Madison was most active in making that branch of the case the leading issue, and in a series of elaborate speeches which cannot now be read without regret, he urged that the present holders should be allowed only the highest market price previously recorded, and that the residue should go to the original holders.  Boudinot at once pointed out that there was nothing on record to show who might be an original bona fide holder.  Great quantities of the certificates of indebtedness had, as a mere matter of convenience, been issued to government clerks who afterwards distributed them among those who furnished supplies to the government or who performed services entitling them to pay.  He mentioned that he himself appeared on the record as original holder in cases wherein he had really acted in behalf of his neighbors to relieve them of the trouble of personal appearance.  Madison’s proposition would therefore invest him with a legal title to property which really belonged to others.  But this and other evidence of the real effect of Madison’s proposal failed to move him, further than to cause him to declare that “all that he wished was that the claims of the original holders, not less than those of the actual holders, should be fairly examined and justly decided,” Finally Benson of New York gave him a shrewd home thrust that plainly embarrassed him.  He put the question whether, if he had purchased a certificate from Madison, and the Treasury withheld part of the amount for Madison as the original holder, Madison would keep the money?  “I ask,” said Benson, “whether he would take advantage of the law against me, and refuse to give me authority to take it up in his name?” Madison evaded the query by saying that everything would depend upon the circumstances of any particular case, and that circumstances were conceivable in which the most tender conscience need not refrain from taking the benefit of what the government had determined.

The debate on Madison’s discrimination amendment lasted from the eleventh to the twenty-second day of February—­Washington’s birthday.  The House did honor to the day when it rejected Madison’s motion by the crushing vote of 36 to 13.  With that, his pretensions to the leadership of the House quite disappeared.

The assumption of state debts was the subject of a debate in committee of the whole which lasted from the twenty-third of February to the second of March.  New factional lines now revealed a supposed diversity of interest of the several States.  The false notions of finance then current were illustrated by an argument that was in continual use, either on the floor or in the lobby.  Members would figure how much their States would have to pay as their share of the debt that would be assumed, and on that basis would reach conclusions as to how their States stood to win or lose by the transaction.  By this reckoning, of course, the great gainer would appear to be the State upon whom the chances of war had piled the largest