“I am not very well,” said Madison, peevishly, “but I realize the necessity,—­and that the papers should be read as extensively in Virginia as here.  I will write a few, and more if I can.”

But, as it came to pass, Madison wrote but fourteen separate papers of the eighty-five, although he collaborated with Hamilton on three others, and Jay wrote five only.  The remaining sixty-three, therefore, of the essays, collected during and after their publication under the title of “The Federalist,” which not only did so much to enlighten and educate the public mind and weaken the influence of such men as Clinton, but which still stand as the ablest exposition of the science of government, and as the parent of American constitutional law, were the work of Hamilton.

“It is the fortunate situation of our country,” said Hamilton, a few months later, at Poughkeepsie, “that the minds of the people are exceedingly enlightened and refined.”  Certainly these papers are a great tribute to the general intelligence of the American race of a century and more ago.  Selfish, petty, and lacking in political knowledge they may have been, but it is evident that their mental tone was high, that their minds had not been vulgarized by trash and sensationalism.  Hamilton’s sole bait was a lucid and engaging style, which would not puzzle the commonest intelligence, which he hoped might instruct without weighing heavily on the capacity of his humbler readers.  That he was addressing the general voter, as well as the men of a higher grade as yet unconvinced, there can be no doubt, for as New York State was still seven-tenths Clintonian, conversion of a large portion of this scowling element was essential to the ratification of the Constitution.  And yet he chose two men of austere and unimaginative style to collaborate with him; while his own style for purity, distinction, and profundity combined with simplicity, has never been excelled.

Betsey was ailing, and her doors closed to society; the children romped on the third floor or on the Battery.  Hamilton wrote chiefly at night, his practice occupying the best of the hours of day, but he was sensible of the calm of his home and of its incentive to literary composition; it never occurred to him to open his office in the evening.  Betsey, the while she knitted socks, listened patiently to her brilliant husband’s luminous discussions on the new Constitution—­which she could have recited backward—­and his profound interpretation of its principles and provisions.  If she worried over these continuous labours she made no sign, for Hamilton was racing Clinton, and there was not a moment to lose.  Clinton won in the first heat.  After a desperate struggle in the State Legislature the Hamiltonians succeeded in passing resolutions ordering a State Convention to be elected for the purpose of considering the Constitution; but the result in April proved the unabated power and industry of Clinton,—­the first, and not