At twenty-six, he is
distinguished as a member of Congress. At thirty, he takes a leading
part in framing the Constitution of the United States. And in his
thirty-third year, he becomes the most extraordinary finance minister
the world has ever seen. He was statesman, soldier, writer, and orator,
and first in each department; and he was as ready for all the parts
which he filled as if he had been long and studiously trained for each
of them by the best of instructors. When Mr. Webster so happily compared
the instantaneousness and perfection of his financial system to "the
fabled birth of Minerva," he did but allude to what is to be remarked of
all Hamilton's works. All that he did was perfect, and no one seems to
have been aware of his power until he had established the fact of its
existence. Such a combination of precocity and versatility stands quite
unparalleled. Octavius, William the Third, Henry St. John, Charles James
Fox, and William Pitt the younger, all showed various powers at early
periods of their lives; but not one of them was the equal of Hamilton in
respect to early maturity of intellect, or in ability to command success
in every department to which he turned his attention. The historical
character of whom he most reminds us is the elder Africanus. In the
early development of his faculties, in his self-reliant spirit, in his
patriotism, in his kingliness of mind, in his personal purity, in his
generosity of thought and of action, and in the fear and envy that he
excited in inferior minds, he was a repetition of the most majestic of
all the Romans. But, unlike the Roman soldier-statesman, he did not
desert the land he had saved, but which had proved ungrateful; and the
grave only was to be his Liternum. He died at not far from the same age
as that to which Africanus reached. In comparing him with certain other
men who achieved fame early, it should be remembered that they all were
regularly prepared for public life, and were born to it as to an
inheritance; whereas he, though of patrician blood, was possessed of no
advantages of fortune, and had to fight the battle of life while
fighting the battles of the nation.

FOOTNOTES:

[F] Mr. Riethmueller, in his volume on "Hamilton and his Contemporaries,"
coolly assumes that Hamilton would have opposed the late war for the
maintenance of the Union, had he been living! Anything more absurd than
such a view of Hamilton's probable course, under circumstances like