funds.  The facts on which this charge rests have been collected and examined by Professor Beard in his Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy.  His analysis shows that out of sixty-four members of the House, twenty-nine were security holders, and of these twenty-one voted for and eight voted against assumption.  But the facts disclosed do not sustain his theory that the issue was essentially a conflict between capitalism and agrarianism.  The assumption bill was lifted to its place on the statute book through the leverage exerted by Hamilton and Jefferson, with Washington’s prestige as their fulcrum.  The characters of these three men resist schemes of classification according to economic interest.  The principal value of analysis of the economic elements of the struggle is to protect from undervaluation the motives that actuated the opposition to Hamilton’s measures.  The historian has the advantage of a perspective denied to participants in events, and this fact is apt to turn unduly to the discredit of lost causes.]

The passage of assumption was the turning point.  Other important measures followed, but none of them met with difficulties which the Administration could not overcome by ordinary methods of persuasion and appeal.  A national bank was authorized by an act approved on February 25, 1791.  Hamilton’s famous report on manufactures, a masterly analysis of the sources of national wealth and of the means of improving them, was sent to Congress on December 5, 1791.  Upon his recommendation Congress established the mint, the only point which excited controversy being Hamilton’s proposal that the coins should be stamped with the head of the President in whose administration they were issued.  This suggestion was rejected on the ground that it smacked too much of the practice of monarchies.  The queer totemistic designs of American coinage are a consequence of this decision.

The formation of national government by voluntary agreement is a unique event.  The explanation of this peculiar result in the case of America is the unifying influence of Hamilton’s measures.  They interested in the support of the government economic forces strong enough to counteract the separatist tendencies that had always before broken up states unless they were held together by sheer might of power in their rulers.  The means employed have been cited as evidence in support of the economic interpretation of history now in fashion.  Government, it is true, like every other form of life, must meet the fundamental needs of subsistence and defense, but this truism supplies no explanation of the particular mode of doing so that may be adopted.  Those needs account for motion but not for direction.  Human will, discernment, and purpose enter and complicate the situation in a way that makes theories of determinism appear absurd.  No one has ever contended that Hamilton was prompted by an economic motive in giving up his law practice to accept public office.  He