igned to
keep up the national debt, and the influence it gave the government,
which, united with standing armies, and immense revenues, would enable
their rulers to rivet the chains which they were secretly forging.
Every prediction which had been uttered respecting the anti-republican
principles of the government, was said to be rapidly verifying, and
that which was disbelieved as prophecy, was daily becoming history. If
a remedy for these ills was not found in the increased representation
of the people which would take place at the ensuing elections, they
would become too monstrous to be borne; and when it was recollected
that the division of opinion was marked by a geographical line, there
was reason to fear that the union would be broken into one or more
confederacies.

These irritable symptoms had assumed appearances of increased
malignity during the session of congress which had just terminated;
and, to the President, who firmly believed that the union and the
liberty of the states depended on the preservation of the government,
they were the more unpleasant and the more alarming, because they were
displayed in full force in his cabinet.

[Sidenote: Disagreement between the secretaries of state and
treasury.]

Between the secretaries of the state and treasury departments, a
disagreement existed, which seems to have originated in an early stage
of the administration, and to have acquired a regular accession of
strength from circumstances which were perpetually occurring, until it
grew into open and irreconcileable hostility.

Without tracing this disagreement to those motives, which, in elective
governments especially, often produce enmities between distinguished
personages, neither of whom acknowledges the superiority of the other,
such radical differences of opinion, on points which would essentially
influence the course of the government, were supposed to exist between
the secretaries, as, in a great measure, to account for this
unextinguishable enmity. These differences of opinion were, perhaps,
to be ascribed, in some measure, to a difference in the original
structure of their minds, and, in some measure, to the difference of
the situations in which they had been placed.

Until near the close of the war, Mr. Hamilton had served his country
in the field; and, just before its termination, had passed from the
camp into congress, where he remained for some time after peace had
been established. In the forme