Mr. Jefferson, sensible that the necessity of his retirement from the cabinet had thus become absolute, determined to take that step in a way as little annoying to the President and as little injurious to the public service as possible. To this end he gave early notice that he would resign at the expiration of the President's first term of office; and when that time arrived he retired. This left General Hamilton without any check from his associates in the administration, save what might proceed from the Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, who became Secretary of State on Jefferson's retirement, and of whom the latter said that his habit was to give his opinions to his friends and his votes to his opponents. Thus, next to Washington, Alexander Hamilton became the most powerful man in the nation, abundantly able to give to party divisions their form and pressure, and in effect to shape the action of the Government according to his judgment by the authority with which he was invested, and which he exerted with less restraint than had ever before or has ever since been encountered by any minister in this country or in Europe. To no quarter, therefore, could our attention be more profitably directed for instruction in the history and course of parties during his political career than to the opinions and acts of that remarkable man. The time has been, I am sensible, when, with vision distorted by partisan prejudices, which seldom allow both sides of any question to be seen, I could not have reviewed his course with the impartiality due to truth and justice; but I am happy to believe that those feelings have sufficiently lost their force to permit me, while dissenting more thoroughly than ever from his principles, to do justice to his motives, and to admit his sincerity and his desire to serve his country in the very acts which I unreservedly condemn. The most obnoxious of his opinions have here, thank God, become obsolete and exploded theories, not at all dangerous as examples, and mainly referred to as historical marks of our progress. Believing, as I think all liberal minds now do, that they were honestly formed, we can speak of them without reproach to their author, and censure them without being suspected of a design to cast obloquy on his memory. The history of our partisan warfare has presented, since his time, the anomalous feature of a persevering denial in his name, by some of his followers, of the political opinions which he not only did not affect to disclaim, but which he made it his business on all fitting occasions to publish and advocate, believing them to be right, and to the last moment of his life confidently expecting that they would become, at no distant day, the general sentiment of the country.