ington or had taken to fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the future.
The result was a review of the Session for the July North American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good history then, and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it happened, in the process of his devious education, this "Session" of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970. The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth century fabric of à priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine tenths of men's political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out,—to patch,—or, in vulgar language, to tinker,—the political machine as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world,—the clumsiest,—the most inefficient.
Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not guess. Indeed when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most triumph ant results of politics—to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even Mr. Sumner, he could not honestly say that such an education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing on lower levels,—clever and amusing men like Garfield and Elaine, who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself which the North American Review would not have admitted. One asked doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn. What kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive political education? The problem never was solved,—had no solution. Garfield and Elaine followed the failures of Grant and Sumner.
Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it. If morals broke down, and machinery stopped working, new morals and
