I

TO A LADY OF HIGH CULTURE

THINK that the greatest misfortune in the intellectual life of women is that they do not hear the truth from men.

All men in cultivated society say to women as much as possible that which they may be supposed to wish to hear, and women are so much accustomed to this that they can scarcely hear without resentment an expression of opinion which takes no account of their personal and private feeling. The consideration for the feelings of women gives an agreeable tone to society, but it is fatal to the severity of truth. Observe a man of the world whose opinions are well known to you,-notice the little pause before he speaks to a lady. During that little pause he is turning over what he has to say, so as to present it in the manner that will please her best; and you may be sure that the integrity of truth will suffer in the process. If we compare what we know of the man with that which the lady hears from him, we perceive the immense disadvantages of her position. He ascertains what will please her, and that is what he administers. He professes to take a deep interest in things which he does not care for in the least, and he passes lightly over subjects and events which he knows to be of the most momentous importance to the world. The lady spends an hour more agreeably than if she heard opinions which would irritate, and prognostics which would alarm her, but she has missed an opportunity for culture, she has been confirmed in feminine illusions. If this happened only from time to time, the effect would not tell so much on the mental constitution; but it is incessant, it is continual. Men disguise their thoughts for women as if to venture into the feminine world were as dangerous as traveling in Arabia, or as if the thoughts themselves were criminal.

There appeared two or three years ago in Punch a clever drawing which might have served as an illustration to this subject. A fashionable doctor was visiting a lady in Belgravia who complained that she suffered from debility. Cod-liver oil being repugnant to her taste, the agreeable doctor, wise in his generation, blandly suggested as an effective substitute a mixture of cream and curaçoa. What that intelligent man did for his patient's physical constitution, all men of politeness do for the intellectual constitution of ladies. Instead of administering the

truth which would strengthen, though unpalatable, they administer intellectual cream and curaçoa.

The primary cause of this tendency to say what is most pleasing to women is likely to be as permanent as the distinction of sex itself. It springs directly from sexual feelings, it is hereditary and instinctive. Men will never talk to women with that rough frankness which they use between themselves. Conversation between the sexes will always be partially insincere. Still I think that the more women are respected, the more men will desire to be approved by them for what they are in reality, and the less they will care for approval which is obtained by dissimulation. It may be observed already that, in the most intellectual society of great capitals, men are considerably more outspoken before women than they are in the provincial middle classes. Where women have most culture, men are most open and sincere. Indeed, the highest culture has a direct tendency to command sincerity in others, both because it is tolerant of variety in opinion, and because it is so penetrating that dissimulation is felt to be of no use. By the side of an uncultivated woman, a man feels that if he says anything different from what she has been accustomed to, she will take offense; whilst if he says anything beyond the narrow range of her information, he will make her cold and uncomfortable. The most honest of men, in such a position, finds it necessary to be very cautious, and can scarcely avoid a little insincerity. But with a woman of culture equal to his own, these causes for apprehension have no existence, and he can safely be more himself.

These considerations lead me to hope that as culture becomes more general women will hear truth more frequently. Whenever this comes to pass, it will be, to them, an immense intellectual gain.

Letter VIII. on Women and Marriage complete.

From "Intellectual Life."

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

(1757-1804)

LEXANDER HAMILTON, the celebrated founder of the Federalist party, was born in the West Indies, January 11th, 1757. He came to the United States in 1772, and entered actively into politics before attaining his majority. The talent for political writing, which had such marked effect when he displayed it through the Federalist after the Constitution had been framed, attracted attention in 1774-75, and when he entered the army he became a favorite member of Washington's staff. After serving with distinction he was elected to the Continental Congress, and in 1787 to the convention which submitted the Federal Constitution to the states. In the New York convention, called to pass upon the Federal constitution, he met powerful opposition ably represented, and defeated it by a force and flexibility of intellect which had not been shown before in American public affairs. From October, 1787, to April, 1788, he co-operated with Jay and Madison in writing the Federalist essays, which appeared serially in the Independent Journal of New York. They owe their form to the Whig Examiner of Addison's time, and their spirit to strong Anglican conservatism and repugnance to everything French. The contest between English ideals and those of eighteenth-century France was waged in America with bitterness during the decade which preceded the actual hostilities of the Revolution, when Otis, Samuel Adams, and Jefferson represented the extreme of opposition to what was afterwards called Federalism. Otis seems first to have promulgated in' America the doctrine of "Individual Sovereignty," which was held by Virginia "Jacobins" with Jefferson, and afterwards by New England "Radicals" with Ralph Waldo Emerson,-who in his "English Traits" pronounces it the only distinctive "American idea." Otis died in 1783, however, and during the time of Hamilton's greatest successes, Jefferson was absent in France. Returning and finding how his followers and friends had been overmatched, Jefferson became embittered against Hamilton and began organizing the country for his overthrow. In his "Anas" Jefferson writes characteristically of the beginning of this contest, and the passage, while it cannot be fairly described, except as an exasperated attack, is vital for an understanding of Hamilton's career and of the next half-century of American history.

