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Among his numerous suggestions to Congress for cancelling eventually the eighty million dollars of the national debt, to which business men of the Northern States were subscribing freely, was an excise. Although this debt, the "Hamiltonian debt," as the Jeffersonians called it, was an iniquitous burden saddled upon the common people, an excise was to them a most offensive way of meeting it.

You, who are a Greek yourself, know that the Greek language is not to be learnt in a flash of lightning and by Hamiltonian systems, but that it swallows up year after year of studious life. It is the nearest thing to a passive recipiency is it not? as a mental action, though it leaves one as weary as ennui itself.

Webster took scarcely any part. He voted for Mr. Calhoun's internal improvement bill, although without entering the debate, and he also voted to pass the bill over Mr. Madison's veto. This was sound Hamiltonian Federalism, and in entire consonance with the national sentiments of Mr. Webster.

The many Federalists who joined their opponents abandoned without scruple the whole spirit and purpose of the Hamiltonian national policy. But at any rate the reconciliation was accomplished. The newly founded American state was for the time being saved from the danger of being torn asunder by two rival factions, each representing irreconcilable ideas and interests.

This, as Professor Jowett remarks, "remains a difficulty for us as well as for the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, and is the stumbling-block of Kant's Critic, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation of Kant as well as of the Platonic ideas.

Advocates of these national enterprises were encouraged by a clause in the Bank bill of 1816. In order to compel the State banks to resume specie payment and to rearrange the national finances after the war, the Republicans had been compelled to resort to the infamous Hamiltonian remedy of chartering a United States bank.

If an eloquent Hamiltonian proposes to appropriate the public money for the purpose of enabling American manufacturers to exhibit their products at a Paris Exhibition, the plainest country member of the Jeffersonian school perceives at once the inconsistency of such a proposition with the fundamental principle of his political creed.

Men who understand and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of American political thought are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and in the welfare of the people as the end of Government.

Above all, it may discover that the attempt to unite the Hamiltonian principle of national political responsibility and efficiency with a frank democratic purpose will give a new meaning to the Hamiltonian system of political ideas and a new power to democracy.

It made Americans more sensitive to a national idea and more conscious of their national responsibilities, and it indirectly helped to place in the Presidential chair the man who, as I have said, represented both the national idea and the spirit of reform. The sincere and intelligent combination of those two ideas is bound to issue in the Hamiltonian practice of constructive national legislation.