The Tendency of Historyl
Henry Adams
Henry Adams' little-known statement of the peculiar problems facing
the modern historian seems to us worth reprinting here because of its
intrinsic documentary interest and because of its relevance to the articles
in this issue by Korsch
and
Silone.-THE
EDITORS.
Guada'-c-jara, December 12, 1894.
Dear Sir:
I regret extremely that constant absence has prevented me
from attending the meetings of the Historical Association.
On
the
date which your letter mentions as that of its first decennial I shall
not be within reach. I have to ask you to offer my apology to the
members, and the assurance that at that moment I am believed to
be somewhere beyond the Isthmus of Panama. Perhaps this absence
runs in some of the mysterious ways of nature's law, for you
will
not forget that when you did me the honor to make me your presi–
dent I was still farther away-in Tahiti or Fiji, I believe-and
never even had an opportunity to thank you. Evidently I am fitted
only to be an absent president, and you will pardon a defect which
is clearly not official, but a condition of the man.
I regret this fault the more because I would have liked to
be
of service, and perhaps there is service that might be usefully per·
formed. Even the effort to hold together the persons interested
in
history is worth making. That we should ever act on public opinion
with the weight of one compact and one energetic conviction is
hardly to be expected, but that one day or another we shall
be
compelled to act individually or in groups I cannot doubt. With
more anxiety than confidence, I should have liked to do something,
however trifling, to hold the association together and unite it on
some common ground, with a .full understanding of the course
which history seems destined to take and with a good-natured
will·
ingness to accept or reject the result, but in any case not to quarrel
over it.
No one who has watched the course of history during the
lut
'A communication to the American Historical Association, as President of
the
Association. Reprinted from Adams'
The Degeneration of the Derrwcratic Dogma,
bJ
r,ermission of The Macmillan Company, publishers.
372
