In January, 1795, Hamilton retired from the Treasury Department. The moment was well chosen, for his great creative work was done and signs were not wanting that the initiative in finance was about to pass to the House of Representatives. As he passed out of office, a young Representative from Pennsylvania made his appearance in Congress who was scarcely his inferior in quick grasp of the intricacies of public finance. Almost the first efforts of Albert Gallatin were directed to the improvement of the methods of congressional finance. It was at his suggestion that the first standing Committee of Ways and Means in the House was appointed, in the expectation that it would assume a general superintendence of finance. Believing that the Executive could be held in check only by systematic, specific appropriations, Gallatin became an insistent advocate of the rule, and in consequence a thorn in the flesh of the departments. "The management of the Treasury," complained Wolcott to Hamilton, "becomes more and more difficult. The legislature will not pass laws in gross. Their appropriations are minute; Gallatin, to whom they yield, is evidently intending to break down this department, by charging it with an impracticable detail." "The heads of departments," Fisher Ames wrote despondently, two years after Hamilton left office, "are chief clerks. Instead of being the ministry, the organs of the executive power, and imparting a kind of momentum to the operation of the laws, they are precluded even from communicating with the House by reports." There was no room for a British ministry in the Republican scheme of politics. Meantime, Washington's foreign policy had widened the breach between the political factions and had forced him into a partisan position. From the Republican point of view, Jay's treaty threw the United States into the arms of England and gave just cause of offense to France. Knowing the popular temper, which was undoubtedly hostile to the treaty, the Republican leaders endeavored to defeat the purposes of the Administration by refusing to vote the necessary appropriations. Their first demand was for the papers relating to the treaty, on the ground that in matters upon which the action of the House was needed, that body might properly call for information to guide its deliberations. The President refused this demand, both because he deemed it imprudent to make the papers public, and because he denied the right of the House to participate in the treaty-making power.