IN the excitement of this rapid and half-understood foreign drama, domestic affairs seemed tame to the American people, who were busied only with the routine of daily life. They had set their democratic house in order. So short and easy was the task, that the work of a single year finished it. When the President was about to meet Congress for the second time, he had no new measures to offer.[62] “The path we have to pursue is so quiet that we have nothing scarcely to propose to our legislature.” The session was too short for severe labor. A quorum was not made until the middle of December, 1802; the Seventh Congress expired March 4, 1803. Of these ten weeks, a large part was consumed in discussions of Morales’s proclamation and Bonaparte’s scheme of colonizing Louisiana. On one plea the ruling party relied as an excuse for inactivity and as a defence against attack. Their enemies had said and believed that the democrats possessed neither virtue nor ability enough to carry on the government; but after eighteen months of trial, as the year 1803 began, the most severe Federalist could not with truth assert that the country had yet suffered in material welfare from the change. Although the peace in Europe, after October, 1801, checked the shipping interests of America, and although France and Spain, returning to the strictness of their colonial system, drove the American flag from their harbors in the Antilles, yet Gallatin at the close of the first year of peace was able to tell Congress[63] that the customs revenue, which he had estimated twelve months before at $9,500,000, had brought into the Treasury $12,280,000, or much more than had ever before been realized in a single year from all sources of revenue united. That the Secretary of the Treasury should miscalculate by one third the product of his own taxes was strange; but Gallatin liked to measure the future, not by a probable mean, but by its lowest possible extreme, and his chief aim was to check extravagance in appropriations for objects which he thought bad. His caution increased the popular effect of his success. Opposition became ridiculous when it persisted in grumbling at a system which, beginning with a hazardous reduction of taxes, brought in a single year an immense increase in revenue. The details of Gallatin’s finance fretted the Federalists without helping them.