Brooks Adams
Baldwin, Summerfield
519 BROOKS ADAMS By SUMMERFIELD BALDWIN A PARDONABLE, because innocent, satisfaction may have relieved the last hours of the earthly existence of Mr. Brooks Adams. For the agony of the...
...Michel and Chartres know, reached some interesting though tentative conclusions...
...While they played at money-lending it ceased to be profitable to produce...
...Thence by degrees greed takes its place...
...The protagonists of his tragedy of man are a motley assortment: Saint Bernard stands over against Thomas Cromwell...
...In those days, the money that had not flowed into the East was in the hands of the bankers...
...Henry Adams always objected to his brother's work on the ground that there was no "why" to it...
...An eccentric, but genial grandson of John Quincy Adams, depressed by the control which capital exerts over democracies, and an enthusiastic partisan of free silver: in such terms as these the eulogies (or apologies) are conceived...
...Surely this is symtomatic...
...Brooks Adams, who was dying, perhaps alone among his countrymen possessed the key to unlock the mystery of this tragedy...
...Symtomatic, too, are the bland obituaries of the author which have graced the daily press...
...Granted that society oscillates under the forces of fear and greed, why does it do so ? The older brother devoted his effort to speculations on the higher metaphysical ground, and as all who have read his Mont St...
...The Law of Civilization and Decay is, in effect, a short history of human society so arranged as to demonstrate Adams's hypothesis of the law under which it has moved in the past, and hence by the scientific implication of the term law, that under which it will move hereafter...
...Yet it is a melancholy fact that not all the pages of either copy owned by the library of Harvard University have as yet been cut...
...Objectively considered, the doctrines of the Adamses represent the bankruptcy of the puritanical democratic theory...
...Both become the hirelings of the capitalist...
...The fear of nature, and of nature's God, he argues by a brilliant generalization, made the relic the summum bonum of the earlier mediaeval European society...
...In 1895 it was desperately unsafe to apologize for the Age of Faith...
...The movement of society, its oscillations between barbarism and civilization he holds analogous to, if not identical with, a movement from a condition of physical dispersion, decentralization, to centralization or consolidation...
...One spoke of the Virgin, the other of the force of fear (the beginning of wisdom...
...both found the Age of Faith...
...For the agony of the agricultural society of the United States had been approaching the acute stage for months...
...A President of the United States reviewed it...
...The Law of Civilization and Decay, despite its author's pathetic attempt to play the cynical materialist, is a tragic apology for the day when "fear," not greed, was the force which moved society...
...Greed makes England a nation of pirates, then of merchant adventurers, then of imperialists, when Clive robs India of its hoards of money...
...the heroes of capital, Sir Josiah Child, Clive, Rothschild, Samuel Loyd are vividly, convincingly portrayed...
...Industrialism succeeds, and at last, early in the nineteenth century, the money-lenders, the bankers, become supreme and society reaches its ultimate consolidation...
...Greed under the Tudors robs the monasteries, and robs the yeomen...
...Brooks certainly never went so far, and indeed betrays elsewhere a doubt as to whether, paradoxically, chaos is not the "order" of nature...
...The force called greed eventuates through economic competition in the capitalist, or, par excellence, the banker...
...and an astute banker, who happened to be Secretary of the Treasury, was gravely shaking his head...
...Such is the skeleton of his thesis...
...But Adams has a point of reference...
...To be sure, it was hardly his fault that he was alone...
...and hence he could not but have seen in the present desperate plight even of American agriculturists evidence of the accuracy of his system...
...The imposition of the gold standard early in the nineteenth century, and the successive exhaustion of the sources of the gold supply of the world he considers strictly analogous, for the gold of the world is in the hands of the bankers to be played with to their own interests, while producers, and first of all agricultural producers, starve...
...For if there be a science of history in the sense in which there is a science of biology, there must certainly stand at the end of every investigation an hypothesis as to the laws according to which human society functions...
...it was translated into French in 1899, into German in 1907...
...But Mr...
...Our native faddists whip themselves into a fine enthusiasm over a mystical German named Spengler, and ignore one of themselves who in erudition, in acuteness, and in clarity brooks no rival in the field he has made his own...
...The Law of Civilization and Decay was published in 1895...
...Yet it throws many incidental lights both upon the past and present...
...As Huysmans called the monasteries of France its lightning-rods, he shows how the fear of God, necessitating prayer and good works, made the religious life the ideal one in the Age of Faith...
...Hence Adams's chapter on The Middle-Ages is compact of that sort of illustration of "superstition" dear to the heart of the liberal nineteenth century...
...Henry Adams was certainly the greater meta-physicist of the singular pair, but he was wanting in those qualities which made his brother a great historical scientist...
...A prophet is not without honor save in his own country...
...The heroes of the Protestant revolt, Gardiner and Cranmer...
...The force called fear, he holds, eventuates in the religious, military, artistic mental types...
...Hence, Adams was a free-silver man...
...Their family history, instinct with intellectual tragedy, forced these brilliant grandchildren to explore logic and history in search of new fundamentals...
...To have done so would have been to preclude anyone at all from reading what one had written...
...But after the chapter on The Reformation, after setting side by side the bloated and avaricious king of England and the eighty-year-old Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury, one is not wholly unprepared for the flaming conclusion...
...Greed wrecks the Templars, greatest of the military orders, a hundred years later...
...a frantic Congress was devising quaint bills aimed to provide relief...
...Adams the materialist links humanity to the natural order and holds that fear and greed are the forces which move society...
...Greed personified by Henrico Dan-dolo makes the-Fourth a parody of crusades hardly more than half a century after Saint Bernard...
...Henry, preoccupied with the "why," left his hypotheses in a distressingly inchoate state, but there is reason to believe that had he carried his spade work further, they would not have materially differed from his brother's...
...For years, in numberless articles, and specifically thirty-two years ago in one of the world's masterpieces of philosophic history, he had been proferring his countrymen the key to that and many other mysteries of their times, of times past, of times to come...
...The state imagined by the great-grandfather John, and desperately defended by the grandfather John Quincy—the state wherein souls equal in the eyes of God, and perfectible by His grace, were to work out that perfection in a sort of earthly paradise, had after all developed a government more perfectly adapted to the needs of the bankers than any which had gone before...
...Brooks showed this work in manuscript to his distinguished brother Henry and was warned by him not to publish it if he ever wished for any of the honors which society confers...
...All this happened before, in the late years of the Roman empire...
...The key was proferred but there were few to take it...
...The measure which he takes is currency...
...Economic competition dethrones priest and soldier alike...
...Saint Bernard and the Second Crusade he takes to mark the highest point to which the force of fear moved human society...
...A second edition appeared in 1897...
...By independent research, as the scientists say, they seem to have come to very similar conclusions...
...Apparently no professor of that great institution has ever included the whole of this not very large volume in any of his courses of instruction...
...The warning was a good one...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 19
