fight.  The business was too ugly and the prospect was almost certain defeat.  Were the first battle lost, he knew that a sharper engagement would immediately succeed:  his political foresight anticipated the tie, and he alone had a consummate knowledge of the character of Burr.  That the Republicans would offer Burr the office of Vice-President was as positive as that Jefferson would be their first and unanimous choice.  Clinton and Chancellor Livingston might be more distinguished men than the little politician, but the first was in open opposition to Jefferson, and the second was deaf.  Burr’s conquest of New York entitled him to reward, and he would accept it and intrigue with every resource of his cunning and address for the larger number of votes, regardless of the will of the people.  If the result were a tie, the Federals would incline to anybody rather than Jefferson, and Hamilton would be obliged to throw into the scale his great influence as leader of his party for the benefit of the man he would gladly have attached to a fork and set to toast above the coals of Hell.  He had no score to settle with Burr, but to permit him to become President of the United States would be a crime for which the leader of the Federalist party would be held responsible.  When the inevitable moment came he should hand over the structure he had created to the man who had desired to rend it from gable to foundation; both because it was the will of the people and because Jefferson was the safer man of the two.

So far his statesmanship triumphed, as it had done in every crisis which he had been called upon to manipulate, and as it would in many more.  But for once, and as regarded the first battle, it failed him, and he made no attempt to invoke it.  This was the blackest period of his inner life, and there were times when he never expected to emerge from its depths.  The threatened loss of the magnificent power he had wielded, the hatreds that possessed and overwhelmed him, the seeming futility of almost a lifetime of labour, sacrifices without end and prodigal dispensing of great gifts, the constant insults of his enemies, and the public ingratitude, had saturated his spirit with a raging bitterness and roused the deadliest passions of his nature.  The marah he had passed through while a member of the Cabinet was shallow compared to the depths in which he almost strangled to-day.  Not only was this the final accumulation, but the inspiring and sustaining affection, the circumscribing bulwark, of Washington was gone from him.  “He was an Aegis very essential to me,” he had said sadly, and he felt his loss more every day that he lived.