The three rose as soon as the ordeal was over.  “It is no use for me to attempt to express my regret or my humiliation,” said Muhlenberg, “I shall be ashamed of this as long as I live.”

“I feel like an ass and a spy,” exclaimed Venable.  “I heartily beg your pardon, sir.”

“Your mistake was justifiable.  Are you satisfied?”

“More than satisfied.”

Hamilton turned to Monroe.

“I made a mistake,” said the Senator from Virginia.  “I beg your pardon.”

“And I shall hear no more of this?”

He received the solemn promise of each, then let them go.  But he locked the letters carefully in their drawer again.

“Are you going to keep those things?” asked Wolcott.  “It must have made you sick to listen to them.”

“It did.  Perhaps I shall keep them for penance, perhaps because I do not trust Monroe.”

XXXII

Hamilton was not long kept in ignorance of the next tactics of his enemies.  They made their deadliest assault soon after Christmas.  Immediately upon the assembling of Congress it was suggested that the Secretary of the Treasury be asked to furnish a plan for reducing the public debt.  Madison arose and fired the first gun.  What Congress wanted was not a plan, but a statement of the national finances.  The Federalists replied that the information would come in due course, and that the House was in duty bound to ask the Secretary to furnish a scheme.  The Republicans, led by Madison, protested that already too much power had been invested in the Secretary of the Treasury, that it had exceeded constitutional limits.  Moreover, he overwhelmed them with volumes, deliberately calculated to confuse their understandings.  One Giles, who did the dirty work of the party, announced that the Secretary was not fit to make plans, and added the numerous and familiar denunciations.  But the Republicans were outvoted, and the suggestions were called for.  Hamilton furnished them immediately.  His plan to reduce the debt was met by so strenuous an opposition from the Republicans that it was defeated, and by the party which had been most persistent in their detestation of the obnoxious burden.  Rather than add to the laurels of Hamilton, they would shoulder it with equanimity.  But this defeat was but an incident.  The Secretary of the Treasury, as the result of a series of resolutions, was bidden to lay before Congress an account of the moneys borrowed at Antwerp and Amsterdam; the President to furnish a statement of the loans made by his authority, their terms, what use had been made of them, how large was the balance; the chiefs of departments to make a return of the persons employed and their salaries.  Hamilton, by this time, was fully alive to the fact that he was about to be subjected to fresh persecution, and the agility of his enemies could not keep pace with his.  He furnished the House with an itemized list—­which