t Congress, after
mature deliberation, decided that it would be safer to receive his
Report in writing than in the form of a personal address from a man who
played so dangerously upon the nerve-board of the human nature. There
hardly could be any hidden witchery in a long paper dealing with so
unemotional a subject as finance; but no man could foresee what might be
the effect of the Secretary's voice and enthusiasm,--which was
perilously communicable,--his inevitable bursts of spontaneous
eloquence. But Hamilton had a pen which served him well, when he was
forced to substitute it for the charm of his personality. It was so
pointed, simple, and powerful, it classified with such clarity, it
expressed his convictions so unmistakably, and conveyed his subtle
appeals to human passions so obediently, that it rarely failed to
quiver like an arrow in the brain to which it was directed. And this
particular report was vitalized by the author's overwhelming sense of
the great crisis with which he was dealing. Reading it to-day, a hundred
and eleven years after it was written, and close to the top of a
twelve-story building, which is a symbol of the industry and progress
for which he more than any man who has ever dedicated his talents to the
United States is responsible, it is so fresh and convincing, so earnest,
so insistent, so courteously peremptory, that the great century which
lies between us and that empire-making paper lapses from the memory, and
one is in that anxious time, in the very study of the yet more anxious
statesman; who, on a tropical island that most of his countrymen never
will see, came into being with the seed of an unimagined nation in his
brain.

To condense Hamilton is much like attempting to increase the density of
a stone, or to reduce the alphabet to a tabloid. I therefore shall make
no effort to add another failure to the several abstracts of this
Report. The heads of his propositions are sufficient. The Report is
accessible to all who find the subject interesting. The main points were
these: The exploding of the discrimination fallacy; the assumption of
the State debts by the Government; the funding of the entire amount of
the public debt, foreign, domestic, and State; three new loans, one to
the entire amount of the debt, another of $10,000,000, a third of
$12,000,000; the prompt payment of the arrears and current interest of
the foreign loan on the original terms of the contract; the segregating
of