"I do not mean to apply this advice to any measures which are passed, or to any particular character. I have given it, in the same _general_ terms, to other officers of the government. My earnest wish is that balm may be poured into _all_ the wounds which have been given, to prevent them from gangrening, and to avoid those fatal consequences which the community may sustain if it is withheld. The friends of the union must wish this: those who are not, but who wish to see it rended, will be disappointed; and all things I hope will go well." * * * * * NOTE--No. VIII. _See Page 479._ The gazettes of the day contain ample proofs on this subject. All the bitterness of party spirit had poured itself out in the most severe invectives against the heads of the state and treasury departments. The secretary of the treasury was represented as the advocate of "aristocracy, monarchy, hereditary succession, a titled order of nobility, and all the other mock pageantry of kingly government." He was arraigned at the bar of the public for holding principles unfavourable to the sovereignty of the people, and with inculcating doctrines insinuating their inability to rule themselves. The theory of the British monarchy was said to have furnished his model for a perfect constitution; and all his systems of finance, which were represented as servile imitations of those previously adopted by England, were held up to public execration as being intended to promote the favourite project of assimilating the government of the United States to that of Great Britain. With this view, he had entailed upon the nation a heavy debt, and perpetual taxes; had created an artificial monied interest which had corrupted, and would continue to corrupt the legislature; and was endeavouring to prostrate the local authorities as a necessary step towards erecting that great consolidated monarchy which he contemplated. To support some of these charges, sentences and parts of sentences were selected from his reports, which expressed the valuable purposes to which a funded debt might be applied, and were alleged to affirm, as an abstract principle, "that a public debt was a public blessing." He was, it was added, the inveterate enemy of Mr. Jefferson, because, in the republican principles of that gentleman, he perceived an invincible obstacle to his views. If the counter charges exhibited against the secretary of state were less capable of alarming the fears of the public for liberty, and of directing the resentments of the people against that officer as the enemy of their rights, they were not less calculated to irritate his personal friends, and to wound his own feelings.