His ideal of government was the rule of ‘gentlemen’—the domination of aristocrats; on the theory that these, with a certain prestige to maintain, were more jealous of their honor and above the vulgar strivings for mere place.[121] Thus it was impossible for him to conceive of a strong and capable government over which the aristocracy did not have sway.[122] Long before the Constitutional Convention we find him writing Morris on financial matters, setting forth the importance of creating an alliance between government and men of wealth.[123] One of his most enthusiastic panegyrists has illustrated his ideal: ‘The nearest approach to it is the popular conception of the empire of Japan—a mass of intelligent humanity, reckless of their lives, yet filled with the joy of life, eager for distinction, hungry for success, alert, practical, and merry; but at the same time subordinate, humbly and piously subordinate, to a pure abstraction.’[124] But this abstraction had to be aristocracy—never democracy; for he believed that democracy could only lead to anarchy.[125] Temperamentally hostile to democracy in the beginning, maintaining that attitude to the end, he never appreciated and always despised public opinion, and in 1794 he frankly confessed to Washington that he ‘long since learned to hold public opinion of no value.’[126] This distrust of the people, contempt for democracy, and reliance on strong government supported by wealth, and, if need be, sustained by standing armies, were carried by him into the Constitutional Convention and there proclaimed with all the tremendous force of his personality.

VII

Unless we divest ourselves of the Hamiltonian myths in reference to the Constitution, an intelligent comprehension of his political character will be impossible. We must rid ourselves of the fallacious notion that he was satisfied with the Constitution or believed it adequate. No one contributed more mightily to making the Constitutional Convention possible. In the preliminary convention at Annapolis, no one did more to crystallize sentiment for it, and it was his persuasive pen that wrote the history-making address there determined upon. About his dining-table in New York he did yeoman service in coaxing skeptical and reluctant members of Congress to call a convention. There, under a simulation of gayety, his eloquence and wit and banter made converts of the most stubborn—a service of immeasurable value.[127]

But in the Convention itself he played no such part as is popularly ascribed to him. After the presentation of his own plan in the early stages, he played an inconspicuous part, and much of the time he was not only absent from the Convention, but out of the State. This was not because of indifference to the event, but to a realization that he could accomplish nothing for his plan.[128]

This plan was a direct contradiction of that which was adopted. There is nothing conjectural about that fact—the records are indisputable. We have the plan, the brilliant five-hour oration in its behalf, the brief from which he spoke. These have come down to us, not from his enemies, but from his partial biographers, his son the editor of his ‘Works,’ and the report of Madison on the authenticity of which he himself passed. This plan provided for the election of a President for life; for Senators for life or during good behavior, and by electors with a property qualification; and for the crushing of the sovereignty of States through the appointment by the President of Governors with a life tenure and the power to veto any act of the State legislatures, though passed unanimously. Not only was the President enabled under this plan to negative any law enacted, but he had the discretionary power to enforce or ignore any law existing.[129] Though his President, serving for life, was not called a king, he was to be armed with more arbitrary power than was possessed by the King of England. His English eulogist does not overstate when he says that ‘what he had in mind was the British Constitution as George III had tried hard to make it,’ and failed because the English people would not tolerate it.[130] This interpretation of Hamilton’s purpose is reënforced by another of his most brilliant disciples who asserts that ‘Hamilton’s governor [President] would have been not dissimilar to Louis XIV and could have said with him, “L’état c’est moi.” ... Thinly veiled, his plan[131] contemplated an elective king with greater powers than those of George III, an imitation House of Lords, and a popular House of Commons with a limited tenure.’[132] Even so this plan confessedly fell far short of his conception of an ideal government. In the brief for his speech[133] we are left in no doubt as to his partiality for a monarchy, in which the aristocracy should have a special power. ‘The monarch ... ought to be hereditary, and to have so much power that it would not be his interest to risk much to acquire more.’ As for the aristocracy, ‘they should be so circumstanced that they can have no interest in a change.’[134] We should be ‘rescued from the democracy.’[135] As to the republican form of government—‘Republics are liable to corruption and intrigue,’[136] and, since ‘a republican government does not admit of a vigorous execution, it is therefore bad.’[137]

