ience. He pointed out that if Talleyrand had made up
his mind that it was best to avoid a war, he would have made a second
and regular overture, which could have been accepted without humiliation
to the country, and the severance of the Federalist party.

As if Adams had not done enough to rouse the deadly wrath of Hamilton,
he announced right and left that the Federalist defeat in New York had
been planned by his arch enemy, with the sole purpose of driving himself
from office; that there was a British faction in the country and that
Hamilton was its chief. He drove Pickering and M'Henry from his Cabinet
with contumely, as the only immediate retaliation he could think of, and
Wolcott would have followed, had there been anyone to take his place.
Franklin once said of Adams that he was always honest, sometimes great,
and often mad. Probably so large an amount of truth has never again been
condensed into an epigram. If Adams had not become inflamed with the
ambition that has ruined the lives and characters of so many Americans,
he would have come down to posterity as a great man, with a record of
services to his country which would have scattered his few mistakes into
the unswept corners of oblivion. But autocratic, irritable, and jealous,
all the infirmities of his temper as brittle with years as the
blood-vessels of his brain, the most exacting office in the civilized
world taxed him too heavily. It is interesting to speculate upon what
he might have been in this final trial of his public career, had
Hamilton died as he took the helm of State. If Hamilton's enemies very
nearly ruined his own character, there is no denying that he exerted an
almost malign influence upon them. To those he loved or who appealed to
the highest in him he gave not only strength, but an abundance of
sweetness and light, illuminating mind and spirit, and inspiring an
affection that was both unselfish and uplifting. But his enemies hated
him so frantically that their characters measurably deteriorated; to
ruin or even disconcert him they stooped and intrigued and lied; they
were betrayed into public acts which lowered them in their own eyes and
in those of all students of history. Other hatreds were healthy and
stimulating by comparison; but there is no doubt that Adams, Jefferson,
and Madison fell far lower than they would have done had Hamilton never
shot into the American heavens, holding their fields at his pleasure,
and paling the fires of l