Moses in Massachusetts
More than thirty years after Brooks Adams first flayed his ancestors in The Emancipation of Massachusetts a new edition of the book has appeared with the original text and a novel preface. What Mr. Adams has added, besides an expression of regret for his earlier acrimony of speech, is an account of the philosophy to which he has arrived after three meditative decades. Although he belongs to the ineffably disillusioned generation which bred also Charles Francis 2d and Henry Adams, Mr. Brooks Adams is still an Adams: he thinks with the hard lucidity and writes with the cold downrightness of his tribe. The central point of his doctrine is touched upon almost in passing: “And so it has always been,” he says, “with each new movement which has been stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and which would cause men to move toward perfection along any other path than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can move no otherwise.” The emancipation of Massachusetts, Mr. Adams has presumably come to believe, was merely an irresistible movement of the commonwealth away from the idealistic impossibilities to which it was originally pledged and to which the conservatives vainly tried to hold it. Once they seemed villains; now they seem fools and dupes.
But Massachusetts is the least of the concerns of this preface, one half of which is devoted to the deeds and character of Moses, an optimist who thought he had found some supernatural power and could control it, tried leadership, discovered that he must after all depend on his own wits, sought vainly to “gratify at once his lust for power and his instinct to live an honest man,” and, after bilking the Israelites in the little matters of the Brazen Serpent and the Tables of the Law, went up into Mount Nebo and committed suicide. (Tom Paine would have liked to write this account of Moses.) The Mosaic idealism having failed, there followed the Roman confidence in physical force, which the Romans erected into a sort of vested interest, in turn also overthrown by the Christian confidence in divine aid secured through prayer—“a school of optimism the most overwhelming and the most brilliant which the world has ever known and which evolved an age whose end we still await.” Thus optimisms rise and fall, but the life of mankind rolls forward without observable acceleration or retardation, only now and then heated here or there to an explosion by some sort of conflict between powerful interests, generally economic. The past shows no variation from this procedure; the future holds forth no hope except in a change to some form of non-competitive civilization which Mr. Adams does not venture to propound. Depressing enough in details, the preface as a whole is one of the most provocative arguments in American literature. Some day the allied and associated pessimism of Brooks Adams and his two brothers will seem hardly a slighter contribution to America than the diplomacy of their father or the statesmanship of their grandfather and great-grandfather.