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 The exception, as American history showed, was American democracy. The loose and barren rule of the Confederation seemed to conservative minds such as Hamilton’s to presage, in its strengthening of individualism, a fatal looseness of social restraints, and led him on to a dread of democracy that he never overcame. Liberty, he reminded his fellows, in the New York Convention of 1788, seemed to be alone considered in government, but there was another thing equally important: “a principle of strength and stability in the organization and of vigour in its operation.” But Hamilton’s governmental system was in fact repressive. He wanted a system strong enough, he would have said, to overcome the anarchic tendencies loosed by war, and represented by those notions of natural rights which he had himself once championed; strong enough to overbear all local, state and sectional prejudices, powers or influence, and to control—not, as Jefferson would have it, to be controlled by—the people. Confidence in the integrity, the self-control, and the good judgment of the people, which was the content of Jefferson’s political faith, had almost no place in Hamilton’s theories. “Men,” said he, “are reasoning rather than reasonable animals.” The charge that he laboured to introduce monarchy by intrigue is an under-estimate of his good sense. Hamilton’s thinking, however, did carry him foul of current democratic philosophy; as he said, he presented his plan in 1787 “not as attainable, but as a model to which we ought to approach as far as possible”; moreover, he held through life his belief in its principles, and in its superiority over the government actually created; and though its inconsistency with American tendencies was yearly more apparent, he never ceased to avow on all occasions his aristocratic-monarchical partialities. Moreover, his preferences for at least an aristocratic republic were shared by many other men of talent. When it is added that Jefferson’s assertions, alike as regards Hamilton’s talk and the intent and tendency of his political measures, were, to the extent of the underlying basic fact—but discounting Jefferson’s somewhat intemperate interpretations—unquestionably true, it cannot be accounted strange that Hamilton’s Democratic opponents mistook his theoretic predilections for positive designs. Nor would it be a strained inference from much that be said, to believe that he hoped and expected that in the “crisis” he foresaw, when democracy should have caused the ruin of the country, a new government might be formed that should approximate to his own ideals. From the beginning of the excesses of the French Revolution he was possessed by the persuasion that American democracy, likewise, might at any moment crush the restraints of the Constitution to enter on a career of licence and anarchy. To this obsession he sacrificed

his life. After the Democratic victory of 1800, his letters, full of retrospective judgments and interesting outlooks, are but rarely relieved in their sombre pessimism by flashes of hope and courage. His last letter on politics, written two days before his death, illustrates the two sides of his thinking already emphasized: in this letter he warns his New England friends against dismemberment of the union as “a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy, the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent.” To the end he never lost his fear of the states, nor gained faith in the future of the country. He laboured still, in mingled hope and apprehension, “to prop the frail and worthless fabric,” but for its spiritual content of democracy he had no understanding, and even in its nationalism he had little hope. Yet probably to no one man, except perhaps to Washington, does American nationalism owe so much as to Hamilton.

In the development of the United States the influence of Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian democracy has been a reactive union; but changed conditions since Hamilton’s time, and particularly since the Civil War, are likely to create misconceptions as to Hamilton’s position in his own day. Great constructive statesman as he was, he was also, from the American point of view, essentially a reactionary. He was the leader of reactionary forces—constructive forces, as it happened—in the critical period after the War of American Independence, and in the period of Federalist supremacy. He was in sympathy with the dominant forces of public life only while they took, during the war, the predominant impress of an imperfect nationalism. Jeffersonian democracy came into power in 1800 in direct line with colonial development; Hamiltonian Federalism was a break in that development; and this alone can explain how Jefferson could organize the Democratic Party in face of the brilliant success of the Federalists in constructing the government. Hamilton stigmatized his great opponent as a political fanatic; but actualist as he claimed to be, Hamilton could not see, or would not concede, the predominating forces in American life, and would uncompromisingly have minimized the two great political conquests of the colonial period—local self-government and democracy.

Few Americans have received higher tributes from foreign authorities. Talleyrand, personally impressed when in America with Hamilton’s brilliant qualities, declared that he had the power of divining without reasoning, and compared him to Fox and Napoleon because he had “deviné l’Europe.” Of the judgments rendered by his countrymen, Washington’s confidence in his ability and integrity is perhaps the most significant. Chancellor James Kent, and others only less competent, paid remarkable testimony to his legal abilities. Chief-justice Marshall ranked him second to Washington alone. No judgment