it took the Committee days to plod through—­of his bookkeepers, clerks, porters, and charwomen, and the varying emoluments they had received since the Department was organized, three years and a half before.  He further informed them that the net yield of the foreign loan was eighteen millions six hundred and seventy-eight thousand florins, that the loans were six in number, that three bore five per cent interest, two four and a half, and one four per cent The enemy was disconcerted but not discouraged.  Five fresh resolutions were moved almost immediately.  Impartial historians have agreed that Jefferson suggested these shameful resolutions, and that Madison drew them up.  Giles brought them forward.  In a vociferous speech he asserted that no man could understand the Secretary’s report, that his methods and processes were clothed in a suspicious obscurity.  It was his painful duty to move the adoption of the following resolutions:  That copies of the papers authorizing the foreign loans should be made; that the names of the persons to whom and by whom the French debt had been paid be sent to Congress; that a statement of the balances between the United States and the Bank be made; that an account of the sinking-fund be rendered, how much money had come into it and where from, how much had been used for the purchase of the debt and where the rest was deposited.  The fifth demanded an account of the unexpended revenue at the close of the preceding year.  Giles charged that a serious discrepancy existed between the report of the Secretary and the books of the Bank—­not less than a million and a half.  It had been the purpose of Jefferson and Madison to bring forward the resolutions with an air of comparative innocence.  But the vanity of Giles carried him away, and his speech informed Congress, and very shortly the country, that the honesty of the Secretary of the Treasury had been impeached, and that he was called upon to vindicate himself.

In crises Hamilton never lost his temper.  The greater the provocation, as the greater the danger, the colder and more impersonal he became.  Nor was it in his direct impatient nature to seek to delay an evil moment any more than it was to protect himself behind what the American of to-day calls “bluff.”  In this, the severest trial of his public career, he did not hesitate a moment for irritation or protest.  He called upon his Department to assist him, and with them he worked day and night, gathering, arranging, elaborating all the information demanded by Congress.  When he was not directing his subordinates, he was shut up in his library preparing his statements and replies.  His meals were taken to him; his family did not see him for weeks, except as he passed them on his way to or from the front door.  He sent in report after report to Congress with a celerity that shattered his health, but kept his enemies on the jump, and worked them half to death.  The mass of manuscript he sent would have furnished a modest bookstore, and the subjects and accounts with which he was so familiar drove Madison and others, too opposed to finance to master the maze of it, close upon the borders of frenzy.  It had been their uncommunicated policy to carry the matter over to the next session, but Hamilton was determined to have done with them by adjournment.