For a statesman of forty-seven, and one of the most distinguished and successful men in the country, the literary author of The Declaration of Independence, the father of many beneficent and popular laws in his own State, a minister to foreign courts and one of the deepest and subtlest students of human nature of his century, to find himself fooled and played with by a young man of thirty-three, relegated by him to a second place in the Cabinet and country, means—­meant in those days, at least—­hate of the most remorseless quality.  Jefferson was like a volcano with bowels of fire and a crater which spilled over in the night.  He smouldered and rumbled, a natural timidity preventing the splendour of fireworks.  But he was deadly.

He and Madison met often during these holidays, and an object of their growing confidence was James Monroe, the new Senator from Virginia.  Monroe was a fighter, and hatred of Hamilton was his religion.  Moreover, he disapproved with violence of every measure of the new government, and everybody connected with it, from Washington down, Jefferson excepted; Randolph he held to be a trimmer, and overlooked the fact that although he himself had opposed the Constitution with all his words, he was one of the first to take office under it.  Jefferson needed but this younger man’s incentive to disapprove more profoundly not only assumption, but Hamilton’s design to establish a National Bank.  That was the most criminal evidence of an ultimate dash for a throne which the Secretary of the Treasury, whose place in the Cabinet should have been second to his own, but who was the very head and front of the Administration, had yet betrayed.  And as for the triumphal progress of Washington through the States in the previous autumn, and again before leaving for Mount Vernon upon the close of the last Congress, a king could have done no more.  The new Republic was tottering on its rotten foundations, and Jefferson and his able lieutenants vowed themselves to the rescue.  Madison was the anti-government leader in the House, Monroe would abet him in the Senate, and Jefferson would undertake the fight in the Cabinet.  It cannot be said that he liked the prospect, for he read his fellow-beings too well to mistake the mettle of Hamilton.  He was a peaceable soul, except when in his study with pen in hand, but stem this monarchical tide he would, and bury Hamilton under the dam.

“We are three to one,” he said reassuringly to his coadjutors.  “He is brilliant.  I do not deny it.  But against a triple power—­”

“He is worth any three men I ever knew,” said Madison, drearily.  “We shall have to work harder than he will.”

Jefferson lifted his pen, and squinted thoughtfully at its point.  Monroe, who was the youngest of the trio, laughed aloud.

And these were the forces of which Hamilton felt the shock shortly after the convening of Congress.

XXIII