of the Oregon Territory, including roughly the State of that name and the rest of the basin of the Columbia River up to the present frontier—­British Columbia being at the same time apportioned to Great Britain; the conquest from Mexico in 1848 of California and a vast mountainous tract at the back of it; the purchase from Mexico of a small frontier strip in 1853; and the acquisition at several later times of various outlying dependencies which will in no way concern us.

3. The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government.

We must turn back to the internal growth of the new united nation.  When the Constitution had been formed and the question of its acceptance by the States had been at last settled, and when Washington had been inaugurated as the first President under it, a wholly new conflict arose between two parties, led by two Ministers in the President’s Cabinet, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.  Both were potent and remarkable men, Hamilton in all senses a great man.  These two men, for all their antagonism, did services to their country, without which the vigorous growth of the new nation would not have been possible.

The figure of Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury (ranked by Talleyrand with Fox and Napoleon as one of the three great men he had known), must fascinate any English student of the period.  If his name is not celebrated in the same way in the country which he so eminently served, it is perhaps because in his ideas, as in his origin, he was not strictly American.  As a boy, half Scotch, half French Huguenot, from the English West Indian island of Nevis, he had been at school in New York when his speeches had some real effect in attaching that city to the cause of Independence.  He had served brilliantly in the war, on Washington’s staff and with his regiment.  He had chivalrously defended, as an advocate and in other ways, the Englishmen and loyalists against whose cause he fought.  He had induced the great central State of New York to accept the Constitution, when the strongest local party would have rejected it and made the Union impossible.  As Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury he organised the machinery of government, helped his chief to preserve a strong, upright and cautious foreign policy at the critical point of the young Republic’s infancy, and performed perhaps the greatest and most difficult service of all in setting the disordered finances of the country upon a sound footing.  In early middle age he ended a life, not flawless but admirable and lovable, in a duel, murderously forced upon him by one Aaron Burr.  This man, who was an elegant profligate, with many graces but no public principle, was a claimant to the Presidency in opposition to Hamilton’s greatest opponent, Jefferson; Hamilton knowingly incurred a feud which must at the best have been dangerous to him, by unhesitatingly throwing his weight upon the side of Jefferson, his