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of the time, he had never known his equal;" and Guizot, in paying tribute to his memory, "He must be classed among the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a government worthy of its name and mission." Hamilton did not merely mistrust, he hated a proletariate democracy. He had to acquiesce in the terms of a Constitution, inevitably a compromise between conflicting tendencies, a compromise which left State Rights to be mainly represented by the Senate, which made the popular House of Representatives a bulwark of Central government, established a Supreme court, a National bank, and which, by the Presidential veto, made the consent of three-fourths of the Legislature essential to any important change.1 doubtful points he fought consistently for his view, challenging for Congress the power to enact general tariffs, endeavouring to narrow the functions of officers, as those of State Judges, dependent on the popular will, and to strengthen on all sides the Supreme Administration. It is idle to speculate on what "might have been;" but we may be permitted to conjecture that, had Hamilton lived, many of the evils which it has taxed the vitality of the States to survive, and others of equal magnitude, against which they still are struggling, would have been averted or mitigated. But when he fell, in a half-personal, half-political quarrel, in his thirty-fifth year (1804), by the bullet of the infamous demagogue Aaron Burr, a blow was dealt to Western civilisation, only less vital and lasting than to that of Scotland by the assassination of the greatest of the Stuart kings; for Hamilton had no worthy successor, and the victory lay henceforth with the unscrupulous man of genius who, without serious let or hindrance, assumed the control of the national destinies.

Washington himself claims direct personal recognition in the field of letters only by his clear and incisive, though

1 V. Note on Constitution at end of volume.

seldom highly-polished, correspondence; for his celebrated Farewell Address is understood to have been mainly the joint work of himself, Madison, and Jay. Hamilton, who also contributed to it, displayed abilities that would have in more "piping times" have made him eminent as an author. His contributions-about three-fourths of the whole-to the Federalist, the organ of his party, are marked, as were all his papers and speeches, by originality of thought, breadth of view, and purity of style. Of his numerous historical sketches, the most celebrated is his letter to Colonel Laurens, giving an account of the fate of Major André, in which refinement of feeling and inflexible impartiality of view are alike conspicuous.

"Never perhaps did any man suffer death with more justice or deserve it less. The character I have given of him is drawn partly from what I saw of him myself, and partly from information. I am aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favourable a light as through the medium of adversity: the clouds that surround him are shades that set off his good qualities. Misfortune cuts down the little vanities that in prosperous times serve as so many spots in his virtues, and gives a tone of humility that makes his worth more amiable. His spectators, who enjoy a happier lot, are less prone to detract from it through envy, and are more disposed by compassion to give him the credit he deserves, and perhaps even to magnify it."

The orator of the Federalists, Fisher Ames, has been by his countrymen intellectually associated with Burke. The points of contact seem to be that both were in constant dread of the excesses of democracy, which they were, in both cases, led to anticipate by the horrors of the French Revolution; and that both were regarded as renegades by their more pronounced associates. Ames was a man of culture, of considerable insight into real dangers, whose style has conspicuously one element of excellence-it is thoughtful and not too cautious, incisive without being reckless. In view of some of the later developments of the American Press, which, says Mr. Trollope, is "not only slanderous but dull," we may

commit ourselves to the expression of some sympathy with the following reflections of the accomplished and eloquent reactionary :

"Intellectual superiority is so far from conciliating confidence that it is the very spirit of a democracy to proscribe the aristocracy of talents. To be the favourite of an ignorant multitude a man must descend to their level . . . he must yield to their prejudices, and substitute them for principles. Instead of enlightening their errors... he must furnish the sophistry that will propagate and defend them.

"The Press is the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. . . . It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.

"It is not by destroying tyrants that we are to extinguish tyranny; Nature is not thus to be exhausted of her power to produce them. The soil of a republic sprouts with the rankest fertility: it has been sown with dragons' teeth. To lessen the hopes of usurping demagogues we must enlighten, animate, and combine the spirit of freemen; we must fortify and guard the constitutional ramparts about liberty. When its friends become indolent or disheartened it is no longer of any importance how long-lived are its enemies: they will prove immortal."

