[19] "He smote the rock of the national resources and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of the public credit, and it sprang upon its feet. The fabled birth of Minerva from the brain of Jove was hardly more sudden or more perfect than the financial system of the United States, as it burst forth from the conceptions of Alexander Hamilton."--_Daniel Webster._ The condition of things at the period we are considering was such as to promise the greatest advantages from the simplest, though persevering and well-considered, employment of the means then for the first time placed at the disposal of the General Government. If it had fortunately so happened that General Washington had placed Hamilton at the head of the State Department, in which the theories which he appears to have studied from his earliest manhood--he having, though anonymously, at the age of twenty-three, sent to Robert Morris, then a member of Congress, the first plan for a bank of the United States, accompanied by an elaborate examination into monetary and financial affairs generally, and those of the United States in particular--would not have been called into action, and if he had appointed Madison to be Secretary of the Treasury, the fate of his administration and the effects of its measures in respect to parties would have been very different. The practical character of Madison's talents and disposition had been exemplified in the whole of his previous career, and was conspicuous in his course on the subject of revenue. On the second day after the votes for President and Vice-President under the new Constitution had been canvassed, and twenty days before the inauguration of President Washington, he commenced operations in the new House of Representatives, of which he was a member, to enable the new government to avail itself of the advantages secured to it by the Constitution in regard to revenue.