Other men talked about empire, but he alone grasped the great conception, and felt it in his soul.  To see not only immediate success imperiled, but the future paltered with by small, mean, and dishonest men, cut him to the quick.  He set himself doggedly to fight it, as he always fought every enemy, using both speech and pen in all quarters.  Much, no doubt, he ultimately effected, but he was contending with the usual results of civil war, which are demoralizing always, and especially so among a young people in a new country.  At first, therefore, all seemed vain.  The selfishness, “peculation, and speculation” seemed to get worse, and the tone of Congress and the people lower, as he struggled against them.  In March, 1779, he wrote to James Warren of Massachusetts:  “Nothing, I am convinced, but the depreciation of our currency, aided by stock-jobbing and party dissensions, has fed the hopes of the enemy, and kept the British arms in America to this day.  They do not scruple to declare this themselves, and add that we shall be our own conquerors.  Can not our common country, America, possess virtue enough to disappoint them?  Is the paltry consideration of a little pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation, and of millions yet unborn?  Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing, at the expense of so much time, blood, and treasure?  And shall we at last become the victims of our own lust of gain?  Forbid it, Heaven!  Forbid it, all and every State in the Union, by enacting and enforcing efficacious laws for checking the growth of these monstrous evils, and restoring matters, in some degree, to the state they were in at the commencement of the war.”

“Our cause is noble.  It is the cause of mankind, and the danger to it is to be apprehended from ourselves.  Shall we slumber and sleep, then, while we should be punishing those miscreants who have brought these troubles upon us, and who are aiming to continue us in them; while we should be striving to fill our battalions, and devising ways and means to raise the value of the currency, on the credit of which everything depends?” Again we see the prevailing idea of the future, which haunted him continually.  Evidently, he had some imagination, and also a power of terse and eloquent expression which we have heard of before, and shall note again.

Still the appeals seemed to sound in deaf ears.  He wrote to George Mason:  “I have seen, without despondency, even for a moment, the hours which America has styled her gloomy ones; but I have beheld no day since the commencement of hostilities that I have thought her liberties in such imminent danger as at present....  Indeed, we are verging so fast to destruction that I am filled with sensations to which I have been a stranger till within these three months.”  To Gouverneur Morris he