of each. He was, rather, a man of action--self-willed,
self-reliant, independent--as ambitious as Burr without his slippery
ways, and as determined as Hamilton with all his ability to criticise
an opponent. Clinton relied not more upon men than upon measures, and
in the end the one thing that made him superior to all his
contemporaries of the nineteenth century was a never-failing belief in
the possibility of success along lines marked out for his life's work.
He had faults and he committed errors. His one great political defect
filled him with faults. He would be all or nothing. Attachment to his
interests was the one supreme and only test of fitness for favours or
friendship, and at one time or another he quarrelled with every friend
who sought to retain independence of action.

Just now Clinton was looking with great expectancy into the political
future. From defeat in 1796 he had reached the Assembly in 1797, and
then passed to the State Senate in 1798; and from defeat in 1799 he
passed again into the Senate in 1800. Thus far his record was without
blemish. As a lad of eighteen he sided with his uncle in the contest
over the Federal Constitution; but once it became the supreme law of
the land he gave it early and vigorous support, not even soiling his
career by a vote for the Kentucky resolutions. Unlike the Livingstons,
he found little to commend in the controversy with Genet and the
French, and in Jay's extra session of the Legislature he voted arms
and appropriations to sustain the hands of the President and the
honour of the flag. But he condemned the trend of Federalism as
unwise, unpatriotic, and dangerous to the liberty of the citizen and
to the growth of the country; and with equal force he opposed the
influence of the French Revolution, maintaining that deeds of violence
were unnecessary to startle the public into the knowledge that
suffering exists, and that bad laws and bad social conditions result
in hunger and misery. If he had been a great orator he would have
charmed the conservatives who hated Federalism and dreaded Jacobinism.
Like his uncle he spoke forcibly and with clearness, but without grace
or eloquence; his writing, though correct in style and sufficiently
polished, lacked the simplicity and the happy gift of picturesque
phrase which characterised the letters of so many of the public men
of that day. Yet he was a noble illustration of what may be
accomplished by an indomitable will, backed b