irony; but the idea of publishing it could hardly have lived for a moment
in the lambent flame of his own sardonic humor. He could be perverse, but
perversity could not well go the length of perpetrating so pointless a joke
as that would come to.

No, Henry Adams would not reveal himself to the curious inspection of an
unsympathetic world; but he would write a book for the purpose of exposing
a dynamic theory of history, than which nothing could well be more
impersonal or unrevealing. With a philosophy of history the Puritan has
always been preoccupied; and it was the major interest of Henry Adams
throughout the better part of his life. He never gained more than a faint
idea of any intelligible philosophy, as he would himself have readily
admitted; but after a lifetime of hard study and close thinking, the matter
struck him thus:

Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house
outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a
historian's objects. No more relation could he discover between the
steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the
cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he
could see only an absolute _fiat_ in electricity as in faith.

In these two forces the secret must lie, since for centuries faith had
ruled inexorably, only to be replaced by electricity which promised to rule
quite as inexorably. To find the secret was diff