Burr before a Kentucky court, entirely believing that his designs were lawful and sanctioned.  Mr. Jefferson showed him the cipher letters of that mysterious and ill-starred adventurer, which convinced Mr. Clay that Burr was certainly a liar, if he was not a traitor.  Mr. Jefferson’s perplexity in 1806 was similar to that of Jackson in 1833,—­too much money in the treasury.  The revenue then was fifteen millions; and, after paying all the expenses of the government and the stipulated portion of the national debt, there was an obstinate and most embarrassing surplus.  What to do with this irrepressible surplus was the question then discussed in Mr. Jefferson’s Cabinet.  The President, being a free-trader, would naturally have said, Reduce the duties.  But the younger men of the party, who had no pet theories, and particularly our young Senator, who had just come in from a six weeks’ horseback flounder over bridgeless roads, urged another solution of the difficulty,—­Internal Improvements.  But the President was a strict-constructionist, denied the authority of Congress to vote money for public works, and was fully committed to that opinion.

Mr. Jefferson yielded.  The most beautiful theories will not always endure the wear and tear of practice.  The President, it is true, still maintained that an amendment to the Constitution ought to precede appropriations for public works; but he said this very briefly and without emphasis, while he stated at some length, and with force, the desirableness of expending the surplus revenue in improving the country.  As time wore on, less and less was said about the amendment, more and more about the importance of internal improvements; until, at last, the Republican party, under Clay, Adams, Calhoun, and Rush, went as far in this business of road-making and canal-digging as Hamilton himself could have desired.  Thus it was that Jefferson rendered true his own saying, “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.”  Jefferson yielded, also, on the question of free-trade.  There is a passage of a few lines in Mr. Jefferson’s Message of 1806, the year of Henry Clay’s first appearance in Washington, which may be regarded as the text of half the Kentuckian’s speeches, and the inspiration of his public life.  The President is discussing the question, What shall we do with the surplus?

“Shall we suppress the impost, and give that advantage to foreign over domestic manufactures?  On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression, in due season, will doubtless be right; but the great mass of the articles upon which impost is paid are foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them.  Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance, and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of Federal