do but supply the last and best information. Education could be carried no further.
With its effects on Hay, Adams had nothing to do; but its effects on himself were grotesque. Never had the proportions of his ignorance looked so appalling. He seemed to know nothing,—to be groping in darkness,—to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that no one knew more. He had at least, the mechanical assurance of certain values to guide him,—like the relative intensities of his Coal-powers, and relative inertia of his Gun-powers,—but he conceived that had he known, besides the mechanics, every relative value of persons, as well as he knew the inmost thoughts of his own government,—had the Tsar and the Kaiser and the Mikado turned school-masters, like Hay, and taught him all they knew, he would still have known nothing. They knew nothing themselves. Only by comparison of their ignorance could the student measure his own.
