House providing, in case such a thing should ever happen,
that the president _pro tempore_ of the Senate, or, should the Senate
have no temporary president, the speaker of the House of
Representatives, should succeed to the vacant office. The House sent
back the bill with an amendment substituting the secretary of state for
the succession in the possible vacancy instead of the presiding officers
of the two houses of Congress. Madison was very earnest for this
amendment, but the Senate rejected it, and the House finally assented to
the original bill. It was shown in the course of the debate that
according to the doctrine of chances the office of president would not
devolve, through the accident of death, upon a third person oftener than
once in about eight hundred and forty years. The rejection of the
amendment naming the secretary of state as the proper person to succeed
to the presidency, in the improbable event supposed, was nevertheless
resented by the Republicans as a direct reflection upon Mr. Jefferson.
Nor did the Federalists deny it. With grim humor they seized upon the
opportunity, apparently, to announce that not with their consent should
he ever be president, even by accident, though he should wait literally
eight hundred and forty years. It was a long-range shot, but there could
not have been one better aimed.

If before there had been some room for hope, Madison's course in the
Second Congress left no doubt as to which party he had cast his lot
with. His hostility to the establishment of a bank was, he thought,
justified by what he saw at the opening of the subscription books in New
York. The anxiety to get possession of the stock was not to him an
evidence of public confidence, and an argument, therefore, in favor of
such an institution, but "a mere scramble for so much public plunder."
He could only see that "stock-jobbing drowns every other subject. The
coffee-house is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers." "It pretty
clearly appears also," he said, "in what proportions the public debt
lies in the country, what sort of hands holding it, and by whom the
people of the United States are to be governed." Here, perhaps, was one
cause of his hostility to Hamilton's financial policy. Its immediate
benefit was for that class whose pecuniary stake in the stability of the
government was the largest. This class was chiefly in the Northern
States, where capital was in money and was always on the lookout for
safe an