bliged to expel him from the cabinet. When the resolutions with
this aim were offered, a member said that delicacy, decency, and every
rule of justice had been violated; "a more unhandsome proceeding he had
never seen in Congress;" he might have remained a member to this day,
and, save for the attempts in our time to expel John Quincy Adams and
Joshua R. Giddings, not have changed his opinion.

In the course of the preceding year Hamilton, under various signatures,
had met his opponents in the newspapers. But it was a veil, not a visor,
behind which he fought; for everybody knew from whom came the vigorous
blows that he dealt about him right and left. It was a boast always of
Jefferson that he never condescended to newspaper controversy; but it
was pretty well understood that he himself did not enter upon that
rather unsatisfactory mode of warfare because he preferred the safer
method of fighting by proxy. Hamilton never was in doubt as to who was
his real antagonist, and he aimed his blows over the heads of his petty
assailants to where he knew they would hit home. They left bad bruises
upon his colleague in the cabinet. Among other papers of the time,
though not a newspaper article, was an official letter to the President,
in which Hamilton defended his principles and his measures. Early in
1792 the President, longing to escape the toils of public life and to
spend the rest of his days in tranquillity, had consulted Madison and
his two secretaries, Jefferson and Hamilton, upon the propriety of his
declining a reelection. He soon changed his mind, influenced, perhaps,
as much by the dissensions, so evident in the expostulations of his
friends, as by the expostulations themselves. He deprecated this open
feud between his secretaries as a public misfortune, and sought, if he
could not reconcile them, to silence it. That the Federalists were
monarchists, as Jefferson and Madison never ceased asserting, he knew
was not true, without the emphatic and indignant declarations of
Hamilton, Adams, and other leading men of that party, when they
condescended to notice a charge which they deemed so absurd that it was
difficult to believe that anybody could make it in earnest. But, while
he knew there was no real danger from that quarter, he could not fail
to see that the reverence and love in which he was held constituted a
bond of unity, so long as he remained chief magistrate; and he may have
felt that, should he retire, there was