It is not therefore cause of astonishment, that the dark motives ascribed to the authors of tax laws, should be extensively believed.
Throughout the United States, the party opposed to the constitution had charged its supporters with a desire to establish a monarchy on the ruins of republican government; and the constitution itself was alleged to contain principles which would prove the truth of this charge.

The leaders of that party had, therefore, been ready from the instant the government came into operation, to discover, in all its measures, those monarchical tendencies which they had perceived in the instrument they opposed.
The salaries allowed to public officers, though so low[60] as not to afford a decent maintenance to those who resided at the seat of government, were declared to be so enormously high, as clearly to manifest a total disregard of that simplicity and economy which were the characteristics of republics.
[Footnote 60: The salary of the secretary of state, which was the highest, was three thousand five hundred dollars.] The levees of the President, and the evening parties of Mrs.
Washington, were said to be imitations of regal institutions, designed to accustom the American people to the pomp and manners of European courts.

The Vice President too was said to keep up the state and dignity of a monarch, and to illustrate, by his conduct, the principles which were inculcated in his political works.
The Indian war they alleged was misconducted, and unnecessarily prolonged for the purposes of expending the public money, and of affording a pretext for augmenting the military establishment, and increasing the revenue.
All this prodigal waste of the money of the people was designed to keep up the national debt, and the influence it gave the government, which, united with standing armies, and immense revenues, would enable their rulers to rivet the chains which they were secretly forging.
Every prediction which had been uttered respecting the anti-republican principles of the government, was said to be rapidly verifying, and that which was disbelieved as prophecy, was daily becoming history.

If a remedy for these ills was not found in the increased representation of the people which would take place at the ensuing elections, they would become too monstrous to be borne; and when it was recollected that the division of opinion was marked by a geographical line, there was reason to fear that the union would be broken into one or more confederacies.
These irritable symptoms had assumed appearances of increased malignity during the session of congress which had just terminated; and, to the President, who firmly believed that the union and the liberty of the states depended on the preservation of the government, they were the more unpleasant and the more alarming, because they were displayed in full force in his cabinet.
[Sidenote: Disagreement between the secretaries of state and treasury.] Between the secretaries of the state and treasury departments, a disagreement existed, which seems to have originated in an early stage of the administration, and to have acquired a regular accession of strength from circumstances which were perpetually occurring, until it grew into open and irreconcileable hostility.
Without tracing this disagreement to those motives, which, in elective governments especially, often produce enmities between distinguished personages, neither of whom acknowledges the superiority of the other, such radical differences of opinion, on points which would essentially influence the course of the government, were supposed to exist between the secretaries, as, in a great measure, to account for this unextinguishable enmity.

These differences of opinion were, perhaps, to be ascribed, in some measure, to a difference in the original structure of their minds, and, in some measure, to the difference of the situations in which they had been placed.
Until near the close of the war, Mr.Hamilton had served his country in the field; and, just before its termination, had passed from the camp into congress, where he remained for some time after peace had been established.