Charles A Conant

Alexander Hamilton. by Charles A Conant

The difference between the career of Hamilton in America and that of the two greatest organizing minds of other countries Caesar and Napoleon marks the difference between Anglo-Saxon political ideals and capacity for self-government and those of other races. Where the organization of a strong government degenerated in Rome and France into absolutism, it tended in America, under the directing genius of Hamilton, to place in the hands of the people a more powerful instrument for executing their own will. So powerful a weapon was thus created that Hamilton himself became alarmed when it was seized by the hands of Jefferson, Madison, and other democratic leaders as the instrument of democratic ideas, and those long strides were taken in the states and under the federal government which wiped out the distinctions between classes, ' abolished the relations of church and state, extended the suffrage, and made the government only the servant of the popular will.