courage to refuse it.  I believe I have; but that is neither here nor there, and I shall fall.  Should I survive, the sole reason would be danger ahead.  For the last two years I have felt myself moving steadily deathward.  By this abrupt exit I but anticipate the inevitable a year or two, and doubtless it seems to the destiny that controls my affairs as the swiftest way to dispose of Burr, and awaken the country to the other dangers that menace it.  To the last I am but a tool.  No man was ever so little his own master, so thrust upon a planet for the accomplishment of public and impersonal ends alone.  I have been permitted a certain amount of domestic felicity as my strength was best conserved thereby, my mind free to concentrate upon public duties.  I was endowed with the gift of fascination, that men should follow me without question, and this country be served with immediate effectiveness, I have received deep and profound satisfaction from both these concessions, but it would not matter in the least if I had not.  They were inevitable with the equipment for the part I had to play.  I have had an astonishing and conquering career against the mightiest obstacles, and I may as a further concession, be permitted an enduring place in history; but that, also, is by the way.  I conquered, not to gratify my love of power and to win immortal fame, but that I might accomplish the part for which I was whirled here from an almost inaccessible island fifteen hundred miles away—­to play my part in the creation of this American empire.  It has been a great part, creatively the greatest part.  The proof that no native-born American could have played it lies in the fact that he did not.  The greatest of her men have abetted me; not one has sought to push me aside and do my work.  My only enemies have been those who would pull my structure down; the most ambitious and individual men in the Union, of the higher sort, are my willing followers.  To win them I never plotted, nor did I ever seek to dazzle and blind them.  Part of my equipment was the power to convince them without effort of my superior usefulness; there was no time to lose.  I am nothing but a genius, encased in such human form as would best serve its purpose; an atom of the vast creative Being beyond the Universe, loaned for an infinitesimal part of time to the excrescence calling itself The United States of North America, on the dot called Earth.  Now the part is played, and I am to be withdrawn.  That my human heart is torn with insupportable anguish, matters not at all.  I leave that behind.”

Hamilton had been bred in the orthodox religion of his time, and its picturesqueness, including its ultimates of heaven and hell, had taken firm hold of his ardent imagination.  But in his cosmic moments the formulations of this planet played no part.