est proof the statesman or politician can give of a moral courage which ought to gain for him all the more respect. But whether that respect must be denied to Mr. Madison, because he was governed by other and lower motives, is the question. There had been no change of political principles either in the party he had left or the party he had joined; but each was striving with all its might to adapt the old doctrines to the altered condition of affairs under the new Union. The change was wholly in Mr. Madison. That which had been white to him was now black; that which had been black was now as the driven snow. Why was this? Had he come to see that in all those years he had been wrong? Or had he suddenly learned, not that he was wrong, but that he had mistaken a straight and narrow path for the broad road which would lead to the goal he was seeking? These are not pleasant questions. He had served his country well; one does not like to doubt whether it was with a selfish rather than a noble purpose. But of any public man who changed front as he changed, the question always will be what moved him? Not to ask it in regard to Madison is to drop out of sight the turning-point of his career; not to consider it is to leave unheeded essential light upon one side of his character. For his own fortunes the choice he made was judicious, if to "gain the whole world" is always the wisest and best thing to do. He gained his world, and was wise and virtuous in his generation according to the vote of a large majority. Whether that decision still holds good it is not so easy to say; probably it does, however; for the popular estimate of men often remains unchanged long after the judgment upon the events which gave them celebrity is completely reversed. But history, in the long run, weighs with even scales; and the verdict on Madison's character usually comes with that pitiful recommendation to mercy from a jury loath to condemn. Admiration for his great services in the Constitutional Convention and after it, when its work was presented to the people for their approval, has never been withheld; upon his official integrity and his high sense of honor in all his personal relations, except when obligation to party may have overshadowed it, there rests no cloud; and his intellectual power is never questioned. One having these recognized qualities, and who for five and twenty years was generally high in office, must needs be held in high estimation especially in a new country where fame, like everything else, is cheap. Nevertheless, impartial historians, who venture to believe that nature admits of imperfections in a native of Virginia, declare their conviction that Mr. Madison either wanted the strength and courage to resist the influence of those about him, or that the ambition of the politician was strong enough to overcome any consideration of principles that might stand in his way. CHAPTER XIII. FRENCH POLITICS. If any proof were wanting of how completely Madison had gone over to the opposition, he gave it in the memorable attack upon the Secretary of the Treasury in the spring of 1793, within four days of the close of the second session of the Second Congress. It was hoped by that proceeding to overwhelm Hamilton with disgrace, and that the President would feel himself obliged to expel him from the cabinet. When the resolutions with this aim were offered, a member said that delicacy, decency, and every rule of justice had been violated; "a more unhandsome proceeding he had never seen in Congress;" he might have remained a member to this day, and, save for the attempts in our time to expel John Quincy Adams and Joshua R. Giddings, not have changed his opinion. In the course of the preceding year Hamilton, under various signatures, had met his opponents in the newspapers. But it was a veil, not a visor, behind which he fought; for everybody knew from whom came the vigorous blows that he dealt 13 about him right and left. It was a boast always of Jefferson that he never condescended to newspaper controversy; but it was pretty well understood that he himself did not enter upon that rather unsatisfactory mode of warfare, because he preferred the safer method of fighting by proxy. Hamilton never was in doubt as to who was his real antagonist, and he aimed his blows over the heads of his petty assailants to where he knew they would hit home. They left bad bruises upon his colleague in the cabinet. Among other papers of the time, though not a newspaper article, was an official letter to the President, in which Hamilton defended his principles and his measures. Early in 1792, the President, longing to escape the toils of public life and to spend the rest of his days in tranquillity, had consulted Madison and his two Secretaries, Jefferson and Hamilton, upon the propriety of his declining a reëlection. He soon changed his mind, influenced, perhaps, as much by the dissensions, so evident in the expostulations of his friends, as by the expostulations themselves. He deprecated this open feud between his Secretaries as a public misfortune, and sought, if he could not reconcile them, to silence it. That the Federalists were monarchists, as Jefferson and Madison never ceased asserting, he knew was not true, without the emphatic and indignant declarations of Hamilton, Adams, and other leading men of that party, when they con descended to notice a charge which they deemed so absurd that it was difficult to believe that anybody could make it in earnest. But, while he knew there was no real danger from that quarter, he could not fail to see that the reverence and love in which he was held constituted a bond of unity, so long as he remained chief magistrate; and he may have felt that, should he retire, there was no other common tie strong enough at that moment to hold together a Union, the possible dissolution of which was, both at the North and at the South, considered with calmness, sometimes with complacency, and, when party passion was at a red heat, even as a thing to be prayed for. At any rate the President consented to take the advice of the counselors whom he had consulted; but in asking that advice he unwittingly aggravated the quarrel among them which caused him so much uneasiness. Jefferson, in the arguments he set forth both in conversation and by letter to influence Washington's decision, dwelt upon the unhappy condition of public affairs. It was a storm which he himself meant to get out of by retiring to Monticello, though he thought it was Washington's duty to remain at the helm and keep an eye to windward. This unhappy condition of affairs, he said, had all come from the course pursued by the Secretary of the Treasury, and was the natural consequence of the acts of Congress in relation to the public debt, |