Hamilton looked forward to the next Congressional term with no delusions.  He polished his armour until it was fit to blind his adversaries, tested the temper of every weapon, sharpened every blade, arranged them for immediate availment.  In spite of the absorbing and disconcerting interests of the summer, he had followed in thought the mental processes of his enemies, kept a sharp eye out for their new methods of aggression.  Themselves had had no more intimate knowledge of their astonishment, humiliation, and impotent fury at the successive victories of the invulnerable Secretary of the Treasury, than had Hamilton himself.  He knew that they had confidently hoped to beat him by their combined strength and unremitting industry, and by the growing power of their party, before the finish of the preceding term.  The Federalists no longer had their former majority in Congress upon all questions, for many of the men who, under that title, had been devoted adherents of the Constitution, were become alarmed at the constant talk of the monarchical tendencies of the Government, of the centralizing aristocratic measures of the Secretary of the Treasury, at the “unrepublican” formalities and elegance of Washington’s “Court,” at his triumphal progresses through the country, and at the enormous one-man power as exhibited in the person of Hamilton.  Upon these minds Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had worked with unremitting subtlety.  It was not so much that the early Federalists wished to see Hamilton dragged from his lofty position, for they admired him, and were willing to acknowledge his services to the country; but that the idea grew within them that he must be properly checked, lest they suddenly find themselves subjects again.  They realized that they had been running to him for advice upon every matter, great and insignificant, since the new Congress began its sittings, and that they had adopted the greater part of his counsels without question; they believed that Hamilton was becoming the Congress as he already was the Administration; and overlooked the fact that legislative authority as against executive had no such powerful supporter as the Secretary of the Treasury.  But it was not an era when men reasoned as exhaustively as they might have done.  They were terrified by bogies, and the blood rarely was out of their heads.  “Monarchism must be checked,” and Hamilton for some months past had watched the rapid welding of the old anti-Federalists and the timid Federalists into what was shortly to be known, for a time, as the Republican party.  That Jefferson had been at work all summer, as during the previous term, with his subtle, insinuating, and convincing pen, he well knew, and for what the examples of such men as Jefferson and Madison counted—­taking their stand on the high ground of stemming the menace to personal liberties.  The Republican party was to be stronger far than the old anti-Federal, for it was to be a direct and constant appeal to the controlling passion of