a jealous care in everything touching the organic law of the Union, and he was peculiarly sensitive to constitutional objections to any given measure.  In the case of the national bank, the objections were strongly as well as vigorously urged, and Washington paused, before signing, to the utmost limit of the time allowed.  He turned to Jefferson and Randolph, both opposed to the bill, and asked them for their objections to its constitutionality.  They gave him in response two able reports.  These he sent to Hamilton, who returned them with that most masterly argument, in which he not only defended the bank charter, but vindicated, in a manner never afterwards surpassed, the new doctrine of the implied powers of the Constitution.  With both sides thus before him, Washington considered the question, and signed the bill.

Rives, in his “Life of Madison,” intimates that Washington had doubts even after signing, but of this there is no evidence of any weight.  He was not a man who indulged in doubts after he had made up his mind and rendered a decision, and it was not in his nature to fret over what had been done and was past, whether in war or peace.  The story that he was worried about his action in this instance arose from his delay in signing, and from the disappointment of those who had hoped much from his hesitation.  This pause, however, was both natural and characteristic.  Washington had approved Morris’s bank policy in the Revolution, and remembered the service it rendered.  He was familiar with Hamilton’s views on the subject, and knew that they were the result of long study and careful thought.  He must also have known that any financial policy devised by his Secretary of the Treasury would contain as an integral part a national bank.  There can be no doubt that both the plan for the bank and the report which embodied it were submitted to him before they went in to Congress, but the violence of the objections raised there on constitutional grounds awakened his attention in a new direction.  He saw at once the gravity of a question, which involved not merely the incorporation of a bank, but which opened up a new field of constitutional powers and constitutional construction.  When such far-reaching results were involved he paused and reflected, and, as was always the case with him under such circumstances, listened to and examined all the arguments on both sides.  This done he decided, and with his national feeling he could not have decided otherwise than he did.  The doctrine of the implied powers of the Constitution was the greatest weapon possible for those whose leading thought was to develop the union of States into a great and imperial nation; and we may well believe that it was this feeling, and not merely faith in the bank as a financial engine, which led Washington to sign the bill.  When he did so he assented to the charter of a national bank, but he also assented to the doctrine of the implied powers and gave to that far-reaching construction of the Constitution the great weight of his name and character.  It was, perhaps, the most important single act of his presidency.