Washington pondered these things with great anxiety, and on the
twenty-ninth of July he wrote a private and confidential letter to
Hamilton, in which he set forth, under twenty-one distinct heads, a
summary of objections to the measures of the administration, drawn
chiefly from Jefferson's letter to the president just alluded to.
"These," he said, "as well as my memory serves me, are the sentiments
which, directly and indirectly, have been disclosed to me. To obtain
light and to pursue truth being my sole aim, and wishing to have before
me explanations of, as well as the complaints on, measures in which the
public interest, harmony, and peace, are so deeply concerned, and my
public conduct so much involved, it is my request, and you would oblige
me by furnishing me with your ideas upon the discontents here
enumerated; and for this purpose I have thrown them into heads, or
sections, and numbered them, that those ideas may be applied to the
correspondent numbers."

Hamilton answered in the required form on the eighteenth of August. "You
will observe here and there," he remarked in his preface, "some
severity appears. I have not fortitude enough always to bear with
calmness calumnies which necessarily include me, as a principal agent in
the measures censured, of the falsehood of which I have the most
unqualified consciousness. I trust I shall always be able to bear as I
ought imputations of errors of judgment; but I acknowledge that I can
not be entirely patient under charges which impeach the integrity of my
public motives or conduct. I feel that I merit them _in no degree_; and
expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort
to suppress them. I rely on your goodness for the proper allowances."

He then, under the head of _Objections and answers respecting the
administration of the government_, ably justified all measures which
distinguished that administration. When treating upon the charges that
"the funding of the debt had furnished effectual means of corruption of
such a portion of the legislature as turned the balance between the
honest voters whichever way it was directed," he manifested much
indignation. "This is one of those assertions," he said, "which can only
be denied, and pronounced to be malignant and false. No facts exist to
support it. The asserters assume to themselves, and to those who think
with them, infallibility. Take their words for it, they are the only
honest men in th