Empire by Gore Vidal Page B

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