public man of the time. This experience had not prepared him-as the character of his mind had not prepared him—to suggest plans or frame institutions fitted to remedy the evils he had observed, and to apply the principles which he had discovered. But it had revealed to him the dangers and difficulties of our situation, and had made him a national statesman, as incapable of confining his politics to the narrow scale of local interests and attachments, as he had been of confining his exertions to the object of achieving the liberties of a single state.

He would have been fitly placed in the chair of any deliberative assembly into which he might have been called at any period of his life; but it was preeminently suitable that he should occupy that of the Convention for forming the Constitution. He had no talent for debate, and upon the floor of this body he would have exerted less influence, and have been far less the central object towards which the opinions and views of the members were directed, than he was in the high and becoming position to which he was now called.

CHAPTER VIII.

HAMILTON.

NEXT to the august name of the President should be mentioned that great man who, as a statesman, towered above all his compeers, even in that assembly of great men, - Alexander Hamilton.

This eminent person is probably less well known to the nation at the present day, than most of the leading statesmen of the Revolution. There are causes for this in his history. He never attained to that high office which has conferred celebrity on inferior men. The political party of which he was one of the founders and one of the chief leaders became unpopular with the great body of his countrymen before it was extinct. His death, too, at the early age of forty-seven, while it did not leave an unfinished character, left an unfinished career, for the contemplation of posterity. In this respect, his fate was unlike that of nearly all his most distinguished contemporaries. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay, and in fact almost all the prominent statesmen of the Revolution, died in old age or in advanced life, and after the circle of their public honors and usefulness had been completed.

Hamilton was cut off at a period of life when he may be said to have had above a third of its best activity yet before him: and this is doubtless one cause why so little is popularly known, by the present generation, of him who was by far the greatest statesman of the Revolutionary age.

It is known, indeed, traditionally, what a thrill of horror- what a sharp, terrible pang-ran through the nation, proving the comprehension by the entire people of what was lost, when Aaron Burr took from his country and the world that important life. In the most distant extremities of the Union, men felt that one of the first intellects of the age had been extinguished. From the utmost activity and public consideration, in the fulness of his strength and usefulness, the bullet of a duellist had taken the first statesman in America; - a man who, while he had not been without errors, and while his life had not been without mistakes, had served his country, from his boyhood to that hour of her bitter bereavement, with an elevation of purpose and a force of intellect never exceeded in her history, and which had caused Washington to lean upon him and to trust him, as he trusted and leaned upon no other man, from first to last. The death of such a man, under such circumstances, cast a deep gloom over the face of society; and Hamilton was mourned by his contemporaries with a sorrow founded on a just appreciation of his greatness, and of what they owed to his intellect and character. But by the generations that have succeeded he has been less intimately known than

many of his compatriots, who lived longer, and reached stations which he never occupied.

He was born in the island of St. Christopher's, in the year 1757; his mother being a native of that island, and his father being a Scotchman. At the age of fifteen, after having been for three years in the counting-house of a merchant at Santa Cruz, he was sent to New York to complete his education, and was entered as a private student in King's (now Columbia) College. At the age of seventeen, his political life was already begun; for at that age, and while still at college, he wrote and published a series of essays on the Rights of the Colonies, which attracted the attention of the whole country. These essays appeared in 1774, in answer to certain pamphlets on the Tory side of the controversy; and in them Hamilton reviewed and vindicated the whole of the proceedings of the first Continental Congress. There are displayed in these papers a power of reasoning and sarcasm, a knowledge of the principles of government and of the English Constitution, and a grasp of the merits of the whole controversy, that would have done honor to any man at any age, and in a youth of seventeen are wonderful. To say that they evince precocity of intellect, gives no idea of their main characteristics. They show great maturity;-a more remarkable maturity than has ever been exhibited by any other person, at so early an age, in the same department of thought. They produced, too, a great effect. Their influence in bringing the public mind to the

point of resistance to the mother country, was important and extensive.

Before he was nineteen years old, Hamilton entered the army as a captain of artillery; and when only twenty, in 1777, he was selected by Washington to be one of his aides-de-camp, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In this capacity he served until 1782, when he was elected a member of Congress from the State of New York, and took his seat. In 1786, he was chosen a member of the legislature of New York. In 1787, he was appointed as a delegate to the Convention which framed the Constitution. In the following year, when only thirty years old, he published, with Madison and Jay, the celebrated essays called "The Federalist," in favor of the form of government proposed by the Convention. In 1788, he became a member of the State Convention of New York, called to ratify the Constitution, and it was chiefly through his influence that it was adopted in that State. In 1789, he took office in Washington's administration, as Secretary of the Treasury. In 1795, he retired to the practice of the law in the city of New York. In 1798, at Washington's absolute demand, he was appointed second in command of the provisional army, raised under the elder Adams's administration, to repel an apprehended invasion of the French. On the death of Washington, in 1799, he succeeded to the chief command. When the army was disbanded, he again returned to the bar, and practised with great reputation until the year 1804, when his life was