the main on other grounds. In the Report on the Public Credit already quoted the writer says:

To promote the increasing respectability of the American name; to answer the calls of justice; to restore landed property to its due value ; to furnish new resources both to agriculture and commerce; to cement more closely the union of the states; to add to their security against foreign attack; to establish public order on the basis of an upright and liberal policy, - these are the great and invaluable ends to be secured by a proper and adequate provision . . . for the support of public credit.1 This enumeration of ends is not unlike that in the preamble to the Constitution. To our ears it is strictly orthodox. But in 1790 it suggested to many what indeed in one sense it was, a plan of campaign against state sovereignty; and at that time state sovereignty was one of the strongest prepossessions of the American people.

The forcible suppression of the Whiskey Insurrection taught a people who hitherto had obeyed only local governments, colonial or state, that they must respect and submit to the authority of the new national government. Other measures, particularly the funding scheme, the bank and, later, the policy of protection, made large classes and powerful interests the permanent allies of the national government, and therefore depressed correspondingly the importance of the states. In all this the government gained, but Hamilton lost. The people were benefited by the discipline, but they did not like the man who administered it. The feeling of the masses may be gathered from the wrathful words of Jefferson, their truest representative. December 28, 1794, he wrote Madison :

The excise law is an infernal one. The first error was to admit it by the constitution; the second, to act on the admission; the third and last will be to make it the instrument of dismembering the Union and setting us all afloat to choose what part of it we will adhere to. The information of the militia, returned from the Westward, is uniform, that though the people there let them pass quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that a thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand places in the Alleghany; that the detestation of the excise law is universal, and has now associated with it

1 Works II, 52.

a detestation of the government; and that a separation which perhaps was a very distant and problematical event, is now near and certain, and determined in the mind of every man.'

In recalling the relation of Hamilton to protection it is important to observe that his chief motive as set forth in the famous Report on Manufactures, was to strengthen the Union; he does not mention as a reason for protection that on which the advocates of the present system place their main reliance, namely, its alleged tendency to raise wages. But the end which Hamilton wished to secure through protection is now fully attained. No one questions to-day the unity or the strength of the United States. The recent complimentary assertion of the Russian ambassador at Berlin, that the United States "have nothing to ask and nothing to fear," if not absolutely true, is still far truer of us than of any other people. Our danger is not that we shall suffer injustice, but that tempted by our strength we shall perpetrate injustice.

In respect to foreign policy Hamilton was in hearty accord with Washington. He held that the United States should seek peace and favorable commercial relations with other countries; that they should hold themselves aloof from the quarrels of foreign states; that they should resent foreign interference in our domestic affairs, and that they should resist the extension of European and seek the increase of American influence in the Western world. He was, however, eminently prudent. His first aim was peace. Unlike Napoleon, the soldier in him was

subordinate to the statesman. At the close of the War of Independence he was friendly to France. Even at the beginning of the French revolution his good will towards that country was marked; but when the Jacobins came into control his early sympathy changed into aversion and hatred, and he began to look on England as the defender of what was best in modern civilization. In this too he differed from the majority of his fellow-citizens. They remained, even during the reign of terror, steadfast in friendship for France and in enmity towards England.

1 Jefferson, Works IV, 112,

Concerning the wisdom and utility of Hamilton's course as a cabinet officer, the conflict of opinion which raged fiercely in his day has almost ceased. Time has amply vindicated both his intentions and his methods. The accusation that he plotted to re-establish monarchy was altogether false. The testimony of contemporaries and his own correspondence establish what indeed there never was reasonable ground for doubting-his loyalty to the republican system. That his measures were wise is proved both by their immediate effect and their later adoption by his enemies. Apart from the charge that he was a monarchist, the substance of the indictment against Hamilton is that to a hurtful degree he sought to strengthen the federal government and to weaken the states. But when Hamilton retired from office was the federal government too strong? Has it been so at any subsequent time down to the close of the Civil War? Have the states at any time previous to 1865 been too weak to discharge the functions which properly belong to them? On the contrary, is it not true that within the period named the public interests suffered oftener from defect of power in the national government and excess of power in the states, than from excess in the former and defect in the latter? And if since 1865 centralization and consequent depression of the states may seem to any one to have proceeded too far, is not the evil traceable to causes quite outside of Hamilton's policy? It is moreover a fair question whether the Union could have withstood the shock of secession had it not been for the strength which Hamilton gave to the national government.

