The second session of congress opened on the 6th of January, 1790. Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, brought forward early his report upon the public debt contracted during the war, and which had hung like a mill-stone so long round the neck of government. Taking an able and enlarged view of the advantages of public credit, he recommended that not only the debts of the continental congress, but those of the individual states contracted on behalf of the common cause, should be funded or assumed by the general government, and that provision should be made for paying the interest by taxes imposed on certain articles of luxury, and on spirits distilled in the country. This report led to long discussion; but in conclusion, congress passed an act for the assumption of the states’ debts, and for funding the national debt. Provision for the payment of the foreign debt was made without any difficulty. The debt funded amounted to about 75,000,000 dollars; and it was especially enacted that no certificate should be obtained from a state-creditor, which it could not be ascertained had been issued for the express purposes of compensation, services, or supplies, during the late war. The proceeds of the western lands and the surplus revenue, with the addition of 2,000,000 dollars which the president was authorised to borrow at 5 per cent, constituted a sinking fund to be applied to the reduction of the debt. The effect of these measures upon the country in general was of the most satisfactory kind. The sudden increase of monied capital gave a fresh impulse to commerce and consequently to agriculture. Shortly after the discussion on the debt commenced in Congress, it was interrupted by petitions from the yearly meeting of the Quakers of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York, advocating the abolition of slavery, and which were followed up by a memorial from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, signed by Benjamin Franklin as president, one of the last public acts of this remarkable man’s life; he died a few weeks afterwards. This subject led to two months’ controversy on the subject of slavery and the slave-trade, the end of which was a report, entered on the journal of the debates, that any state thinking proper to import slaves, could not be prohibited by congress prior to the year 1808, although it had power to prevent their supplying foreigners with slaves, and that they had no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them in any of the states.