SOURCE: "Brooks Adams," in The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 140, June, 1927, pp. 615-27.

In the following excerpt, Ford surveys Adams's major works.

Brooks Adams, born at Quincy, Massachusetts, June 24, 1848, died at Boston, February 13, 1927. He was the youngest son of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks, daughter of Peter Chardon Brooks. After some years in English schools, his father being the American Minister to the Court of St. James's, he was prepared for Harvard College by Professor Ephraim Whitman Gurney, later to be professor of history in the University. Graduating in 1870, he passed one year in the Harvard Law School, but was taken by his father to Geneva to serve as his Secretary during the Alabama Claims Arbitration. In 1873 he was admitted to the Suffolk bar. It was characteristic of him to take an office in a building other than that where his father and brothers were, and to...