f the law of the land. These amendments provided, among other
things, that Congress could make no law respecting the establishment of
religion, abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a
redress of grievances. They also guaranteed indictment by grand jury and
trial by jury for all persons charged by federal officers with serious
crimes. To reassure those who still feared that local rights might be
invaded by the federal government, the tenth amendment expressly
provided that the powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the
states respectively or to the people. Seven years later, the eleventh
amendment was written in the same spirit as the first ten, after a
heated debate over the action of the Supreme Court in permitting a
citizen to bring a suit against "the sovereign state" of Georgia. The
new amendment was designed to protect states against the federal
judiciary by forbidding it to hear any case in which a state was sued by
a citizen.

=Funding the National Debt.=--Paper declarations of rights, however,
paid no bills. To this task Hamilton turned all his splendid genius. At
the very outset he addressed himself to the problem of the huge public
debt, daily mounting as the unpaid interest accumulated. In a _Report on
Public Credit_ under date of January 9, 1790, one of the first and
greatest of American state papers, he laid before Congress the outlines
of his plan. He proposed that the federal government should call in all
the old bonds, certificates of indebtedness, and other promises to pay
which had been issued by the Congress since the beginning of the
Revolution. These national obligations, he urged, should be put into one
consolidated debt resting on the credit of the United States; to the
holders of the old paper should be issued new bonds drawing interest at
fixed rates. This process was called "funding the debt." Such a
provision for the support of public credit, Hamilton insisted, would
satisfy creditors, restore landed property to its former value, and
furnish new resources to agriculture and commerce in the form of credit
and capital.

=Assumption and Funding of State Debts.=--Hamilton then turned to the
obligations incurred by the several states in support of the Revolution.
These debts he proposed to add to the national debt. They were to be
"