In a published address, on January 22, 1795, Governor Clinton declined to stand for re-election in the following April because of ill health and neglected private affairs. Included in this letter was the somewhat apocryphal statement that he withdrew from an office never solicited, which he had accepted with diffidence, and from which he should retire with pleasure. The reader who has followed the story of his career through the campaigns of 1789 and 1792 will scarcely believe him serious in this declaration, although he undoubtedly retired with pleasure. At the time of his withdrawal, he had an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, but he was neither a sick man nor an old one, being then in his fifty-fifth year, with twelve years of honourable public life still before him. It is likely the reason in the old rhyme, "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day," had more to do with his retirement than shattered health and crippled fortune. Defeat has never been regarded helpful to future political preferment, and this shrewd reader of the signs of the times, his ambition already fixed on higher honours and more exalted place, saw the coming political change in New York as clearly and unmistakably as an approaching storm announced itself in an increase of his rheumatic aches. CHAPTER VII RECOGNITION OF EARNEST MEN 1795-1800 With Clinton out of the race for governor in 1795, his party's weakness discovered itself in the selection of Chief Justice Robert Yates, Hamilton's coalition candidate in 1789. It was a makeshift nomination, since none cared to run after Clinton's declination sounded a note of defeat. Yates' passion for office led him into strange blunders. He seemed willing to become the candidate of any party, under any conditions, at any time, if only he could step into the official shoes of George Clinton. He was excusable in 1789, perhaps, when the way opened up a fair chance of success, but in 1795 his ambition subjected him to ridicule as well as to humiliation. It was said derisively that he was defeated, although every freeholder in the State had voted for him.