406 GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND 



and benevolence or providence for the many cannot but be 

 blessed. The secretary of the confederate treasury, Mem- 

 minger, was far above the men in Davis' cabinet in correct 

 understanding, and that edifice, discarding the sound experi- 

 ence of nations, exhausted itself before it ceased to fight. The 

 military ardor which made him the chief victim of the bank- 

 rupt Burr's gamester shot probably took from Hamilton the 

 fifty years his wife survived him. Presidential ambition is 

 equally incompatible with steady financial statesmanship. 

 The art of evading responsibility is the financier's stultification. 

 Gallatin, Crawford, R. J. Walker, Howell Cobb, Chase, John 

 Sherman, are instances of men who weight themselves with 

 treasure to win a jockey race. 



The severest comment upon Aaron Burr's reputed talents 

 is that he who would be president and an emperor could 

 not make a living either by his talents or his probity. His 

 second wife, a former mistress, turned him out of the house 

 for appropriating her rents. He was the natural founder of 

 Tammany hall. Alexander Hamilton, according to the diary 

 of Gouverneur Morris, who wrote it there the day he eulo- 

 gized Hamilton's ashes, was an illegitimate son, but his 

 financial genius remade him family ties. 



It is not necessary to remind you that the Rothschilds, 

 who are now taking care of our currency, established their 

 fortune upon the loan of the British subsidy for Hessian troops 

 to subdue America; nor that half the foundation of the Bar- 

 ings, whose failure made our misery, was the fortune of Senator 

 William Bingham, of Philadelphia, whose daughter married 

 Baring. Her sister, who had been seduced by Count Tilly, 

 a roue noble in Philadelphia, was lifted out of her humility by 

 another Baring marrying her. European travel, foreign 

 society, profusion and fast life extinguished this family here, 

 and in the abbey church at Bath, England, I read the tablet 

 over William Bingham, Robert Morris' successor, and the 

 descendant of one of Paris' Quaker blacksmiths. 



The life of Jacob Ridgway's heiress, Mme. Rush, of Phila- 

 delphia, was equally foreign and fast. Ridgway was the 

 banker rival of Stephen Girard, and, like Bingham, used our 

 consular service to increase his wealth. His daughter had 