After his retirement from the cabinet Hamilton continued his practice of seeking to educate public opinion through essays published in the newspapers. Under the signature of Camillus he discussed and defended in a masterly way the treaty which Jay had recently negotiated with England. The essays numbered thirty-eight and had, in the decision of the very important question at issue, an influence which may be compared with that of The Federalist on ratification. Many other essays appeared during the years 1796, 1797 and 1798, most of which bore on the controversies with France. In some of these one

notes a marked change of tone. Denunciation is a prominent feature. The appeal is no longer to the people as a whole but to the Federalists. This change, it is true, was a natural consequence of the development of parties and the growth of partisanship; none the less it signifies loss and deterioration.

To these closing years of the century belongs the unhappy chapter which narrates the quarrel with John Adams. We cannot exonerate Hamilton. His intrigues against Adams in successive presidential campaigns, although they may have been prompted by zeal for the public welfare, were unnecessary and mischievous. The pamphlet attack in 1800, which tried to prove that the Federalist candidate was unfit for the presidency, and then advised the party in spite of his unfitness to vote for him, showed that its author, under strong temptation, was capable of jeoparding the success of his party for the sake of gratifying personal animosity. His earlier relations with Adams' cabinet tended to pervert for the time being the natural functions of that very important body. Adams had inherited his cabinet from Washington. Its three most important members, Pickering, Wolcott and McHenry, were at the outset unfriendly to Adams and soon became sharply hostile. They looked upon Hamilton as the real head of the Federalist party and maintained with him a close correspondence. Their letters contain much bitter criticism of the president, and betray now and then something very like treachery. Hamilton undertook with the aid of the secretaries two things: first, to direct the policy of the administration; second, to obtain matter which he could employ in his warfare upon Adams. The mere statement Although justly rated

of the facts condemns him and his allies. as a man of honor, Hamilton was guilty at times of strange lapses, and this was one of the gravest. The intrigue was an act of political libertinism; its essence was infidelity.1

1 Mr. Lodge takes a different view: "The fact that he was not personally on good terms with Adams does not affect the matter. Hamilton was fully entitled to write private letters to members of the cabinet, and they had a right to receive them. The fact that the secretaries, after they found themselves in opposition to the president, ought to have retired, is a wholly distinct matter, and must be discussed on different grounds. If they chose to be guided by Hamilton, a private individual and

Again, Hamilton's course towards Adams subjects him to censure as a party leader. Good leadership requires the fullest use of every means which can be honorably employed to promote party success. John Adams was an important factor in the political situation. He was confessedly one of the greatest of Americans. He stood nearer to the people than most of the Federalist leaders. He, better than they, could mediate between the aristocratic conservative classes and the multitude. But Hamilton's treatment of Adams was calculated to lessen, and undoubtedly did lessen, the possible service both of Adams and himself to Federalism and to the Union. His attempt to be the power behind the throne, while he was the enemy of its occupant, was, to say the least, a wide deviation from the honorable and patriotic course which he usually pursued.

The year 1800 marks the darkest period in the life of Hamilton. During its early months he made the attack upon Adams. On May 7, he wrote to John Jay, the Federalist governor of New York, as follows:

...

You have been informed of the loss of our election in this city the moral certainty is therefore that there will be an anti-Federal majority in the ensuing legislature; and the very high probability is that this will bring Jefferson into the chief magistracy, unless it be prevented by the measure which I shall now submit to your consideration, namely the immediate calling together of the existing legislature. . . . Scruples of delicacy and propriety, as relative to a common course of things, ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. They ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state. . . . The calling of the legislature will have for its object the choosing of electors by the people in districts; this will insure a majority of votes in the United States for a Federal candidate. . . . In

unofficial leader, that was their affair, not his."— Henry Cabot Lodge, Alexander Hamilton (American Statesmen Series), p. 234.

It seems to me, on the contrary, that if these men, over whom Hamilton had an almost controlling influence, chose to do a public and official wrong, it was emphatically "his affair"; simply as a good citizen he was under obligation to dissuade them. The measure of Hamilton's responsibility appears when we reflect that he instigated the misconduct of Wolcott and Pickering and was their accomplice; and that he himself had served in the cabinet under Washington, and knew better than most what was due to the president from a member of the cabinet.