Such a sudden and tempestuous change in the popularity of a public official is unprecedented in the history of American politics.

In a night the whole State was thrown into a ferment of intense excitement, the storm of vituperation seeming to centre in New York city.

Trivial facts frequently throw light upon important designs.

No one can be blind to the finger of party spirit, visible in these and similar transactions.

Nevertheless the country was greatly and permanently benefited.

Up to that time men might have been executed for stealing a few loaves of high-priced bread to relieve the sufferings of a hungry family.

Under Jay's humane plea for mercy the death penalty was limited to treason, murder, and stealing from a church.

Jay's administration might be called the reward days of earnest, able men, whose meritorious service became their passport to office.

If Jay had never done anything else, the appointment of Kent would immortalise him, just as the selection of John Marshall placed a halo about the head of President Adams.

He was making brilliant way in politics, showing himself an administrator, a debater, and a leader of consummate ability; but he steadily refused to withdraw from the professional path along which he was to move with such distinction.

He will always be remembered in history as judge-advocate of the court that tried Major André.

He belonged to that coterie of brilliant young men, noted for bravery and endurance, who quickly found favour with the fighting generals of the Revolution.

It was a strange coincidence, one brother resisting Parliament in Congress, the other resisting Congress in Parliament.

That inherent defect came from his mother, who gave him, also, a brilliancy and versatility that other members of the family did not share, making him more conspicuously active in high places during the exciting days of the Revolution.

He did not, like Jay, outline a constitution, but he believed, with Jay, in balancing wealth against numbers, and in contending for the protection of the rights of property against the spirit of democracy.

With Washington and Greene he opposed the Conway cabal; with Jay and Livingston he drafted the Constitution of the State; with Hamilton and Madison he stood for the Federal Constitution, the revision of its style being committed to his pen.

Although his influence, even among specialists, has probably faded now, he inspired the scientific thought of his time, and established societies which still exist, and whose history, up to the time of his death in 1831, was largely his…

Opposition growing out of his famous treaty had entirely subsided, salutary changes in laws comforted the people, and with Hamilton's financial system, then thoroughly understood and appreciated, came unprecedented good times.

He added learning to great natural ability, and brilliancy to profound thought; and although so deaf as to make communication with him difficult, he nearly concealed the defect by his remarkable eloquence and conversational gifts.

He lacked the creative genius of Hamilton, the prescient gifts of Jay, and the skill of Burr to marshal men for selfish purposes, but he was at home in debate with the ablest men of his time, a master of sarcasm, of trenchant wit, and of…

He reasoned, as every ambitious New York statesman has reasoned from that day to this, that if he could carry the State in an off year, he would be needed in a presidential year.

This reasoning reduces the governorship to a sort of spring-board from which to vault into the White House, and, although only one man in a century has performed the feat, it has always figured as a popular and potent factor in the…

But the fact that Jay carried legislative districts in which Republicans sent DeWitt Clinton and Ambrose Spencer to the Senate, would indicate that confidence in Jay, if not dislike of Livingston, had been the principal factor in this…

Under the Act of Sedition a citizen could be dragged from his bed at night and taken hundreds of miles from home to be tried for circulating a petition asking that these laws be repealed.

The absence of violent democratic innovations was the Constitution's remarkable feature.