but I can give you no encouragement.  You will fail here—­gloriously, but you will fail.  Mark my words, the army will go home cursing, and scratch the ground to feed its women.  The States will have no peace establishment to threaten their sovereign rights, we will pay nobody, and become more and more poverty-stricken and contemptible in our own eyes, and in the eyes of Europe; we will do nothing that is wise and everything that is foolish—­”

“And then, when the country is sick unto death,” interrupted Hamilton, “it will awake to the wisdom of the drastic remedy and cohere into a nation.”

“Query,” said Madison, “would it not be patriotic to push things from bad to worse as quickly as possible?  It might be a case of justifiable Jesuitism.”

“And it might lead to anarchy and the jaws of Europe,” said Hamilton.  “It is never safe to go beyond a certain point in the management of human affairs.  What turn the passions of the people may take can never be foretold, nor that element of the unknown, which is always under the invisible cap and close on one’s heels.  God knows I have not much patience in my nature, and I do not believe that most of my schemes are so far in advance of even this country’s development; but certain lessons must be instilled by slow persistence.  I have no faith in rushing people at the point of the bayonet in times of peace.”

“I think you are right there,” said Morris.  “But mark my words, you’ll propagate ideas here, and the result in time will be the birth of a nation—­no doubt of that; but you must rest content to live on hope for the present.  I was a fettered limb in this body too long.  I know its inertia.”

He knew whereof he spoke.  Hamilton won little but additional reputation, much admiration, half resentful, and many enemies.  The army went home unpaid; the peace establishment consisted of eighty men; little or nothing was done to relieve the national debt or to carry on the business of government.  Even his proposition to admit the public to the galleries of Congress, in the hope of interesting it in governmental affairs, only drew upon him the sneer that he could go out on the balcony and make his speeches if he feared his eloquence was wasted.  He was accused of writing the Newburg address inciting the officers to civil war, because it was particularly well written, and of hurrying Congress to Trenton, when threatened by a mutinous regiment.  But he worked on undaunted, leaving his indelible mark; for he taught the States that their future prosperity and happiness lay in giving up to the Union some part of the imposts that might be levied on foreign commodities, and incidentally the idea of a double government; he proposed a definite system of funding the debts on continental securities, which gradually rooted in the common sense of the American people, and he inveighed with a bitter incisiveness, which was tempered by neither humour nor gaiety, against the traitorous faction in the pay of France.  He dissuaded Robert Morris from resigning, and introduced a resolution in eulogy of Washington’s management of his officers in the most critical hour of the Union’s history.  But his immediate accomplishment was small and discouraging, although his foresight may have anticipated what George Ticknor Curtis wrote many years later:—­