THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH 581
advised him that anybody can cut off, but that the sewing on is an acquired art. Mr. Bryce feels strongly for the men who practised what Catharine thought so difficult, and he stops for a moment in the midst of his very impersonal treatise to deliver a panegyric on Alexander Hamilton. Tanto n011lini 1zullum par elogÏ1t'Jn. His merits can hardly be overstated. Talleyrand assured Ticknor that he had never kno\vn his equal; Se\vard calls him U the ablest and most effective statesman en- gaged in organising and establishing the union)J; Mac- master, the iconoclast, and Holst, poorly endowed with the gift of praise, unite in saying that he was the fore- most genius among public men in the new world; Guizot told Rush that The Federalist was the greatest work known to him, in the application of elementary principles of government to practical administration; his paradox in support of political corruption, so hard to reconcile with the character of an honest man, \vas repeated to the letter by Niebuhr. In estimating Hamilton we have to remember that he was in no sense the author of the constitution. In the convention he \vas isolated, and his plan was rejected. In The Federalist, written before he was thirty, he pleaded for a form of government which he distrusted and disliked. He was out of sYlnpathy with the spirit that prevailed, and was not the true representa- tive of the cause, like Madison, who said of him, "If his theory of government deviated from the republican standard, he had the candour to avow it, and the greater merit of co-operating faithfully in maturing and support- ing a system ,vhich \vas not his choice." The develop- tnent of the constitution, so far as it continued on his lines, was the work of Marshall, barely known to us by the extracts in late editions of the C01n1llentaries. "The Federalist," says Story, "could do little more than state the objects and general bearing of these powers and functions. The masterly reasoning of the chief - justice has follo\ved them out to their ultimate results and boundaries \vith a precision and clearness approaching, as near as may be, to mathematical demonstration." Morris:
