strictly American. As a boy, half Scotch, half French Huguenot, from the
English West Indian island of Nevis, he had been at school in New York
when his speeches had some real effect in attaching that city to the
cause of Independence. He had served brilliantly in the war, on
Washington's staff and with his regiment. He had chivalrously defended,
as an advocate and in other ways, the Englishmen and loyalists against
whose cause he fought. He had induced the great central State of New
York to accept the Constitution, when the strongest local party would
have rejected it and made the Union impossible. As Washington's
Secretary of the Treasury he organised the machinery of government,
helped his chief to preserve a strong, upright and cautious foreign
policy at the critical point of the young Republic's infancy, and
performed perhaps the greatest and most difficult service of all in
setting the disordered finances of the country upon a sound footing. In
early middle age he ended a life, not flawless but admirable and lovable,
in a duel, murderously forced upon him by one Aaron Burr. This man, who
was an elegant profligate, with many graces but no public principle, was
a claimant to the Presidency in opposition to Hamilton's greatest
opponent, Jefferson; Hamilton knowingly incurred a feud which must at the
best have been dangerous to him, by unhesitatingly throwing his weight
upon the side of Jefferson, his own ungenerous rival. The details of his
policy do not concern us, but the United States could hardly have endured
for many years without the passionate sense of the need of government and
the genius for actual administration with which Hamilton set the new
nation on its way. Nevertheless--so do gifts differ--the general spirit
which has on the whole informed the American nation and held it together
was neither respected nor understood by him. His party, called the
Federalists, because they claimed to stand for a strong and an efficient
Federal Government, did not survive him long. It is of interest to us
here only because, with its early disappearance, there ceased for ever to