Hamilton, in his report, and by which the whole was awarded to the speculators. The entire transaction caused deep disgust in the minds of many who felt solicitous for the purity of the Government, and not a few believed that the scramble which ensued was foreseen and counted upon as a source of influence to enlist Congress on the side of the administration. Their hostility to a system susceptible, as they thought, of such practices, was of course greatly inflamed. The construction thus placed upon the Secretary's course received its strongest confirmation from his proposal and untiring efforts for the assumption of the State debts. The first object of a prudent financier would seem to be to keep the debt he has to deal with at the lowest practicable point. Hamilton, on the contrary, whilst struggling with embarrassments in respect to the debts for which the United States were legally bound, upon the largest portion of which many years of interest had been suffered to accumulate, proposed to increase the liability twenty-five millions by the voluntary assumption of debts which the Federal Government was under no obligations to pay; an assumption not only unsolicited on the part of the indebted States, but to which there was the best reason for believing that several among them would be opposed. The special representatives of the latter in the Senate, where the proposition originated, so earnestly contested it that the clause of the bill to carry it into effect could only be passed by a majority of two, was in the first instance rejected in the House of Representatives against the united influences of the administration, and could only be reconsidered and barely carried by means of a discreditable intrigue to which the Secretary and Mr. Jefferson, as the latter has acknowledged with shame and contrition, were parties. The reasons assigned by Hamilton for this forced assumption of a debt which had never been audited, and the amount of which they were obliged to guess at, though framed with his usual ability, cannot, I should think, he now regarded as sufficient to justify the step. The weight which they might by any be supposed to possess was overbalanced by the obvious unconstitutionality of the measure. It adopted as well the debts of the States which, upon the final settlement between them and the United States, were found in debt to the latter, as of those which proved to have balances in their favor, and was therefore a loan by the Federal Government to the former class of States, made under the power in the Constitution authorizing Congress to borrow money.