to reward, and
he would accept it and intrigue with every resource of his cunning and
address for the larger number of votes, regardless of the will of the
people. If the result were a tie, the Federals would incline to anybody
rather than Jefferson, and Hamilton would be obliged to throw into the
scale his great influence as leader of his party for the benefit of the
man he would gladly have attached to a fork and set to toast above the
coals of Hell. He had no score to settle with Burr, but to permit him to
become President of the United States would be a crime for which the
leader of the Federalist party would be held responsible. When the
inevitable moment came he should hand over the structure he had created
to the man who had desired to rend it from gable to foundation; both
because it was the will of the people and because Jefferson was the
safer man of the two.

So far his statesmanship triumphed, as it had done in every crisis which
he had been called upon to manipulate, and as it would in many more.
But for once, and as regarded the first battle, it failed him, and he
made no attempt to invoke it. This was the blackest period of his inner
life, and there were times when he never expected to emerge from its
depths. The threatened loss of the magnificent power he had wielded, the
hatreds that possessed and overwhelmed him, the seeming futility of
almost a lifetime of labour, sacrifices without end and prodigal
dispensing of great gifts, the constant insults of his enemies, and the
public ingratitude, had saturated his spirit with a raging bitterness
and roused the deadliest passions of his nature. The marah he had passed
through while a member of the Cabinet was shallow compared to the depths
in which he almost strangled to-day. Not only was this the final
accumulation, but the inspiring and sustaining affection, the
circumscribing bulwark, of Washington was gone from him. "He was an
Aegis very essential to me," he had said sadly, and he felt his loss
more every day that he lived.

He knew there was just one chance to save the Presidency to the
Federalist party. Did he employ the magic of his pen to recreate the
popularity of John Adams, it was more than possible that thousands would
gladly permit the leader they had followed for years to persuade them
they had judged too hastily the man of whom they had expected too much.
But by this time there was one man Hamilton hated more implacably than
Jefferson, and th