The struggle was completely over. All the dangers, real and imaginary, had vanished. The great Federal party which had created, organized, and for twelve years administered the government, and whose chief now handed it, safe and undisturbed, to Mr. Jefferson and his friends, was prostrate, broken and torn by dying convulsions. The new political force of which Mr. Jefferson was the guide had no word of sympathy for the vanquished. Full of hope and self-confidence, he took the helm and promised that "now the ship was put on her Republican tack she would show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders." Even Mr. Gallatin's cooler head felt the power of the strong wine, success. He too believed that human nature was to show itself in new aspects, and that the failures of the past were due to the faults of the past. "Every man, from John Adams to John Hewitt, who undertakes to do what he does not understand deserves a whipping," he wrote to his wife a year later, when his tailor had spoiled a coat for him. He had yet to pass through his twelve years of struggle and disappointment in order to learn how his own followers and his own President were to answer his ideal, when the same insolence of foreign dictation and the same violence of a recalcitrant party presented to their and to his own lips the cup of which John Adams was now draining the dregs. BOOK III. THE TREASURY. 1801-1813. In governments, as in households, he who holds the purse holds the power. The Treasury is the natural point of control to be occupied by any statesman who aims at organization or reform, and conversely no organization or reform is likely to succeed that does not begin with and is not guided by the Treasury. The highest type of practical statesmanship must always take this direction. Washington and Jefferson doubtless stand pre-eminent as the representatives of what is best in our national character or its aspirations, but Washington depended mainly upon Hamilton, and without Gallatin Mr. Jefferson would have been helpless. The mere financial duties of the Treasury, serious as they are, were the least of the burdens these men had to carry; their keenest anxieties were not connected most nearly with their own department, but resulted from that effort to control the whole machinery and policy of government which is necessarily forced upon the holder of the purse. Possibly it may be said with truth that a majority of financial ministers have not so understood their duties, but, on the other hand, the ministers who composed this majority have hardly left great reputations behind them. Perhaps, too, the very magnitude and overshadowing influence of the Treasury have tended to rouse a certain jealousy in the minds of successive Presidents, and have worked to dwarf an authority legitimate in itself, but certainly dangerous to the Executive head. Be this as it may, there are, to the present time, in