Unhappily, in his old age, for some cause or causes that have never been recorded, he lost his judgment as a business man. About 1791, he formed a land company, which bought from the Six Nations in the State of New York a tract of land equal in extent to several of the German Principalities of that time, and they owned some millions of acres in five other States. These lands, bought for a trifling sum, would have enriched every member of the company if they had not omitted from their calculations the important element of _time_. But a gentleman sixty years of age cannot wait twenty years for the development of a speculation. Confident in the soundness of his calculations and expecting to be speedily rich beyond the dreams of avarice, he erected in Philadelphia a palace for his own abode, of the most preposterous magnificence. The architect assured him that the building would cost sixty thousand dollars, but the mere cellars exhausted that sum. He imported from Europe the most costly furniture and fine statuary for this house. But ardent speculators do not take into consideration the obvious and certain truth that no country enjoys a long period of buoyancy in money affairs. Hamilton's financial schemes led to such a sudden increase of values as to bring on a period of the wildest speculation; which was followed, as it always is, by reaction and collapse. Then came the threatened renewal of the war with Great Britain, followed by the long imbroglio with France, which put a stop to emigration for years. The Western lands did not sell. The bubble burst. Robert Morris was ruined. He was arrested in 1797 upon the suit of one Blair McClenachan, to whom he owed sixteen thousand dollars, and he was confined in the debtors' prison in Philadelphia, as before mentioned, for four years. Nor would he have ever been released but for the operation of a new bankrupt law. A paragraph from one of his letters, written when he had been in prison two weeks, few people can read without emotion. These are the words of a man who had been a capitalist and lived in luxury more than forty years: "I have tried in vain," he wrote, "to get a room exclusively to myself, and hope to be able to do so in a few days, but at a high rent which I am unable to bear. Then I may set up a bed in it, and have a chair or two and a table, and so be made comfortable. Now I am very uncomfortable, for I have no particular place allotted me. I feel like an intruder everywhere; sleeping in other people's beds, and sitting in other people's rooms. I am writing on other people's paper with other people's ink. The pen is my own. That and the clothes I wear are all that I can claim as mine here." Released in 1802, he lived with his wife in a small house on the outskirts of the city, where he died in 1806 aged seventy-two.