st and
attention. As an issue in serious political discussions and party
divisions the question has disappeared.

In addition to the subject of the Tariff, considered in the previous
section, public attention has been directed chiefly, during the last
quarter of a century, to the two great subjects, Finance and Civil
Service Reform.

The Financial question has been like that of the Tariff,--it has
been almost a constant factor in political controversies since the
organization of the Government.

The financial measures of Hamilton were the chief subject of political
controversy under our first administration, and they formed the basis
of division for the first political parties under the Constitution. The
funding of the Revolutionary debt, its payment dollar for dollar
without discrimination between the holders of the public securities,
the assumption of the State debts by the National Government, and
the establishment of the First United States Bank, these measures of
Hamilton were all stoutly combated by his opponents, but they were
all carried to a successful conclusion. It was the discussion on the
establishment of the First United States Bank that brought from Hamilton
and Jefferson their differing constructions of the Constitution. In
his argument to Washington in favor of the Bank, Hamilton presented
his famous theory of implied powers, while Jefferson contended that
the Constitution should be strictly construed, and that the "sweeping
clause"--"words subsidiary to limited powers"--should not be so
construed as to give unlimited powers. Madison and Giles in the House
presented notable arguments in support of the Jeffersonian view. For
twenty years after 1791 our financial questions were chiefly questions
of administration, not of legislation. In 1811 the attempt to recharter
the First United States Bank was defeated in the Senate by the casting
vote of Vice-President Clinton. The financial embarrassments of the
war of 1812, however, led to the establishment, in 1812, of the second
United States Bank,--by a law very similar in its provisions to the act
creating the First Bank in 1791. The bill chartering the Second United
States Bank was signed by Madison, who had strenuously opposed the
charter of the First Bank. The financial difficulties in which the
war had involved his administration had convinced Madison that such an
institution as the Bank was a "necessary and proper" means of carrying
on the fiscal affa