June 28, another old bill was dragged forth and amended by inserting “on the River Potomac, at some place between the mouths of the Eastern Branch and the Connogocheague.” This was finally passed, July 16, 1790, entitled “An Act establishing the temporary and permanent seat of the government of the United States.” The word temporary applied to Philadelphia, whose disappointment in not becoming the final Capital was to be appeased by Congress holding their sessions there till 1800, when, as a member expressed it, “they were to go to the Indian place with the long name, on the Potomac.” Human bitterness and dissension were even then rife in both Houses of Congress. The bond which bound the new Union of States together was scarcely welded, and yet secession already was an openly uttered threat. An amendment had been offered to the funding act, providing for the assumption of the State debts to the amount of twenty-one millions, which was rejected by the House. The North favored assumption and the South opposed it. Just then reconciliation and amity were brought about between the combatants precisely as they often are in our own time, over a well-laid dinner table, and a bottle of rare old wine. Jefferson was then Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton thought that the North would yield and consent to the establishment of the Capital on the Potomac, if the South would agree to the amendment to assume the State debts. Jefferson and Hamilton met accidentally in the street, and the result of their half an hour’s walk “backward and forward before the President’s door” was the next day’s dinner party, and the final, irrevocable fixing of the National Capital on the banks of the Potomac. How it was done, as an illustration of early legislation, which has its perfect parallel in the legislation of the present day, can best be told in Jefferson’s own words, quoted from one of his letters. He says: “Hamilton was in despair. As I was going to the President’s one day I met him in the street. He walked me backward and forward before the President’s door for half an hour. He painted pathetically the temper into which the legislature had been wrought; the disgust of those who were called the creditor States; the danger of the secession of their members, and the separation of the States. He observed that the members of the administration ought to act in concert ... that the President was the centre on which all administrative questions finally rested; that all of us should rally around him and support by joint efforts measures approved by him, ... that an appeal from me to the judgment and discretion of some of my friends might effect a change in the vote, and the machine of government now suspended, might be again set in motion. I told him that I was really a stranger to the whole subject, not having yet informed myself of the system of finance adopted ... that if its rejection endangered a