of the American cause which enabled him to begin with the pen his part in the Revolution, forcing the crisis, taking rank as a political philosopher when but a youth of seventeen; instead of bolting from his books to the battlefield at the first welcome call to arms.  Up to this time he had adhered to his resolution to let nothing impede the progress of his education, to live strictly in the hour until the time came to leave the college for the world.  Therefore, although he had heard the question of Colonies versus Crown argued week after week at Liberty Hall, and at the many New York houses where he dined of a Sunday with his friends, Stevens, Troup, and Fish, he had persistently refused to study the matter:  there were older heads to settle it and there was only one age for a man’s education.  Moreover, he had grown up with a deep reverence for the British Constitution, and his strong aristocratic prejudices inclined him to all the aloofness of the true conservative.  So while the patriots and royalists of King’s were debating, ofttimes concluding in sequestered nooks, Hamilton remained “The young West Indian,” an alien who cared for naught but book-learning, walking abstractedly under the great green shade of Batteau Street while Liberty Boys were shouting, and British soldiers swaggered with a sharp eye for aggression.  This period of philosophic repose in the midst of electric fire darting from every point in turn and sometimes from all points at once, endured from the October of his arrival to its decent burial in Boston shortly after his seventeenth birthday.

Boston was sober and depressed, stonily awaiting the vengeance of the crown for her dramatic defiance in the matter of tea.  Even in that rumbling interval, Hamilton learned, the Committee of Correspondence, which had directed the momentous act, had been unexcited and methodical, restraining the Mohawks day after day, hoping until the last moment that the Collector of Customs would clear the ships and send the tea whence it came.  Hamilton heard the wrongs of the colonies discussed without any of the excitement or pyrotechnical brilliancy to which he had become accustomed.  New York was not only the hot-bed of Toryism, but even such ardent Republicans as William Livingston, George Clinton, and John Jay were aristocrats, holding themselves fastidiously aloof from the rank and file that marched and yelled under the name of Sons of Liberty.  To Hamilton the conflict had been spectacular rather than real, until he met and moved with these sombre, undemonstrative, superficially unpleasing men of Boston; then, almost in a flash, he realized that the colonies were struggling, not to be relieved of this tax or that, but for a principle; realized that three millions of people, a respectable majority honourable, industrious, and educated, were being treated like incapables, apprehensive of violence if they dared to protest for their rights under the British Constitution.  Hamilton also learned that Boston was the conspicuous