Later, in one of his few discussions, he said that ‘those who mean to form a solid republican government ought to proceed to the confines of another government.’[138] His republic, and in his great speech he had conceded that no other form would be accepted by the people, ‘was to be an aristocratic as distinguished from a democratic republic, and the power of the separate States was to be effectually crippled.’[139] In one of his brief Convention talks he said of the States that ‘as States he thought they should be abolished.’[140] Even after the Constitution had been adopted, he believed that one of the objects of administration should be ‘to acquire for the federal government more consistency than the Constitution seems to promise for so great a country,’ to the end that it ‘may triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce them to an utter subordination, dividing the large States into simpler districts.’[141] Such were the ideas urged by Hamilton in the forceful five-hour speech which Gouverneur Morris thought the most brilliant intellectual exhibition he had ever witnessed. After this exhaustive exposition, he took but little part. Toward the close he explained his comparative silence: ‘He had been restrained from entering into the discussions by his dislike of the scheme of government in general.’[142] This distaste did not diminish as the Convention closed its labors, and he accepted the Constitution in the end ‘as better than nothing.’[143] His motive for joining in recommending it to the people is conclusively shown in his last Convention utterance: ‘No man’s ideas are more remote from the plan than my own are known to be; but is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side, and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other?’[144]

Nor did he ever lose faith in his own plan, or gain confidence in the Constitution which was adopted.[145] Just before retiring from the Cabinet he avowed himself a monarchist who had ‘no objections to a trial being made of this thing of a republic.’[146] Two years before his death he wrote bitterly to Morris of his support of a Constitution in which he had never had faith ‘from the beginning,’ in which he described it as ‘a frail and worthless fabric.’[147] And the night of his death, when his bosom friend and confidant was meditating the funeral oration he was to deliver on the steps of Trinity Church, he wrote in his diary, ‘He was in principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government, but then his opinions were generally known and have been long and loudly proclaimed. His share in the forming of our Constitution must be mentioned, and his unfavorable opinion cannot therefore be concealed.’[148]

If, however, he was a tremendous factor in making any Constitutional Convention possible, he was to be even more essential in securing the ratification of the document he disliked—and it is here that he rises to the pinnacle of patriotic statesmanship, and earns the eternal gratitude of the Republic. When on that summer day, on a packet floating lazily down the Hudson, he subordinated his personal preferences to the public good, and sat down to the writing of the first number of ‘The Federalist,’ he reached the very acme of his greatness. Had he done nothing else, his fame would have been as eternal as the Nation he helped to make. Thus does he take his rightful place among the greatest nation-builders of all time.

VIII

The qualities of strength and weakness accounting for the successes and failures of his political leadership are easily found in an analysis of his character. As is true of most genius, his was three fourths hard work. From his earliest boyhood he had learned the value of system. Nothing was permitted to disturb the programme by which he regulated his days and nights. We may surmise that he was his own most relentless taskmaster from the rules he wrote for the guidance of his favorite son. This almost monastic schedule denotes the system by which he governed his own life.[149] He never completed his education, and the exactions of politics and his profession never made him a stranger to his library. Here, surrounded by his family, he ministered to an insatiable mind. Never tiring of the classics, he kept pace with the printing-press, and Mrs. Church rummaged about the book-stalls of London to supply him with all the new worth-while publications. Thus the ‘Wealth of Nations’ was in his hands as soon after its appearance as a boat could cross the sea.[150] His manner of study was intensive, absorbing, and he fairly lashed his mind and memory to their allotted tasks. Walking the floor while reading and studying, it was a comment of his friends that with equal exertion he could have walked from one end of the country to the other.[151]