"Adieu," he said. "I go to ruminate upon our Captain's diplomacy, and to pursue the ankle of Mrs. Croix. Be sure that the one will not interfere with the other, but will mutually stimulate."
The other gentlemen adjourned to the dining room.
The story of the Convention has been told so often that only the merest outline is necessary here; those who have not before this read at least one of the numberless reports, would be the last to wish its multigenerous details. To the students of history there is nothing new to tell, as may be the case with less exploited incidents of Hamilton's career. Someone has said that it was an assemblage of hostile camps, and it certainly was the scene of intense and bitter struggles, of a heterogeneous mass blindly striving to cohere, whilst a thousand sectional interests tugged at the more familiar of the dual ideal; of compromise after compromise; of a fear pervading at least one-half that the liberties of republicanism were menaced by every energetic suggestion; of the soundest judgement and patriotism compelled to truckle to meaner sentiments lest they get nothing; of the picked men of the Confederacy, honourable, loyal, able, and enlightened, animated in the first and last instance by a pure and common desire for the highest welfare of the country, driven to war upon one another by the strength of their conflicting opinions; ending--among the thirty-nine out of the sixty-one delegates who signed the Constitution--in a feeling as closely resembling general satisfaction as individual disappointments would permit.
At first so turbulent were the conditions, that Franklin, who troubled the Almighty but little himself, arose and suggested that the meetings be opened with prayer. After this sarcasm, and the submission of his mild compromise with the Confederation, he sat and watched the painted sun behind Washington's chair, pensively wondering if the artist had intended to convey the idea of a rise or a setting. Hamilton presented his draft at the right moment, and the startled impression it made quite satisfied him, particularly as his long speech to the Committee of the Whole was received with the closest attention. Nothing could alter his personal fascination, and even his bitterest enemies rarely left their chairs while he spoke. The small figure, so full of dignity and magnetizing power that it excluded every other object from their vision, the massive head with a piercing force in every line of its features, the dark eyes blazing and flashing with a fire that never had been seen in the eyes of a mere mortal before, the graceful rapid gestures, and the passionate eloquence which never in its most apparently abandoned moments failed to be sincere and logical, made him for the hour the glory of friend and enemy alike, although the reaction was correspondingly bitter. Upon this occasion he spoke for six hours without the interruption of a scraping heel; and what the Convention did not know about the science of government before he finished with them, they never would learn elsewhere. Although he made but this one speech, he talked constantly to the groups surrounding him wherever he moved. To his original scheme he had too much tact to make further allusion; but his general opinions, ardently propounded, his emphatic reiteration of the demoralized country's need for a national government, and of the tyrannies inherent in unbridled democracies, wedged in many a chink. Nevertheless, he was disgusted and disheartened when he left for New York, at the end of May. The Convention was chaos, but he could accomplish nothing more than what he hoped he might have done; the matter was now best in the hands of Madison and Gouverneur Morris, and his practice could no longer be neglected.