Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the shortest road to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside the social pale. No Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced one's self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of deplorably bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances of ending in the gutter were, at best, even. The risk was the greater in Adams's case, because he had no very clear idea what to do when he got there. That he must educate himself over again, for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do it--how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist of the Capital--he had not an idea, and no one to teach him. The question of money is rarely serious for a young American unless he is married, and money never troubled Adams more than others; not because he had it, but because he could do without it, like most people in Washington who all lived on the income of bricklayers; but with or without money he met the difficulty that, after getting to Washington in order to go on the press, it was necessary to seek a press to go on. For large work he could count on the North American Review, but this was scarcely a press. For current discussion and correspondence, he could depend on the New York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily, and no New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the death of Henry J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was out of the question both for political and personal reasons, and because Whitelaw Reid had already undertaken that singularly venturesome position, amid difficulties that would have swamped Adams in four-and-twenty hours. Charles A. Dana had made the Sun a very successful as well as a very amusing paper, but had hurt his own social position in doing it; and Adams knew himself well enough to know that he could never please himself and Dana too; with the best intentions, he must always fail as a blackguard, and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life to the Sun. As for the New York Herald, it was a despotic empire admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the moment, the New York daily press offered no field except the free-trade Holy Land of the Evening Post under William Cullen Bryant, while beside it lay only the elevated plateau of the New Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation. Much as Adams liked Godkin, and glad as he was to creep under the shelter of the Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware that he should find there only the same circle of readers that he reached in the North American Review.