education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever (SL 23)

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

"He loved, or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved was
the eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of, and were
destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come, he knew nothing.
Military Germany was his abhorrence. What he liked was the simple
character; the good-natured sentiment; the musical and metaphysical
abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for practical
affairs. At that time [late 1850s, HR] everyone looked on Germany as
incapable of competing with France, England or America in any sort of
organized energy. Germany had no confidence in herself, and no reason to
feel it. She had no unity, and no reason to want it. She never had unity.
Her religious and social history, her economical interests, her military
geography, her political convenience, had always tended to eccentric
rather than concentric motion. Until coalpower and railways were created,
she was mediæval by nature and geography, and this was what Adams, under
the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell, liked."


"The Education of Henry Adams", page 70. In
http://fr.feedbooks.com/book/4377.pdf



Heikki