"Susquehanna" stricken out, and "Germantown" inserted. The House would not accept the amendment, and the session ended before a place had been agreed upon. The subject being resumed in the spring of 1790, it was again productive of heat and recrimination; again the South was outvoted, and the Potomac rejected by a small majority. Baffled in the House, Southern men renewed their efforts over Mr. Jefferson's wine and hickory-nuts in Maiden Lane. Two sets of members were sour or savage from the loss of a measure upon which they had set their hearts: Southern men had lost the capital, and Northern men assumption. Then it was that the original American log-roller-name unrecorded — conceived the idea of this bad kind of compromise. The bargain was this: two Southern members should vote for assumption, and so carry it; and, in return for this concession, Hamilton agreed to induce a few Northern members to change their votes on the question of the capital, and so fix it upon the Potomac. It was agreed, at length, that for the next ten years the seat of government should be Philadelphia, and finally near Georgetown. How much trouble would have been saved if some prophetic member had been strong enough to carry a very simple amendinent, to strike out ten years, and insert one hundred! And, in that case, what an agreeable task would have been devolved upon this generation, of repealing Georgetown, and beginning a suitable capital at the proper place!

To the last of his public life, Jefferson never ceased to regret the part he had innocently taken in this bargain. Even as a matter of convenience (leaving principle out of sight), he thought the separate States could reduce their chaos of debts to order, and put them in a fair way to be discharged, better, sooner, and cheaper, than it could be done by the general government. But, while the crisis lasted, the minds of all men were filled with dismay and apprehension; for the threat of disunion had then lost none of its terrors by repetition and familiarity. The letters of the time are full of the perils of the situation. Jefferson himself, in a letter to his young friend Monroe, dated June 20, 1790, held this fearful language: "After exhausting their arguments and patience on these subjects, members have been for some time resting upon their oars, unable to get along as to these businesses, and indisposed to attend to any thing else till they are settled. And, in fine, it has become probable, that, unless they can be settled by some plan of compromise, there will be no funding

bill agreed to, and our credit (raised by late prospects to be the first on the exchange at Amsterdam, where our paper is above par) will burst and vanish, and the States separate to take care every one of itself."

And so Hamilton triumphed. The young republic rose in the estimation of all the money-streets of Christendom; and in Amsterdam, a few months later, a new United-States loan of two and a half millions of florins was filled in two hours and a half. What a contrast from the time when all Mr. Adams's pertinacity and eloquence, united with Mr. Jefferson's tact and suavity, had only been able to wring florins enough from Holland to keep the servants of Congress in Europe supplied with the necessaries of life! At home the sudden increase in the value of the widely scattered debt enriched many people, improved the circumstances of more, and gave a lift to the whole country. America began to be. New York entered upon its predestined career. Corner-lots acquired value. But the corpse of the public credit, having got firmly upon its feet, began soon to dance, caper, leap, and execute gymnastic wonders; for the young gentleman at the head of the treasury must needs apply the galvanic fluid once more. That "Bank of the United States," of which he had dreamed by the camp-fires of the Revolution, he was now in a position to establish. Deaf to the warnings of the prudent and the arguments of the wise, he forced it through Congress, and sat up all night writing a paper to convince the president that he ought to sign the bill. The books were opened. In a day-as fast, indeed, as the entries could be made the shares were all taken, and large numbers of people were still eager to subscribe.

Then arose in the United States just such a mania for speculation as France experienced when the gambler Law, and the roué Regent, put their heads together in 1717. Every scrap of paper issued by the United States or bearing its sanction, whether debt or shares, acquired a fictitious value. "What do you think of this scrippomania?" asks Jefferson of a friend in August, 1791. "Ships are lying idle at the wharves, buildings are stopped, capitals are withdrawn from commerce, manufactures, arts and agriculture, to be employed in gambling; and the tide of public prosperity, almost unparalleled in any country, is arrested in its course, and suppressed by the rage of getting rich in a day. No mortal can tell when this will stop; for the spirit of gaming, when once it has seized a

subject, is incurable. The tailor who has made thousands in one day, though he has lost them the next, can never again be content with the slow and moderate earnings of his needle." Hamilton, too, was alarmed at the "extravagant sallies of speculation," which, he said, disgusted all sober citizens, and gave "a wild air to every thing." Such periods, happily, can never be of long duration: under the magic touch of Law, the corpse of French credit kept upon its feet eight months, then collapsed, and "a hundred thousand persons ruined." The period of inflation in the United States lasted about the same time, and was followed by the usual depression, and the sudden return of the speculating tailor to his needle.

