778 CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 



never looked with satisfaction upon the experience, for he was con- 

 tending against influences of a sinister character which in the end 

 proved stronger than his own efforts. His confidence in the future 

 of the road was fully justified in later years, and to its subsequent 

 success Mr. Adams contributed more than was at the time recognized. 



After leaving the army Mr. Adams had been occupied in public 

 business and the affairs of a great railroad; there came to him now a 

 period of comparative rest. So active a mind could not remain 

 unoccupied. He took up the subject of education, and when on the 

 State Board of Education, where he sat for only one year, he formu- 

 lated a plan of studies to be followed in the common schools. As an 

 Overseer of Harvard University from 1882 to 1907 he criticised freely, 

 but also did much constructive work, one of the important items 

 being his report on the English department which led to changes in 

 that department greatly to its improvement. His challenge to the 

 classics — A College Fetish — awakened wide interest, and to him 

 was due the requirement in entrance examination of only one of the 

 classical languages, instead of two. He reformed the school system of 

 the town of Quincy, and the "Quincy School System" has been fol- 

 lowed in many localities, for it applied business methods to the com- 

 mon schools, resulting in a higher efficiency. 



Of Mr. Adams' historical work little need be said, for it speaks so 

 well for itself. How he came to engage in it he has told in his " Auto- 

 biography," and for forty years it constituted his principal enjoy- 

 ment, the best realization of his powers for investigation and exposi- 

 tion. Whether it was the story of the beginnings of the plantation 

 of the Massachusetts-Bay, or the diplomatic career of his father, or a 

 biography of a man of law and letters, the result proved his unusual 

 qualification and high equipment. In each department he sought to 

 l)e complete — to approach as near to finality as the records permitted. 

 His "Three Episodes of Massachusetts History," which was really a 

 history of the town of Quincy, is a model of local history, when treated 

 in its relations to national history. It was in preparing this work 

 that his thorough methods tempted him to edit Thomas Morton's 

 "Xew-English Canaan" and the Winthrop-Weld tract on "Anti- 

 nomianism in New England," two side-studies to the larger under- 

 taking on which he left little still to be interpreted. The "Life of 

 Richard Henry Dana" is also a model of its kind, wherein the subject of 

 the biography is made to tell his own story, the compiler adding only 

 what was needed for a full comprehension of the text. But how 

 nuich the "compiler" added, and how he made clear the path to the 



