t great contest neither has been nor will be
either rank or money."[58] After his return from Europe, when Governor
Clinton's division of patronage and treatment of royalists had become
intensely objectionable, Jay was again urged to stand as a candidate,
but he answered that "a servant should not leave a good old master for
the sake of more pay or a prettier livery."[59] If this was good
reasoning in 1786 and 1789, when he was secretary of foreign affairs,
it was better reasoning in 1792, when he was chief justice of the
United States; but the pleadings of Hamilton seem to have set a
presidential bee buzzing, or, at least, to have started ambition in a
mind until now without ambition. At any rate, Jay, suddenly and
without any apparent reason, consented to exchange the most exalted
office next to President, to chance the New York governorship.

[Footnote 58: William Jay, _Life of John Jay_, Vol. 1, p. 162.]

[Footnote 59: _Ibid._, p. 198.]

There had never been a time since John Jay entered public life that he
was not the most popular man in the city of New York. In 1788 he
received for delegate to the Poughkeepsie convention, twenty-seven
hundred and thirty-five votes out of a total of twenty-eight hundred
and thirty-three. John Adams called him "a Roman" because he resembled
Cato more than any of his contemporaries. Jay's life divided itself
into three distinct epochs of twenty-eight years each--study and the
practice of law, public employment, and retirement. During the years
of uninterrupted public life, he ran the gamut of office-holding. It
is a long catalogue, including delegate to the Continental Congress,
framer of the New York Constitution, chief justice of the New York
Supreme Court, president of the Continental Congress, minister to
Spain, member of the Peace Commission, secretary of foreign affairs,
chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, negotiator of the
Jay treaty, and finally governor of New York. No other American save
John Quincy Adams and John Marshall ever served his country so
continuously in such exalted and responsible place. On his return from
Europe after an absence of five years, Adams said he returned to his
country "like a bee to its hive, with both legs loaded with merit and
honour."[60]

[Footnote 60: To Thos. Barclay, May 24, 1784, _Hist. Mag._, 1869, p.
358.]

Jay accepted the nomination for governor in 1792, on condition that he
be not asked to take part in the campaign