meshes, she pulled a string and back he came.  Perhaps this is the reason why no specific account of his numerous alleged amours have come down to us.  He is vaguely accused of being the Lothario of his time, irresistible and indefatigable; but of all famous men whose names are enlivened with anecdotes of gallantry in the vast bulk of the world’s unwritten history, he alone is the hero of much mysterious affirmation but of no particular romance.  The Reynolds affair is open history and not a case in point.  It is probable that, owing to inherent fickleness and Betsey’s gentle manipulation, his affairs rarely lasted long enough to attract attention.  It is one of the accidents of life that the world barely knew of his acquaintance with Eliza Croix, she who has come down to us as Madame Jumel; and such a thing could not happen twice.  But whether or not he possessed in all their perfection the proclivities of so great and impetuous and passionate a genius, it is certain that he loved his wife devotedly, and above all other women, so long as his being held together.  His home was always his Mecca, and he left it only when public duty compelled his presence in exile.

III

In February he went to the Assembly to fight Clinton’s opposition to the harassing need of conferring a permanent revenue upon Congress.  He had already written a memorial, distributed over the State, setting forth the dangerous position of the country.  But Clinton was lord of the masses, and their representatives in the Legislature had been trained to think as he thought.  They honoured him because he had made New York the greatest State in the Union, not yet realizing that he had brought her into disrepute at home and abroad, and that his selfish policy was now hastening her to her ruin.  To increase the power of Congress was to encourage the spirit of Nationalism, and that meant the sure decline of the States and of himself.  The fight was hot and bitter.  Clinton won; but the thinking men present took Hamilton’s words home and pondered upon them, and in time they bore fruit.

After many delays the Convention was summoned to meet at Philadelphia on the 14th of May.  History calls it the Constitutional Convention, but its promoters were careful to give the States-right people no such guide to contravention.  The violent oppositionists of all change slumbered peacefully, while the representatives of the more enlightened were appointed to the Convention under moderately worded and somewhat vague resolutions; and some of them went as vaguely.  Congress, after a characteristic and selfish hesitation, and a thorough fright induced by the Massachusetts rebellion, was finally persuaded to give her official sanction to the proposed Convention.  Hamilton secured his appointment as a delegate,—­after a hard fight to have New York represented at all,—­and found himself saddled with two Clintonians, Robert Yates and John Lansing, Jr.  But the first great step for which he had struggled, since his Morristown letter to the Financier of the Revolution seven years before, was assured at last.