tion out of the resources of a vast understanding, controlled by
wisdom and honour, is an ambition which should be dignified with a
higher name. Small and purely personal ambitions were unknown to
Hamilton, his gifts were given him for the elevation of the human race;
but he would rather have reigned in hell than have sunk to
insignificance on earth. As he remarked once to Kitty Livingston, the
complexity of man so far exceeds that of the average woman, complexity
being purely a matter of brain and having no roots whatever in sex, that
it were a waste of valuable time to analyze its ramifications, and the
crossings and entanglements of its threads. Hamilton paid the money,
yielded further to the extent of several hundred dollars, then the
people disappeared, and he hoped that he had heard the last of them.
Fortunately his habits were methodical, the result of his mercantile
training on St. Croix, and he preserved the correspondence.

XXVI

Hamilton looked forward to the next Congressional term with no
delusions. He polished his armour until it was fit to blind his
adversaries, tested the temper of every weapon, sharpened every blade,
arranged them for immediate availment. In spite of the absorbing and
disconcerting interests of the summer, he had followed in thought the
mental processes of his enemies, kept a sharp eye out for their new
methods of aggression. Themselves had had no more intimate knowledge of
their astonishment, humiliation, and impotent fury at the successive
victories of the invulnerable Secretary of the Treasury, than had
Hamilton himself. He knew that they had confidently hoped to beat him by
their combined strength and unremitting industry, and by the growing
power of their party, before the finish of the preceding term. The
Federalists no longer had their former majority in Congress upon all
questions, for many of the men who, under that title, had been devoted
adherents of the Constitution, were become alarmed at the constant talk
of the monarchical tendencies of the Government, of the centralizing
aristocratic measures of the Secretary of the Treasury, at the
"unrepublican" formalities and elegance of Washington's "Court," at his
triumphal progresses through the country, and at the enormous one-man
power as exhibited in the person of Hamilton. Upon these minds
Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had worked with unremitting subtlety. It
was not so much that the early Federalists wished to see Hamilto