"The want of some authority which should procure justice to the public creditors," Jefferson writes, "and an observance of treaties with foreign nations, produced . . . the call of a convention of the states at Annapolis. Although, at this meeting, a difference of opinion was evident on the question of a republican or kingly government, yet so general through the states was the sentiment in favor of the former, that the friends of the latter confined themselves to a course of obstruction only, and delay, to everything proposed; they hoped that nothing being done, and all things going from bad to worse, a kingly government might be usurped, and submitted to by the people, as better than anarchy and wars internal and external, the certain consequences of the present want of a general government. The effect of their manoeuvres, with the defective attendance of Deputies from the states, resulted in the measure of calling a more general convention, to be held at Philadelphia. At this the same party exhibited the same practices, and with the same views of preventing a government of concord, which they foresaw would be republican, and of forcing through anarchy their way to monarchy. But the mass of that convention was too honest, too wise, and too steady, to be baffled and misled by their manœuvres. One of these was a form of government proposed by Col. Hamilton, which would have been in fact a compromise between the two parties of royalism and republicanism. According to this, the executive and one branch of the legislature were to be during good behavior, i. e., for life, and the governors of the states were to be named by these two permanent organs. This, however, was rejected; on which Hamilton left the convention, as desperate, and never returned again until near its final conclusion. These opinions and efforts, secret or avowed, of the advocates for monarchy had begotten great jealousy through the states generally; and this jealousy it was which excited the strong opposition to the conventional constitution, a jealousy which yielded at last only to a general determination to establish certain amendments as barriers against a government either monarchical or consolidated. In what passed through the whole period of these conventions, I have gone on the information of those who were members of them, being absent myself on my mission to France.

"I returned from that mission in the first year of the new government, having landed in Virginia in December, 1789, and proceeded to New York in March, 1790, to enter on the office of Secretary of State. Here, certainly, I found a state of things which, of all I had ever contemplated, I the least expected. I had left France in the first year of her revolution, in the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to these rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinner parties given me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversation filled me. Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself, for the most part, the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that

party from the legislative houses. Hamilton's financial system had then passed. It had two objects: first, as a puzzle, to exclude popular understanding and inquiry; second, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature,— for he avowed the opinion that man could be governed by one of two motives only, force or interest; force, he observed, in this country was out of the question, and the interests, therefore, of the members must be laid hold of, to keep the legislative in unison with the executive. And with grief and shame it must be acknowledged that his machine was not without effect; that even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests, and to look after personal rather than public good."

This defines the partisan issue on which the Federalist party was defeated and disorganized in 1800. Hamilton, who had been Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 to 1795, was appointed Commander in Chief of the army in 1799, and he was the real leader of the Federalist party in the struggle which seemed to result in the complete repudiation of his ideas. This appearance was delusive, however, for his ideas represent the inevitable tendencies of all parties when they are in administration; and regardless of party names and individual preferences, the Hamiltonian idea came back under Jefferson's own administration and developed until it resulted in John Quincy Adams. Briefly stated, it was that governments are founded to do everything which, in their own opinion, promote the general welfare. Jefferson's theory was that their object is the exercise of granted powers as trustees acting under instructions from the grantors. The Embargo and the purchase of Louisiana without waiting for the constitutional amendment which Jefferson said was necessary to authorize it, were in full accord with Hamilton's ideal of government, and but for Burr's bullet he might have lived to indorse as ideal Republicanism that for favoring which he himself had been so hotly denounced as a disguised monarchist. John Adams, who represented with Hamilton the Federalistic idea in the campaign of 1800, did live to renew toward Jefferson the esteem which had characterized their association in the early days of the struggle against England. Every party in opposition must become more or less Jeffersonian to succeed, while the whole tendency of power is to make every party in administration Hamiltonian. Perhaps this is logic in which reason ought never to acquiesce, but it is the logic of events; and except as it is checked by reason, it controls.

W. V. B.