He never traced the betrayal of a secret which all concerned had promised to keep inviolate, but he had his suspicions.  Mrs. Croix, now living in a large house on the Bowling Green, was the animated and resourceful centre of Jacobinism.  She wore a red cap to the theatre and a tri-coloured cockade on the street.  Her salon was the headquarters of the Republican leaders, and many a plot was hatched in her inspiring presence.  The Virginian Junta were far too clever to put themselves in the power of a drunkard like Callender, but they were constantly in collusion with Mrs. Croix.  They knew that she feared nothing under heaven, and that she had devoted herself to Hamilton’s ruin.  Callender drew upon her for virus whenever his own supply ran down, and would have hailed the Reynolds concoction, even had it gone to him naked and begging.  Hamilton saw the shadow of a fair hand throughout the entire pamphlet, and, indeed, could have traced many an envenomed shaft, since 1793, to a source which once had threatened to cloy him with its sweetness.

Meanwhile John Adams had been elected President of the United States, and Thomas Jefferson, Vice-President.  Hamilton had made no secret of the fact that he should prefer to see Thomas Pinckney succeed Washington, for he contemplated the possibility of Adams in the Executive Chair, with distrust and uneasiness.  In spite of that eminent statesman’s intrepidity, integrity, and loyal Federalism, he was, in Hamilton’s opinion, too suspicious, jealous of influence, and hot headed, to be a safe leader in approaching storms.  With Pinckney as a brilliant and popular figurehead, Hamilton well knew that his own hand would remain on the helm.  With the irascible old gentleman from Massachusetts in the Chair, his continued predominance was by no means certain.  Washington once said of Hamilton that he undoubtedly was ambitious, but that his ambition was of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand; adding that his judgement was intuitively great.  The truth was that Hamilton regarded the United States as his child.  He had made her wealthy and respected, he foresaw a future importance for her equal to that of any state in Europe.  “I anticipate,” he wrote to Rufus King, “that this country will, ere long, assume an attitude correspondent with its great destinies—­majestic, efficient, and operative of great things.  A noble career lies before it.”  The first of the “Imperialists,” he had striven for years to awaken the Government to the importance of obtaining possession of Louisiana and the Floridas, and he also had his eye on South America.  Naturally, he wanted no interruption; the moment the security of the country was threatened, he was as alert and anxious as if his nursery were menaced with an Indian invasion.  Without conceit or vanity no man ever was more conscious of his great powers; moreover, no American had made such sacrifices as he.  Washington and almost all the leading