with his party after he retired from office.  Most of our public men retire to utter obscurity when they have lost office, but Hamilton was as prominent in private life as in his official duties.  He was the oracle of his party, a great political sage, whose utterances had the moral force of law.  He never lost the leadership of his party, even when he retired from public life.  His political influence lasted till he died.  He had no rewards to give, no office to fill, but he still ruled like a chieftain.  It was he who defeated by his quiet influence the political aspirations of Burr, when Burr was the most popular man in the country,—­a great wire-puller, a prince of politicians, a great organizer of political forces, like Van Buren and Thurlow Weed,—­whose eloquent conversation and fascinating manner few men could resist, to say nothing of women.  But for Hamilton, he would in all probability have been President of the United States, at a time when individual genius and ability might not unreasonably aspire to that high office.  He was the rival of Jefferson, and lost the election by only one vote, after the equality of candidates had thrown the election into the House of Representatives.  Hamilton did not like Jefferson, but he preferred Jefferson to Burr, since he knew that the country would be safe under his guidance, and would not be safe with so unscrupulous a man as Burr.  He distrusted and disliked Burr; not because he was his rival at the Bar,—­for great rival lawyers may personally be good friends, like Brougham and Lyndhurst, like Mason and Webster,—­but because his political integrity was not to be trusted; because he was a selfish and scheming politician, bent on personal advancement rather than the public good.  And this hostility was returned with an unrelenting and savage fierceness, which culminated in deadly wrath when Burr found that Hamilton’s influence prevented his election as Governor of New York,—­which office, it seems, he preferred to the Vice-presidency, which had dignity but no power.  Burr wanted power rather than influence.  In his bitter disappointment and remorseless rage, nothing would satisfy him but the blood of Hamilton.  He picked a quarrel, and would accept neither apology nor reconciliation; he wanted revenge.

Hamilton knew he could not escape Burr’s vengeance; that he must fight the fatal duel, in obedience to that “code of honor” which had tyrannically bound gentlemen since the feudal ages, though unknown to Pagan Greece and Rome.  There was no law or custom which would have warranted a challenge from Aeschines to Demosthenes, when the former was defeated in the forensic and oratorical contest and sent into banishment.  But the necessity for Hamilton to fight his antagonist was such as he had not the moral power to resist, and that few other men in his circumstances would have resisted.  In the eyes of public men there was no honorable way of escape.  Life or death turned on his skill with the pistol; and he