higher methods failed, coercion.

"What imperious method are you devising, Hamilton?" asked Livingston.
"Your lips are set; your eyes are almost black. I've seen you like that
in court, but never in good company before. You look as if considering a
challenge to mortal combat."

Hamilton's brow cleared, and he laughed with that mercurial lightness
which did more to preserve the balance of what otherwise would have been
an overweighted mind than any other quality it possessed.

"Well, am I not to fight a duel?" he asked. "Would that I could call
Clinton out and settle the question as easily as that. I disapprove of
duelling, but so critical a moment as this would justify anything short
of trickery. We'll leave that to Clinton; but although there is no vast
difference between my political and my private conscience, there are
recourses which are as fair in political as in martial warfare, and I
should be found ingenuous and incapable did I fail to make use of them."

"Well, you love a fight," said Jay, without experiencing the humour of
his remark. "I believe you would rather fight than sit down in good
company at any time, and you are notoriously convivial. But easy
conquest would demoralize you. If I do not mistake, you have the
greatest battle of your career, past or present, immediately ahead of
you--and it means so much to all of us--I fear--I fear--"

"I will listen to no fears," cried Hamilton, who at all events had no
mind to be tormented by any but his own. "Are we not alive? Are we not
in health? Are not our intellectual powers at their ripest point of
development? Can Clinton, Melancthon Smith, Yates, Lansing, Jones, make
a better showing?"

"We are nineteen against forty-six," said Jay, with conceivable gloom.

"True. But there is no reason why we should not shortly be forty-six
against nineteen."

"We certainly are Right against the most unstatesman-like Selfishness
the world has ever seen," observed Duane.

"Would that experience justified us in thinking well enough of the human
race to gather courage from that fact," replied Hamilton. "It is to the
self-interest of the majority we shall have to appeal. Convince them
that there is neither career nor prosperity for them in an isolated
State, and we may drag them up to a height which is safer than their
mire, simply because it is better, or better because it is safer. This
is a time to practice patriotism, but not to waste time talking about
it."