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By Root 1297 0

from a well-established family (unless the Harrisons could be considered to so qualify). Retreating to the comfort of their homes and the pursuits of their class, they left government increasingly to hard-driving newcomers pushing up from below. Such energies as they had they devoted to making money in banking and trade, rather than from the land which they gradually abandoned. The great estates of the Dutch-descended patroons of New York declined first; the Southern plantations went with the Civil War; Boston’s old families remained active and prosperous but on the whole aloof from government. The proud “Hub” had produced no President after the first two Adamses. “The most valuable, most moderate, able and cultivated part of the population,” wrote Emerson, in his essay on Politics, “is timid and merely defensive of property.”

Forty years later the Englishman James Bryce was struck by the “apathy among the luxurious classes and fastidious minds,” and devoted a whole chapter in The American Commonwealth to “Why the Best Men Do Not Go into Politics.” They lacked a sense of noblesse oblige. The “indifference of the educated and wealthy classes” was due partly, he thought, to the lack of respect in which they were held by the masses. “Since the masses do not look to them for guidance, they do not come forward to give it.”

Without land to hold on to, a hereditary governing class had failed to develop, and the absence of such a class bound by a traditional morality left America open to the unrestricted exploits of the “plungers” and plunderers, the builders and malefactors and profiteers—and through them to the corruption of politics. With the great release and surge of enterprise after the Civil War, America was in a period of unprecedented expansion. The population increased by 50 per cent from fifty million to seventy-five million in the years 1880–1900. With opportunity opening on every hand, government in America through the seventies and eighties functioned chiefly to make the country safe—and lucrative—for the capitalist. Government was a paid agent. Its scandals and deals, becoming blatant, had aroused anger and people were demanding reform. But meanwhile gentlemen did not “stoop to politics,” as Edith Wharton said of New York “Society.” Few of her friends of “the best class” made use of their abilities or rendered the public services they could have. America “wasted this class instead of using it.”

With no role in government and no security from the land, the American rich panicked easily. When the financial crisis of 1893 threatened the loss of John Adams’ fortune, “he went all to pieces,” wrote Henry. “The entire nervous system of Boston seemed to give way and he broke down with a whole crowd of other leading men. I have certainly no reason to think that any of us are stronger than he. My own nerves went to pieces long ago.” Although many of his class were stronger-fibered than Adams, they were a far cry from Lewis Morris, lord of the manor of Morrisania, who, when urged by his brother not to sign the Declaration of Independence because of the consequences to his property, replied, “Damn the consequences, give me the pen!”

Speaker Reed in character, intellect and a kind of brutal independence represented the best that America could put into politics in his time. He was sprung from a rib of that hard northern corner of New England with the uncompromising monosyllabic name. At the time of his birth in 1839 his ancestors had been living in Maine for two hundred years. Through his mother he was descended from a Mayflower passenger and through his father’s mother from George Cleve, who came from England in 1632, built the first white man’s house in Maine and was founder of the Portland Colony and its first Governor. The Reed who married Cleve’s great-great-granddaughter came of a fishing and seafaring family. Never landed in a large sense, nor wealthy, these forbears and their neighbors had striven over the generations to maintain a settlement on the rock-ribbed soil, to survive Indian attack and isolation and snowbound