Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough. Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. A friend in power is a friend lost.
Power is poison.
Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic. American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it. As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.