I have already spoken of the extent to which the public mind was excited by Hamilton's measures. Large portions of the people regarded the most prominent among them as violations of the Constitution, and most of them as servile imitations of the English system, inexpedient in themselves and contrary to the genius and spirit of our institutions. Their arraignment and vindication brought into the political field the ablest men of the country at a period when she abounded in great men. The American Revolution accomplished here that which the French Revolution, then at its commencement, and similar crises in all countries and times, have brought about, namely, the production of great men by great events, developing and calling into action upon a large scale intellects the powers of which, but for their application to great transactions, might have remained unknown alike to their possessors and to the world. Among the master minds which were thus roused to political activity were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Patrick Henry, John and Samuel Adams, John Jay, Chancellor Livingston, Gouverneur Morris, George Clinton, Robert Yates, Chancellor Lansing, John Langdon, Elbridge Gerry, Rufus King, Roger Sherman, John Dickinson, Speight and Williamson and the Rutledges, Pinckneys, and Middletons of North and South Carolina, Chace and Luther Martin of Maryland, Jackson, Few, and Baldwin, of Georgia, John Mason, Marshall, Pendleton, and Wythe of Virginia, and others; men, some of whom have under various circumstances added celebrity to the best informed communities in the world and at one of the brightest periods of the human intellect, and who, if they could now be congregated, would eclipse the great men of any country. Hamilton's measures, of which the funding system was the pioneer, presented their first field, after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, for the display of their opinions and talents. They supported in those grave discussions, with few exceptions, relatively the same principles by which they had been influenced in respect to federal politics during the government of the Confederation, by which also they and men of their stamp had been governed under the colonial system, and to which they would have adhered, in all probability, throughout the intermediate period if they had not been driven into open rebellion by the indiscriminate and intolerable oppression of a bigoted tyrant, and by their own innate hatred of wrong and outrage, without immediate regard to the government that should result from their revolution.