Il6 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 



contrast between Washington's efficiency and the in- 

 efficiency of Congress had done much to confirm 

 them ; his own winter of hard work in Congress no 

 doubt confirmed them still more. Every man has the 

 defects of his excellences, and this element of narrow- 

 ness in Hamilton's view of popular government was 

 closely related to the qualities that made him so pre- 

 eminent as a constructive thinker. 



One winter of such hopeless work was for the 

 present enough for Hamilton. In 1783 he returned 

 to the practice of law and began rising rapidly at the 

 bar. Even in his professional practice he had an 

 opportunity to figure as a defender of the federal 

 government against the state sovereignty. Just as it 

 was in later years with Daniel Webster, his first 

 famous law case stood in a noticeable relation to his 

 career as a statesman. Hamilton was honourably dis- 

 tinguished for his vigorous condemnation of the cruel 

 and silly persecution to which the Tories, especially 

 in New York, were subjected after the close of the 

 war. His first great case, in 1784, was one in which 

 the treaty obligations of the United States to protect 

 the Tories from further abuse came into conflict with 

 a persecuting act which the New York legislature had 

 lately passed against such people. There was then 

 no federal Supreme Court, or any other federal court, 

 in which such questions could be settled. The case 

 was one which must begin and end in the state courts 

 of New York, and its bearing upon the political ques- 

 tion was rather implied than asserted. It was a case 

 in which, if the state law were upheld, a poor widow 

 would recover property of which the vicissitudes of 

 war deprived her ; but if the state law were set aside, a 



