olossus in his path. Assumption he held to be a measure of the very
devil, and fumed whenever he reflected upon his part in its
accomplishment. "I was made to hold a candle!" he would explain
apologetically. "He hoodwinked me, made a fool of me."

For a statesman of forty-seven, and one of the most distinguished and
successful men in the country, the literary author of The Declaration of
Independence, the father of many beneficent and popular laws in his own
State, a minister to foreign courts and one of the deepest and subtlest
students of human nature of his century, to find himself fooled and
played with by a young man of thirty-three, relegated by him to a second
place in the Cabinet and country, means--meant in those days, at
least--hate of the most remorseless quality. Jefferson was like a
volcano with bowels of fire and a crater which spilled over in the
night. He smouldered and rumbled, a natural timidity preventing the
splendour of fireworks. But he was deadly.

He and Madison met often during these holidays, and an object of their
growing confidence was James Monroe, the new Senator from Virginia.
Monroe was a fighter, and hatred of Hamilton was his religion. Moreover,
he disapproved with violence of every measure of the new government, and
everybody connected with it, from Washington down, Jefferson excepted;
Randolph he held to be a trimmer, and overlooked the fact that although
he himself had opposed the Constitution with all his words, he was one
of the first to take office under it. Jefferson needed but this younger
man's incentive to disapprove more profoundly not only assumption, but
Hamilton's design to establish a National Bank. That was the most
criminal evidence of an ultimate dash for a throne which the Secretary
of the Treasury, whose place in the Cabinet should have been second to
his own, but who was the very head and front of the Administration, had
yet betrayed. And as for the triumphal progress of Washington through
the States in the previous autumn, and again before leaving for Mount
Vernon upon the close of the last Congress, a king could have done no
more. The new Republic was tottering on its rotten foundations, and
Jefferson and his able lieutenants vowed themselves to the rescue.
Madison was the anti-government leader in the House, Monroe would abet
him in the Senate, and Jefferson would undertake the fight in the
Cabinet. It cannot be said that he liked the prospect, for he read his
f