We laugh at those periods of collapse when they are past; but, while they are passing, the hurricanes of the West Indies, the simooms of Sahara, the earthquakes of the Andes, are not more terrible. They once threatened to play the same part in the spiritual history of America as the "terrible aspects of Nature" did in that of Spain, where, as Mr. Buckle remarks, famines, epidemics, and earthquakes kept the human mind in a bondage of terror, and rendered it the easy prey of the priest.

CHAPTER XLIV.

JEFFERSON SETTLING TO HIS WORK.

THE secretary of state, meanwhile, was grappling with the weighty, unconspicuous duties of his place. No one knew, at first, what those duties were, or were not. For a while he was postmastergeneral; and we find him inviting Colonel Pickering to dinner to confer upon a dashing scheme of sending the mail over the country at the furious pace of one hundred miles a day. His idea was to employ the public coaches for the service; but, as they only travelled by day, he wished to "hand the mail along through the night, till it may fall in with another stage the next day." He was commissioner of patents as well; and, in that capacity, saw what "a spring" was given to invention by the patent-law. Happy were the inventors to find so appreciative an examiner of their devices! Oddly enough, too, it was to him the House referred a pretended discovery of one Isaacs for converting sea water into fresh. He gave a quietus to the claim of the enterprising Isaacs by inviting him to try his hand upon a few gallons of salt water in the presence of Rittenhouse, Wistar, Hutchinson, and himself, all members of the Philosophical Society. The process proved to be a mere distillation (known and practised for many years), veiled by a little hocuspocus of Mr. Isaac's own contriving. He reported against the claim, and advised that a short account of the best way of extemporizing a still on board ship be printed on the back of all ships' clearances, with an invitation to forward results of such attempts to the secretary of state.

The question of establishing a mint was referred by a lazy House of Representatives to the secretary of state. Shall we send abroad to get our coins made, or manufacture them at home? At home, said Mr. Jefferson. "Coinage is peculiarly an attribute of sovereign

ty. . . . To transfer its exercise into another country, is to submit it to another sovereign." So the mint was established at Philadelphia, workmen were invited from abroad, and a quantity of copper ordered from Europe to be made into American cents.

Some questions, which would now be answered by the Supreme Court, were referred to him for an opinion. One was this: If the president nominates an ambassador, has the senate a right to change the grade of the nominee to plenipotentiary? It has not, was the opinion given. Even the validity of a grant of land was referred to him. Many a day of arduous toil, and many an hour of earnest consultation, were devoted by Jefferson in the summer of 1790 to a report, called for by the House, of a plan of establishing uniformity in coinage, weights, and measures; a subject familiar to his mind for many years. In this most elaborate and able paper, packed close with curious knowledge, and illumined with happy suggestions, he made one more attempt to introduce the decimal system. If his advice had been followed, school-boys to-day might be "saying" their tables in this fashion: "Ten points one line; ten lines one inch; ten inches one foot; ten feet one decad; ten decads one rood; ten roods one furlong; ten furlongs one mile." But this was too audacious for Congress to accept. The only decimal table adopted was the one relating to the new Federal money. But the people long clung to the familiar difficulties of pounds, shillings, and pence, aggravated by the intricacies of the different State currencies. After the lapse of eighty-two years, so inveterate is habit - we are not yet universally submissive to the easy yoke of the decimal currency. "Dime" comes slowly into use; the words "sixpence" and "shilling" linger after the coins are gone; and the popular propensity is to call an eagle a "ten-dollar piece."

In addition to these domestic duties, it devolved upon the secretary of state to superintend the laying out of the District of Columbia, and the planning of the public edifices in the dense forest that covered the site of Washington. Hence, perhaps, the general resemblance of that city to ancient Williamsburg in Virginia, where the secretary of state attended college, studied law, played the violin, and loved Belinda. If Jefferson could have forgotten the spacious, pleasant old town, there was "dear Page" at his side, and plenty of other graduates of William and Mary, to remind him of it.

In the autumn of 1790 the government packed up its traps, and