in the organization and of vigour in its operation." Hamilton's notion of a strong national government did err on the side of oppression at times. This is best evidenced by his warm support for the final form of the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798. Hamilton did not agree with Jefferson that the general public should control government. "Men," he said, "are reasoning rather than reasonable animals." His last letter on politics, written two days before his death, illustrates the two sides of his thinking already emphasized; in this letter he warns his New England friends against dismemberment of the union as "a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy, the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent." No judgment of Hamilton is more justly measured than James Madison's written in 1831. "That he possessed intellectual powers of the first order, and the moral qualities of integrity and honor in a captivating degree, has been awarded him by a suffrage now universal. If his theory of government deviated from the republican standard he had the candour to avow it, and thegreater merit of co-operating faithfully in mat...
