ate the
inevitable a year or two, and doubtless it seems to the destiny that
controls my affairs as the swiftest way to dispose of Burr, and awaken
the country to the other dangers that menace it. To the last I am but a
tool. No man was ever so little his own master, so thrust upon a planet
for the accomplishment of public and impersonal ends alone. I have been
permitted a certain amount of domestic felicity as my strength was best
conserved thereby, my mind free to concentrate upon public duties. I was
endowed with the gift of fascination, that men should follow me without
question, and this country be served with immediate effectiveness, I
have received deep and profound satisfaction from both these
concessions, but it would not matter in the least if I had not. They
were inevitable with the equipment for the part I had to play. I have
had an astonishing and conquering career against the mightiest
obstacles, and I may as a further concession, be permitted an enduring
place in history; but that, also, is by the way. I conquered, not to
gratify my love of power and to win immortal fame, but that I might
accomplish the part for which I was whirled here from an almost
inaccessible island fifteen hundred miles away--to play my part in the
creation of this American empire. It has been a great part, creatively
the greatest part. The proof that no native-born American could have
played it lies in the fact that he did not. The greatest of her men have
abetted me; not one has sought to push me aside and do my work. My only
enemies have been those who would pull my structure down; the most
ambitious and individual men in the Union, of the higher sort, are my
willing followers. To win them I never plotted, nor did I ever seek to
dazzle and blind them. Part of my equipment was the power to convince
them without effort of my superior usefulness; there was no time to
lose. I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would
best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the
Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence
calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called
Earth. Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn. That my human
heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all. I leave
that behind."

Hamilton had been bred in the orthodox religion of his time, and its
picturesqueness, including its ultimates of heaven and hell, had taken
f