today like a grand government job. But they worked
well, laying the foundation of our national credit. Interest arrears and
back installments of the foreign debt were to be paid at once with the
proceeds of a fresh loan, supplemented by income from customs and
tonnage. The remaining debt was to be refunded. Federal stocks shot up
in value, moneyed interests became attached to the Government, and the
nation began to be looked to as a more reliable bulwark of sound finance
than any of the States.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Alexander Hamilton.
From a painting by John Trumbull in the Trumbull Gallery at Yale College.

III. The Excise.--Unexpectedly productive as the tariff had proved,
public income still fell short of what these vast operations required.
Direct taxation or a higher tariff being out of the question, Hamilton
proposed, and Congress voted, an excise on spirits, from nine to
twenty-five cents a gallon if from grain, from eleven to thirty if from
imported material, as molasses. Excise was a hated form of tax, and this
measure awakened great opposition in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina,
and New England, and most of all in Pennsylvania, in whose western
counties distilling was the staple industry.

Here, far from the seats of power, even the state government had
asserted itself little. The general Government was defied. A meeting in
Washington County voted to regard as an enemy any person taking office
under the excise law. September 6, 1791, a revenue officer was tarred
and feathered. Other such cases followed. Secret societies were formed
to oppose the law. Whippings and even murders resulted. At last there
was a veritable reign of terror. The President proceeded slowly but with
firmness, accounting this a good opportunity vividly to reveal to the
people the might of the new Government. Militia and volunteers were
called out, who arrived in the rebellious districts in November, 1794.
Happily, their presence sufficed. The opposition faded away before them,
not a shot being fired on either side.

[Illustration: Several men working with a large still.]
Illicit Distillers warned of the Approach of Revenue Officers.

IV. The Bank.--The Secretary of the Treasury pleaded for a United States
Bank as not only profitable to Government but indispensable to the
proper administration of the national finances. Congress acquiesced, yet
with so violent hostility on the part of many that before approving the
Ch