country was willing to surrender an advantage without an equivalent, Hay had a chance to offer the Senate a Treaty. In all such cases the price paid for the Treaty was paid wholly to the Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of time and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed Hay; "The Major will have promised all the consulates in the service; the senators will all come to me and refuse to believe me dis-consulate; I shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by one, by the 34-per-cent. of kickers and strikers; the only mitigation I can foresee is being sick a good part of the time; I am nearing my grand climacteric, and the great culbute is approaching."
He was thinking of his friend Elaine, and might have thought of all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as historian their sufferings had been a long delight,—the solitary picturesque and tragic element in politics, incidentally requiring character-studies like Aaron Burr and William B. Giles, Calhoun and Webster and Sumner, with Sir Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and stage-exaggerations like Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs and Malvolios,—endless varieties of human nature nowhere else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or because they were like school-boys in their simplicity. "Life is so gay and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and more rarely, but what he felt most was the enormous complexity and friction of the vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly complained that it had made him a bore,—of all things the most senatorial, and to him the most obnoxious. The old friend was lost, and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by the complexities and multiplicities of his new world.
To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the practical interest and the practical man were such as looked forward to the next election, or perhaps, in corporations, five or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could be named who were known to have looked a dozen years ahead; while any historian who means to keep his alignment with past and future must cover an horizon of two generations at least. If he seeks to align himself with the future, he must assume a condition
