st Monroe."

XXXII

Hamilton was not long kept in ignorance of the next tactics of his
enemies. They made their deadliest assault soon after Christmas.
Immediately upon the assembling of Congress it was suggested that the
Secretary of the Treasury be asked to furnish a plan for reducing the
public debt. Madison arose and fired the first gun. What Congress
wanted was not a plan, but a statement of the national finances. The
Federalists replied that the information would come in due course, and
that the House was in duty bound to ask the Secretary to furnish a
scheme. The Republicans, led by Madison, protested that already too much
power had been invested in the Secretary of the Treasury, that it had
exceeded constitutional limits. Moreover, he overwhelmed them with
volumes, deliberately calculated to confuse their understandings. One
Giles, who did the dirty work of the party, announced that the Secretary
was not fit to make plans, and added the numerous and familiar
denunciations. But the Republicans were outvoted, and the suggestions
were called for. Hamilton furnished them immediately. His plan to reduce
the debt was met by so strenuous an opposition from the Republicans that
it was defeated, and by the party which had been most persistent in
their detestation of the obnoxious burden. Rather than add to the
laurels of Hamilton, they would shoulder it with equanimity. But this
defeat was but an incident. The Secretary of the Treasury, as the result
of a series of resolutions, was bidden to lay before Congress an account
of the moneys borrowed at Antwerp and Amsterdam; the President to
furnish a statement of the loans made by his authority, their terms,
what use had been made of them, how large was the balance; the chiefs of
departments to make a return of the persons employed and their salaries.
Hamilton, by this time, was fully alive to the fact that he was about to
be subjected to fresh persecution, and the agility of his enemies could
not keep pace with his. He furnished the House with an itemized
list--which it took the Committee days to plod through--of his
bookkeepers, clerks, porters, and charwomen, and the varying emoluments
they had received since the Department was organized, three years and a
half before. He further informed them that the net yield of the foreign
loan was eighteen millions six hundred and seventy-eight thousand
florins, that the loans were six in number, that three bore five per
cent int