Ames continued to take a prominent part in public affairs during the last years of the century, and in 1796 made perhaps his most brilliant political speech in defence of the policy of his party, which preferred a British to a French alliance. Twice, before his death (in 1808), he was drawn from his retirement to pronounce the best of many encomiums on the two greatest of his compatriots. From these we may select the following as characteristic sentences:

"The unambitious life of Washington, declining fame yet courted by it, seemed like the Ohio to choose its long way through solitudes diffusing fertility; or like his own Potomac widening and deepening his channel as he approaches the sea, and displaying most the serenity of his greatest towards the end of his course.

Again,

"The tears that flow on this recital will never dry up. My heart,

penetrated with the remembrance of the man, grows liquid as I write . . . I could weep too for my country, which, mournful as it is, does not know the half of its loss. It deeply laments when it turns its eyes back and sees what Hamilton was; but my soul stiffens with despair when I think what Hamilton would have been. . . . It is not as Apollo, enchanting the shepherds with his lyre, that we deplore him it is as Hercules, treacherously slain in the midst of his unfinished labours, leaving the world overrun with monsters."

:

The great antagonist of the Federals is one of the most conspicuous figures in American history. THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826) is the representative in chief of the iconoclastic spirit of his age and nation. While his rivals stood firmly on the defensive against the encroachments of an arbitrary government, his desire, in politics as in speculation, was to break with the past. Inspired by Patrick Henry's denunciations of the Stamp Act, he became prominent, in 1769, as a member of the Virginian Assembly. In 1776, the main responsibility of drawing up the "Declaration of Independence" fell on him. He subsequently spent six years in or near Paris, as Minister of Congress, and brought back, from his residence, an admiration for those phases of the French Revolution from which the more temperate judgments of Hamilton and Ames and Adams had recoiled. He threw himself heart and soul into the arms of the Democratic party, and, in the constitutional struggle that ensued, his keener sense of the direction in which popular sympathies were tending, gave him the ascendency over the wider knowledge and more far-seeing intellects of his adversaries. Jefferson was the Danton of the West; but his forte lay not so much in oratory as in political management. More perhaps than any other statesman of his age, he aspired to be an author, to which title the most vivacious pages of his Notes on Virginia, conspicuously his graphic description of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge, his Autobiography and Correspondence, give him a fair claim. His sketches of continental society, though bearing the mark of a somewhat

superficial study of French models, and marred by eighteenthcentury mannerism, are lively; and his occasional flights of fancy, as in the Dialogue between the Head and the Heart, at least ingenious. The latter, in accord with the fashionable sentimentalism of the time, of course gets the advantage, as in the following retort on her adversary:

"Grief with such a comfort (companionship) is almost a luxury. In a life where we are perpetually exposed to accident yours is a wonderful proposition-to insulate ourselves, to retire from all aid, and to wrap ourselves in the mantle of self-sufficiency. For assuredly no one will care for him who cares for nobody. Friendship is precious, not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life. . . . I will recur for proof to the days we have lately passed. On these indeed the sun shone brightly. . . . Hills, valleys, chateaux, gardens, rivers, every object wore its liveliest hue. Whence did they borrow it? From the presence of our charming companion. They were pleasing because she seemed pleased. . . . When Nature assigned us the same habitation she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science, to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem -it is yours; Nature has given you no cognisance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the Heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the Head."

This reminds one of Diderot, and of Carlyle's comment, "Be virtuous then." Nature in the earlier periods of American investigation "allotted" the field of science to Franklin, the Bertrams, and Wilson the ornithologist; and in the sphere of philology to the famous Lindley Murray, and Noah Webster (1758-1843), Johnson's successor in English lexicography. She can hardly be said to have consigned to Jefferson the care of morals. His religion and ethics, at their theoretic best, were those of the too-much-abused though rather vulgar immigrant, his friend Tom Paine, and of the French Encyclopédie. In light literature a successful dilettante, his power of putting in forcible terms a sometimes.