While the Bank of America was engrossing the attention of the Legislature and the nomination of a presidential candidate convulsed Congress, George Clinton closed his distinguished career at Washington on the 20th of April, 1812. If he left behind him a memory of long service which had been lived to his own advantage, it was by no means lived to the disadvantage of his country or his State. He did much for both. Perhaps he was better fitted for an instrument of revolution than a governor of peace, but the influence which he exercised upon his time was prodigious. In the two great events of his life--the revolt of the Colonies and the adoption of a Federal Constitution--he undoubtedly swayed the minds of his countrymen to a degree unequalled among those contemporaries who favoured independence and state supremacy. He lacked the genius of Hamilton, the scholarly, refined integrity of Jay, and the statesmanship of both; but he was by odds the strongest, ablest, and most astute man of his party in the State. Jay and Hamilton looked into the future, Clinton saw only the present. The former possessed a love for humanity and a longing for progress which encouraged them to work out a national existence, broad enough and strong enough to satisfy the ambition of a great nation a century after its birth; Clinton was satisfied to conserve what he had, unmoved by the great possibilities even then indistinctly outlined to the eye of the statesman whose vision was fixed intently upon an undivided America. But Clinton wisely conserved what was given to his keeping. As he grew older he grew more tolerant and humane, substituting imprisonment for the death penalty, and recommending a complete revision of the criminal laws. His administration, too, saw the earliest attempts made in a systematic way toward the spread of education among the multitudes, his message to the Legislature of 1795 urging a generous appropriation to common schools. This was the first suggestion of state aid. Colleges and seminaries had been remembered, but schools for the common people waited until Clinton had been governor for eighteen years. CHAPTER XVIII CLINTON AND THE PRESIDENCY 1812