Gore Vidal - Empire

“Oh, no!” Caroline could not face another discussion of the case of Captain Dreyfus that had divided France for so long, boring her to death in the process. Even Mlle. Souvestre had lost her classical serenity when she defended the hapless Dreyfus to her students.

“Oh, yes,” murmured Del. “Mr. Adams’s rabid on the subject. So is Uncle Dor, but he’s less monotonous.”

Brooks Adams looked at the newcomers without interest. Then he included them in his moving orbit. He resumed his crooked circumnavigation of the chair that held his brother. “Now you may say, suppose Captain Dreyfus is innocent of giving secrets to the enemy?”

“I should never say such a thing,” murmured Henry Adams.

Brooks ignored his brother. “To which I say, if he is innocent, so much the worse for France, for the West, to allow the Jew-the commercial interest-to bring to a halt-for nothing-a great power. England and the United States, the one decadent, and the other ignorant but educable-our task-to side with the Jew-interest, which, simultaneously, may save us in the coming struggle between America and Europe, which I have calculated should start no later than 1914, because there are only two possible victors-the United States, now the greatest world sea-power, and Russia, the greatest world land-power. Germany-too small for world power-will be crushed, and France and England will become irrelevant, and so that leaves us, facing vast ignorant Russia, dominated by a handful of Germans and Jews. But can Russia withstand us in her present state of development or non-development? I think not.”

Brooks Adams’s irregular ellipse now brought him face to face with his brother. “Russia must either expand drastically, into Asia, or undergo an internal revolution. In either case, this gives us our advantage. This is why we must pray for war now . Not the great coming war between the hemispheres.” Brooks’s odd circuit brought him to Henry James, who gazed like a benign bearded Buddha upon the febrile little man. “But the war to secure us all Asia. McKinley has made a superb beginning. He is our Alexander. Our Caesar. Our Lincoln reborn. But he must understand why he is doing what he is doing, and that is where you, Henry, and I and Admiral Mahan must explain to him the nature of history, as we know it…”

“I know absolutely nothing,” said Henry Adams, abruptly sitting up. “Except that I want my drive.”

“To Rye. With me,” said Henry James, moving away from the balustrade. “I go home,” he said to Mrs. Cameron. “I’ve invited your Henry-ah, and mine, too-for tea. We shall travel in a hired electrical-motor conveyance of local provenance.”

Henry Adams was calling. “Hitty! Hitty! Where are you?”

But Hitty, the niece Abigail, was not to be found. And so it was that in the interminable confusion of Henry James’s farewell, Henry Adams took Caroline’s arm. “I must have a niece of some sort with me, at all times. It is the law. You are chosen.”

“I am honored. But…”

There were no buts, as Henry Adams fled his brother Brooks, Caroline in tow, to be thrown, she thought, like dinner to wolves if Brooks were to draw too close to James’s rented troika or, to be precise, and James was nothing but that, electrical-motor car. At the last moment Del was included. Yet even in the driveway, to the astonishment of Mr. Beech, Brooks continued to hold forth as the uniformed chauffeur got the two Henrys, the one Del and the one Caroline into their high motor car.

“War is the natural state of man. But for what? For energy…”

“Oh, for energy!” simultaneously shouted Henry Adams, as the ungainly electrical-motor car, driven by the uniformed chauffeur, glided through the park, to the further astonishment of Mr. Beech-and of the deer. In the back seat Caroline and Adams faced Del and Henry James.

“I have never heard Brooks in such good and, may I say, abundant voice.” Henry James smiled the mischievous small smile that Caroline had come to find enchanting; although he missed nothing, he seemed never, as far as she could tell, to sit in judgment.

“He wears me out,” Adams sighed. “He is a genius, you know. Unfortunately, I am the genius’s hard-working older brother. So he comes to… to mine me, like an ore of gold, or more likely, lead. You see, I have a number of cloudy theories, which he makes into iron-bound laws.”

“Are there really laws to history?” asked Del, suddenly curious.

“If there were not, I wouldn’t have spent my life trying to be an historian.” Adams was tart; then he sighed again. “The only thing is-I can’t work them out properly. But Brooks can-to a point.”

“Well, what are they?” Yes, Del was genuinely curious, thought Caroline, and she was pleased because she was enough of a French woman to take pleasure, no matter how cursorily, in the elegant generality made flesh by the specific.

“Brooks’s law is as follows.” Adams stared off into the middle distance where, invisible for the moment, stood Hever Castle, which he had already shown Caroline and a raft of nieces. She thought of Anne Boleyn, who had lived there, and wondered if, when Henry VIII cut off her head, he was obeying a law of history which said, Energy requires that you now start the Reformation: or did he, simply, want a new wife, and a son?

“All civilization is centralization. That is the first unarguable law. All centralization is economy. That is the second-resources must be adequate to sustain the civilization, and give it its energy. Therefore all civilization is the survival of the most economical system…”

“What,” asked Del, “does most economical mean?”

“The cheapest,” said Adams curtly. “Brooks thinks that there is now a race between America and Europe to control the vast coal mines of China, because whichever power has the most and the cheapest energy will dominate the world.”

“But we have so much coal and oil at home.” Del was puzzled. “So much more than we know what to do with. Why go to China?”

“To keep others from going. But your instinct is right. If Brooks’s law holds, we shall have got-and won-everything.”

“Is this-dare one ask?-a good thing?” James was tentative.

“A law of nature is neither good nor ill; it simply is. If not us, Russia? Superstitious, barbaric Russia? No. If not us, Germany? A race given to frenzy-and poetry? No.”

“What then are we given to, that is so immeasurably superior?” James was staring, Caroline noticed, directly into Adams’s face-something he, with his endless tact, seldom did. He appeared to be reading Adams’s face, like a book.

“We are given to Anglo-Saxon freedom and the common law and…” Adams paused.

“And we are-extraordinarily and absolutely… we.” James smiled, without, Caroline thought, much pleasure.

“Surely in your love for England,” Adams delicately pricked his expatriate friend, “you must have found qualities here that you think superior to those of every other country-and you could have chosen to live anywhere, including our own turbulent republic. Well, then think of the United States as an extension of this country, which you do love and trust. So think of us as simply taking up the Anglo-Saxon radical task, shouldering it for these islands as they begin to lose their-economy.”

James spread his hands placatingly. “You speak of laws of history, and I am no lawyer. But I confess to misgivings. How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our Oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American-and bad, too, let me hasten to add-cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?”