In the middle of the feast the door opened, and the Vice-President, courteous and calm as though he were taking the chair of the Senate, entered and took a seat of honor at the table. His appearance was expected, and roused no surprise; but to the startled amusement of the Federalists he presently rose and pronounced a toast: “The union of all honest men!” This dramatic insult, thus flung in the face of the President and his Virginia friends, was the more significant to them because they alone understood what it meant. To the world at large the toast might seem innocent; but the Virginians had reason to know that Burr believed himself to have been twice betrayed by them, and that his union of honest men was meant to gibbet them as scoundrels. They had no choice but to resent it. Henceforward the party could not contain both him and them. Within a few days De Witt Clinton’s newspaper, the “American Citizen,” began the attack, and its editor Cheetham henceforward pursued Burr with a vindictiveness which perplexed and divided the Northern democrats, who had no great confidence in Clinton. What was of far more consequence, Duane and the Philadelphia “Aurora,” after a moment’s hesitation, joined in the hue-and-cry. CHAPTER XI. THE Bill repealing the new Judiciary Act, having passed the Senate, February 3, was taken into consideration by the House, in Committee of the Whole, February 4, and caused the chief debate of the session. By common consent Giles and Bayard were accepted as the champions of the two parties, and their speeches were taken as the official arguments on either side. The men were equal to their tasks. For ten years William Branch Giles had been the most active leader of the extreme Republicans. A Virginian, born in 1762, he began his career as a Member of Congress in 1791, by opposing the creation of a national bank. In 1793 he distinguished himself by an attack on Secretary Hamilton, charging him with peculation. In 1796 he led the opposition to Jay’s Treaty. After opposing Washington’s administration with consistency and severity during six years, he retired from Congress in 1798 in order to oppose Washington’s successor with more effect in the legislature of Virginia. With James Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, and Wilson Cary Nicholas, he had taken an active part in the Resolutions of 1798, and his remarks in the debate of December, 1798, showed that he carried the extreme conclusions of the Virginia school to their extreme practical consequences.[61] He “said that the measures of our present government tended to the establishment of monarchy, limited or absolute.... If ... the government were a social compact, he pronounced monarchy to be near at hand, the symptoms and causes of which he particularly pointed out; and concluded that the State legislatures alone, at this time, prevented monarchy.” In language perfectly intelligible to his friends he hinted that his party “had no arms, but they would find arms.” Even