elf after.

The violence of party feeling engendered once more by the debates over
Hamilton's Report spread over the country like a prairie fire, and raged
until, in the North at least, it was met by the back fire of increasing
prosperity. As the summer waned farmers and merchants beheld the prices
of public securities going up, heard that in Holland the foreign loan
had gone above par, and that two hundred and seventy-eight thousand
dollars of the domestic debt had been purchased and cancelled at a cost
of one hundred and fifty thousand, saw trade reviving, felt their own
burdens lighten with the banishment of the State debt. To sing the
praises of the Assumption Bill was but a natural sequence, and from
thence to a constant panegyric of Hamilton. The anti-Federalist press
was drowned in the North by the jubilance of the Federal and its
increasing recruits, but in the South everything connected with the
Government in general and Hamilton in particular was unholy, and the
language in which the sentiment was expressed was unholier.

Meanwhile, Hamilton was established in a little house in Philadelphia,
at work upon his second Report on the Public Credit, and elaborating his
argument in favour of a National Bank. Betsey had been more fortunate
than many in getting her house in order within a reasonable time, for
others were camping in two rooms while the carpenters hammered over the
rest of the neglected mansions. Washington arrived in November and took
possession of the stately home of Robert Morris, although he grumbled
that the stables would hold but twelve horses. It was a splendid
mansion, however, and filled not only with the fine collections of the
rich merchant, but with many beautiful works of art that the President
brought from Mount Vernon. Congress opened on the 6th of December.

If Hamilton had given only an occasional half-amused, half-irritated
attention to the journalistic and pamphlet warfare in which he had been
the target, he now found a domestic engagement confronting him which
commanded his attentions and roused all the fighting Scotch blood in his
composition. Jefferson had done much and distressful thinking during the
summer recess. In the leisure of his extensive, not to say magnificent,
Virginia estates, and while entertaining the neighbouring aristocracy,
he had moved slowly to the conclusion that he approved of nothing in the
Administration, and that Hamilton was a danger to the Nation and a
c