Had the Senate agreed to this bill, there are some luminous pages of American history that would never have been written; for the progress of events would have taken quite another direction had the influences surrounding the national capital for the first half of this century been Northern instead of Southern. But the Senate did not agree. For "the convenient place on the banks of the Susquehanna" it substituted ten miles square on the river Delaware, beginning one mile from Philadelphia and including the village of Germantown. To this amendment the House agreed, and there, but for Madison, the matter would have ended. He had labored earnestly for the site on the Potomac; but failing in that, he hoped to postpone the question till the next session of Congress, when the representatives from North Carolina would be present. He moved a proviso that the laws of Pennsylvania should remain in force within the district ceded by the State till Congress should otherwise provide by law. It seems to have been accepted without consideration, a single member only saying that he saw no necessity for it. At any rate, whether that was Mr. Madison's motive or not, time was gained, for it compelled the return of the bill to the Senate. This was on September 28, and the next day the session was closed by adjournment till the following January.

When in that next session the bill came back

from the Senate to the House, a member from South Carolina said, in the course of debate, that "a Quaker State was a bad neighborhood for the South Carolinians." The Senate had also come to that conclusion, for the bill now proposed that the capital should be at Philadelphia for ten years only, and should then be removed to the banks of the Potomac. It was done, Madison wrote to Monroe, by a single vote, for two Southern senators voted against it. But the two senators from North Carolina were now present, and the majority of one was made sure of somehow.

So much was gained by gaining time, and Madison thought the passage of the bill through the House was possible, "but attended with great difficulties." Did he know how these difficulties were to be overcome? "If the Potomac succeeds," he adds, "it will have resulted from a fortuitous coincidence of circumstances which might never happen again." What the "fortuitous coincidence" was he does not explain; but the term was a felicitous euphuism to cover up what in the blunter political language of our time is called "log-rolling."

The reader of this series of biographies is already familiar with Hamilton's skillful barter of votes for the Potomac site of the capital in exchange for votes in favor of his scheme for the assumption of the state debts. Madison seems not to have been ignorant of the progress of that bar

gain, with which Jefferson was afterward so anxious to prove that he had nothing to do. Madison earnestly opposed the assumption of the state debts from first to last; but, when he saw that the measure was sure to pass the House, he wrote to Monroe: "I cannot deny that the crisis demands a spirit of accommodation to a certain extent. If the measure should be adopted, I shall wish it to be considered as an unavoidable evil, and possibly not the worst side of the dilemma." In other words, he was willing to assent silently to what he believed to be a great injustice to several of the States, provided that the bargain should be a gain to his own State. If Hamilton and Jefferson were sinners in this business, Madison will hardly pass for a saint.

CHAPTER XI.

NATIONAL FINANCES.

SLAVERY.

HAMILTON'S famous report to the First Congress, as Secretary of the Treasury, was made at the second session in January, 1790. Near the close of the previous session a petition asking for some settlement of the public debt was received and referred to a committee of which Madison was chairman. The committee reported in favor of the petition, and the House accordingly called upon the Secretary to prepare a plan "for the support of the public credit."

So far as Hamilton's funding scheme provided for that portion of the debt due to foreigners it was accepted without demur. There could be no doubt that there the ostensible creditor was the real creditor, who should be paid in full. The report assumed that this was equally true of the domestic debt. A citizen holding a certificate of the indebtedness of the government, no matter how he came by it, nor at what price, was entitled to payment at its face value. But here the question was raised, Was this ostensible creditor the sole creditor? Was he, whose necessities had

compelled him to part with the government's note of hand at a large discount when full payment was impossible, to receive nothing now when at last government was able to pay in full? Was it equity to let all the loss all upon the original creditor, and all the gain go to him who had lost nothing originally, and had only assumed at small cost the risk of a profitable speculation? Moreover it was charged, and not denied, that in some of these speculations.there had been no risk whatever; and that so soon as the tenor of the report was known fast-sailing vessels were dispatched from New York to the Carolinas and Georgia to buy up public securities held by persons ignorant of their recent rapid rise in value. As hitherto they had been worth only about fifteen cents on the dollar; as upon the publication of the Secretary's report they had risen to fifty cents on the dollar; and as, if the Secretary's advice should be taken, they would rise to a hundred cents on the dollar; it would be securing, what in the slang of the modern stock-exchange is called "a good thing," to send agents into the rural districts in advance of the news to buy up government paper. My soul rises indignant," exclaimed a member, "at the avaricious and moral turpitude which so vile a conduct displays." Nor on that point did anybody venture then to disagree with him openly.

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But besides the question as to who were in real