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guished, through a long subsequent political career, for CHAPTER pertinacious virulence and total want of candor. But. Giles did not stand alone in this business. He had been 1793. judiciously selected as spokesman; but the attack upon Hamilton was evidently a concerted matter among the leaders of the opposition. The main assault had disgracefully failed; but it was still hoped to pick, at least, some flaws in the secretary's management of financial affairs; and in the minute history of the transactions of that department, drawn out by repeated inquiries, to find something on which to rest, at least, the charges of want of caution, or want of judgment, or of acts done without sufficient authority.

By acts of the 4th and 12th of August, 1790, as has been mentioned in a previous chapter, the president had been authorized to negotiate two loans, one of twelve millions of dollars, for the discharge of the foreign, especially of the French, debt due and to become due; the other, of two millions, for the purposes of the sinking fund. The general execution of the powers thus given to the president he had committed, under certain restrictions, by a written authority, to the Secretary of the Treasury. Prior to the passage of these acts, the American bankers in Holland, perceiving that money would be needed to meet the foreign demands against the United States, had availed themselves of a favorable opportunity to open on their own responsibility a new loan for three millions of florins, trusting to the government to ratify and confirm their proceedings. This loan it had been thought best to adopt as a part of those authorized by Congress, and Hamilton had written to the bankers to make a partition of it between the two loans, that for the foreign debt, and that for the sinking fund, which he proposed at first to keep separate and distinct. But to

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CHAPTER this partition of the loan already made the bankers obV. jected, as likely to raise suspicions among the subscrib1793. ers, to whom it might not be so easy to explain the proceeding, and Hamilton, on reflection, saw no objection to a general borrowing, on the joint authority of the two acts, to the extent of fourteen millions of dollars, without any special partition of the money thus borrowed between the two loans. In fact, the opening at the same time of two distinct and separate loans might give occasion to many inconveniences.. In accordance with this idea, the sum of 19,550,000 florins, about $7,820,000, had been borrowed in Holland in six separate installments, at rates of interest, charges included, beginning at a fraction above five and a half per cent., and ending at a fraction below four and a half per cent. Of this amount upward of four millions of dollars had been appropriated to pay the installments of the French debt already due. Spanish debt had also been provided for out of it; the debt due to the foreign officers who had served in the Continental armies; and the interest and installments of the Dutch loans. Besides these payments made abroad, an amount equal to $2,304,769 had been drawn into the treasury by the sale of bills of exchange on the foreign bankers, in whose hands there still remained, after deducting the charges on the loans, a small balance. All these loans or installments of loans, except the first, had been made by Short as solé commissioner. The payments to France had been under the superintend ence of Morris; but in both cases the actual handling of the money had rested exclusively with the bank. ers of the United States at Amsterdam and Paris. Of the moneys drawn into the United States, near half a million had been expended in advances for St. Domingo on account of the French debt. The early purchases

V.

of stocks made by the Commissioners of the Sinking CHAPTER Fund had also been paid for by the same means. But those purchases having been checked by the rapid rise in 1793. the value of stocks, the whole amount purchased had fallen short of the income realized from sources other than the two million loan, which thus remained, in fact, untouched, leaving in the treasury, including the proceeds of the bills sold but not yet paid for, near two millions of dollars, which Hamilton had proposed to appropriate toward paying off the debt to the bank. subscription to the bank and the loan of the two millions in return had both been made without the actual use of any money, the subscription having been paid by bills on the foreign bankers, and the loan having been made by the return of the same bills.

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The having drawn two millions of money into the United States, nominally for the benefit of the sinking fund, but which proved ultimately not needed for that purpose, was what had chiefly excited the suspicions of the opposition; as though Hamilton had done it with the very intention of diverting this money to the use of the bank, by paying up the bank debt in full. And this idea they adhered to very obstinately, at least the more unreasonable among them, notwithstanding the abundant evidence furnished by Hamilton in a supplementary Feb. 13. report that this strengthening the treasury by these drafts from abroad had been rendered advisable by various considerations, as well as by the necessities of the sinking fund itself. At the same time, he did not deny, as one among many other co-operating reasons why the drafts had been made, the possibility, should any surplus remain in the treasury growing out of these drafts, of applying it to change the six per cent. debt due the bank into a four and a half per cent. debt due abroad,

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With respect to the temporary loan of $400,000 from the United States Bank for the charges of the Indian 1793. war, it appeared from the statements submitted by Hamilton that, but for that loan, which had been made in monthly installments, beginning with June, there would have been at the command of the treasury, at the commencement of July, at those places from which immediate supplies could be derived, that is to say, at Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, the sum of only about seventeen thousand dollars, and on the first of October an actual deficiency at those places of $125,000, the total amount on hand at that date in the nine depositories then employed the United States Bank and its branches at Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston, and the state banks of Massachusetts, Providence, New York, and North America-amounting only to $420,000, even including the loan of $400,000 from the bank and the proceeds of the bills, the drawing of which had excited such suspicion.

Upon this statement of facts, which, in the minds of unprejudiced persons, seemed to leave but few loop-holes for objections, even on the part of those most critically disposed, Giles and his fellow-laborers proceeded to frame Feb. 28. nine resolutions of censure, for which he asked the vote of the House. The first two resolutions were merely abstract propositions, to the effect that specific appropriations ought to be strictly executed, and that a violation of a law making appropriations was an infringement of the Constitution, which forbade money to be drawn from the treasury except in consequence of appropriations made by law. The third charged the Secretary of the Treasury with dereliction of duty in failing to give information to Congress of the moneys drawn from Europe, and of the progress of such drafts. The fourth charged

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him with appropriating a part of the loan of August 4th CHAPTER to pay the interest due upon it, and with having drawn part of that loan into the United States without instruc- 1793. tions from the president. The fifth charged him with deviating from his instructions and violating the law by mingling together the two loans of August 4th and August 12th, The sixth was a rehash of the third and part of the fourth, charging him with having improperly drawn into the United States a sum exceeding two millions of dollars, and with having failed to inform the Commissioners of the Sinking Fund of the progress of those drafts. The seventh charged him with borrowing $400,000 of the United States Bank at a time when a larger sum was deposited in various banks to the credit of the United States. The eighth charged him with indecorum toward the House in undertaking to judge of its motives in calling for information, and in failing to give all the information called for. The ninth proposed to transmit the foregoing resolutions to the President of the United States as an intimation, doubtless, of the opinion of the House that so faithless an officer ought forthwith to be dismissed from the public service.

Giles moved to refer these resolutions to a Committee of the Whole, which Van Murray opposed as a useless waste of time, just at the end of the session, when so many important matters remained to be disposed of. "Though the subject was intricate, the various reports of the secretary contained full grounds for a decision to which the House might come at once. The mode in which these resolutions were brought forward did not entitle them to much ceremony. A more unhandsome proceeding he had never known. Common right and the first principles of justice dictated that whoever was charged with a violation of law on which a punishment IV.-C c