funding operations he had seen our affairs desperate and our credit lost, and that this was in a sudden and extraordinary degree raised to the highest pitch." With the common sense and poise that were his outstanding qualities, Washington refused to inquire into the ultimate motives of Hamilton. The Secretary of the Treasury had rescued the finances of the country from bankruptcy; he was a good, efficient, and personally honest administrator, and it was Washington's hope that he would be able to keep with him two useful collaborators whom he could not easily replace. Shall I confess that, in my humble opinion, and in spite of the contrary judgment of several American historians, Washington was probably right. The quarrel between Hamilton and Jefferson is undoubtedly of considerable importance in the history of political parties in the United States. I am not so certain that it exerted so tremendous an influence on the destinies of the nation. Whatever may have been the ambitious schemes of Hamilton, the theoretical preferences of John Adams, it is difficult to see how any one could have succeeded at that time in establishing overnight an hereditary monarchy in the United States. Such a _"coup d'état"_ is always a possibility in the old countries of Europe, all of them more or less centralized and controlled from a national capital; but in 1793 there was no national capital in America, loyalty to the Federal Government was scarcely nascent, citizens had not been accustomed to look to Congress for bounties, assistance, and subsidies. The vastness of the country would have offered insuperable obstacles, even to the genius of a Bonaparte. No real danger existed because, as Montesquieu would have said, a monarchy was not in the nature of things, and both Hamilton and Jefferson would have realized it, if they had not been caught in the maelstrom of political and personal passions.