on before the house. The idea of a balance
unaccounted for was necessarily relinquished; but the secretary of the
treasury was charged with neglect of duty in failing to give congress
official information of the monies drawn by him from Europe into the
United States; with violating the law of the 4th of August, 1790, by
applying a portion of the principal borrowed under it to the payment
of interest, and by drawing a part of the same monies into the United
States, without instructions from the President; with deviating from
the instructions of the President in other respects; with negotiating
a loan at the bank, contrary to the public interest, while public
monies to a greater amount than were required, lay unemployed in the
bank; and with an indecorum to the house, in undertaking to judge of
its motives in calling for information which was demandable of him
from the constitution of his office; and in failing to give all the
necessary information within his knowledge relative to subjects on
which certain specified references had been previously made to him.

These resolutions were followed by one, directing that a copy of them
should be transmitted to the President of the United States.

The debate on this subject, which commenced on the 28th of February,
was continued to the 1st of March, and was conducted with a spirit of
acrimony towards the secretary, demonstrating the soreness of the
wounds that had been given and received in the political and party
wars which had been previously waged.[65] It terminated in a rejection
of all the resolutions. The highest number voting in favour of any one
of them was sixteen.

[Footnote 65: See note, No. VIII. at the end of the volume.]

[Sidenote: Congress adjourns.]

On the 3d of March, a constitutional period was put to the existence
of the present congress. The members separated with obvious symptoms
of extreme irritation. Various causes, the most prominent of which
have already been noticed, had combined to organize two distinct
parties in the United States, which were rapidly taking the form of a
ministerial and an opposition party. By that in opposition, the
President was not yet openly renounced. His personal influence was too
great to be encountered by a direct avowal that he was at the head of
their adversaries; and his public conduct did not admit of a suspicion
that he could allow himself to rank as the chief of a party. Nor could
public opinion be seduced to