For three years Hamilton worked on with a hope which was never broken, constantly adding to his fame. And then came the fatal error of his life. All along he had opposed Aaron Burr. When named for a foreign mission, Hamilton helped to defeat him. When the tie vote came between Jefferson and Burr in the Presidential returns, Hamilton said, "The appointment of Burr as President will disgrace our country abroad." When Burr was nominated for Governor of New York, Hamilton used every effort to defeat him, and succeeded. Burr, exasperated and disappointed at his failures, sent Hamilton a challenge. He wrote to Hamilton, "_Political_ opposition can never absolve gentlemen from the necessity of a rigid adherence to the laws of honor and the rules of decorum. I neither claim such privilege nor indulge it in others." Alas! that some men in public life, even now, forget the "laws of honor and the rules of decorum" in their treatment of opponents. Everything in Hamilton's career protested against this suicidal combat. He was only forty-seven, distinguished and beloved, with a wife and seven children dependent upon him. Before going to the fatal meeting, he wrote his feelings about duelling. "My religious and moral principles are strongly opposed to the practice of duelling, and it would even give me pain to be obliged to shed the blood of a fellow-creature in a private combat forbidden by the laws.... To those who, with me, abhorring the practice of duelling, may think that I ought on no account to have added to the number of bad examples, I answer that my _relative_ situation, as well in public as private, enforcing all the considerations which constitute what men of the world denominate honor, imposed on me (as I thought) a peculiar necessity not to decline the call. The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular."