laws for the quick.

When the last Valois consulted his dying mother, she advised him that
anybody can cut off, but that the sewing on is an acquired art. Mr.
Bryce feels strongly for the men who practised what Catharine thought so
difficult, and he stops for a moment in the midst of his very impersonal
treatise to deliver a panegyric on Alexander Hamilton. _Tanto nomini
nullum par elogium._ His merits can hardly be overstated. Talleyrand
assured Ticknor that he had never known his equal; Seward calls him "the
ablest and most effective statesman engaged in organising and
establishing the union"; Macmaster, the iconoclast, and Holst, poorly
endowed with the gift of praise, unite in saying that he was the
foremost genius among public men in the new world; Guizot told Rush that
_The Federalist_ was the greatest work known to him, in the application
of elementary principles of government to practical administration; his
paradox in support of political corruption, so hard to reconcile with
the character of an honest man, was repeated to the letter by Niebuhr.
In estimating Hamilton we have to remember that he was in no sense the
author of the constitution. In the convention he was isolated, and his
plan was rejected. In _The Federalist_, written before he was thirty, he
pleaded for a form of government which he distrusted and disliked. He
was out of sympathy with the spirit that prevailed, and was not the true
representative of the cause, like Madison, who said of him, "If his
theory of government deviated from the republican standard, he had the
candour to avow it, and the greater merit of co-operating faithfully in
maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice." The
development of the constitution, so far as it continued on his lines,
was the work of Marshall, barely known to us by the extracts in late
editions of the _Commentaries_. "_The Federalist_," says Story, "could
do little more than state the objects and general bearing of these
powers and functions. The masterly reasoning of the chief-justice has
followed them out to their ultimate results and boundaries with a
precision and clearness approaching, as near as may be, to mathematical
demonstration." Morris, who was as strong as Hamilton on the side of
federalism, testifies heavily against him as a leader: "More a theoretic
than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system
may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circum