“I will listen to no fears,” cried Hamilton, who at all events had no mind to be tormented by any but his own.  “Are we not alive?  Are we not in health?  Are not our intellectual powers at their ripest point of development?  Can Clinton, Melancthon Smith, Yates, Lansing, Jones, make a better showing?”

“We are nineteen against forty-six,” said Jay, with conceivable gloom.

“True.  But there is no reason why we should not shortly be forty-six against nineteen.”

“We certainly are Right against the most unstatesman-like Selfishness the world has ever seen,” observed Duane.

“Would that experience justified us in thinking well enough of the human race to gather courage from that fact,” replied Hamilton.  “It is to the self-interest of the majority we shall have to appeal.  Convince them that there is neither career nor prosperity for them in an isolated State, and we may drag them up to a height which is safer than their mire, simply because it is better, or better because it is safer.  This is a time to practice patriotism, but not to waste time talking about it.”

“Your remarks savour of cynicism,” replied Jay, “but I fear there is much truth in them.  It is only in the millennium, I suppose, that we shall have the unthinkable happiness of seeing on all sides of us an absolute conformity to our ideals.”

In spite of the close, if somewhat formal, friendship between Jay and Hamilton, the latter was often momentarily depressed by the resemblance of this flawless character to, and its rigid contrasts from, his dead friend Laurens.  Jay was all that Laurens had passionately wished to be, and apparently without effort; for nature had not balanced him with a redeeming vice, consequently with no power to inspire hate or love.  Had he been a degree greater, a trifle more ambitious, or had circumstances isolated him in politics, he would have been an even lonelier and loftier figure than Washington, for our Chief had one or two redeeming humanities; as it was, he stood to a few as a character so perfect that they marvelled, while they deplored his lack of personal influence.  But his intellect is in the rank which stands just beneath that of the men of genius revealed by history, and he hangs like a silver star of the tropics upon the sometimes dubious fields of our ancestral heavens.  Nevertheless, he frequently inspired Hamilton with so poignant a longing for Laurens that our impetuous hero was tempted to wish for an exchange of fates.

“In the millennium we will all tell the truth and hate each other,” answered Hamilton.  “And we either shall all be fools, or those irritants will be extinct; in any case we shall be happy, particularly if we have someone to hate.”

“Ah, now you jest,” said Duane, smiling.  “For you are logical or nothing. You may be happy when on the warpath, but the rest of us are not.  And you are the last man to be happy in a millennium by yourself.”