Man was a
moving arsenal in those long and lonely journeys, for the bear and the
panther were breeding undisturbed. But the month was hot, and those
forest depths were very cool; the scenery was often as magnificent as
primeval, and a generous hospitality at many a board dispelled, for an
interval, the political anxiety of Hamilton and his companions.
Hamilton, despite a mind trained to the subordination of private
interests to public duty, knew that it was the crisis of his own destiny
toward which he was hastening. He had bound up his personal ambitions
with the principles of the Federalist party--so called since the
publication in book form of the Publius essays; for not only was he
largely responsible for those principles, but his mind was too well
regulated to consider the alternative of a compromise with a possibly
victorious party which he detested. Perhaps his ambition was too
vaulting to adapt itself to a restricted field when his imagination had
played for years with the big ninepins of history; at all events, it was
inseparably bound up with nationalism in the boldest sense achievable,
and with methods which days and nights of severe thought had convinced
him were for the greatest good of the American people.
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