dent returned answer that he considered it a dangerous precedent to admit the right of the house to see the papers, and absolutely refused compliance with the request. In the debate that followed, Gallatin charged John Jay and other Federalists with having pusillanimously surrendered the honor of their country. In reply to this, Uriah Tracy, of Connecticut, said: “I cannot be thankful to that gentleman for coming all the way from Geneva to give Americans a character for pusillanimity.” Throughout his congressional career Gallatin participated in all of the important debates, but always made the treasury department and its control, past and present, the object of his unceasing criticism. The establishment of the committee of ways and means was due to his suggestion, and he was ever a warm advocate of internal improvements. His third term closed in 1801. In the first term he asserted his power, and took his place in the councils of the party. In his second, he became its acknowledged chief. In the third, he led its forces to final victory. Besides maintaining his views in debate, he published pamphlets on “A Sketch of the Finances of the United States” (Philadelphia, 1796) and “Views of the Public Debt, Receipts and Expenditures of the United States” (1800). When Thomas Jefferson became president, Gallatin was made secretary of the treasury, and held the office continuously until 1813. He at once applied himself to the mastery of the details of the public finances, and undertook not only the reduction of the debt, but also of the taxes. His management of the treasury department was eminently successful, and he soon obtained a reputation as one of the greatest financiers of the age. The public debt on 1 Jan., 1802, was $86,712,632.25, and this he reduced until, on 1 Jan., 1812, it was only $45,209,737.90. In his annual reports, which were models of clearness, he pointed out methods for the gradual extinction of the debt. In 1812 his report says: “The redemption of principal has been effected without the aid of any internal taxes, either direct or indirect, without any addition during the last seven years to the rate of duties on importations, which, on the contrary, have been impaired by the repeal of the duty on salt, and notwithstanding the great diminution of commerce during the last four years.” The war of 1812 then occurred, and the national debt in- creased steadily until it reached, on 1 Jan., 1810, $127,334,933.74. After negotiating several loans, he severed his connection with the treasury department, and he was sent with James A. Bayard to St. Petersburg as U. S. commissioner to treat for peace with Great Britain under the mediation which the emperor Alexander had offered to the United States. The British government refused to accept the intervention of a foreign power, and the conference was not held. Meanwhile he was continued as commissioner, and subsequently was associated in the negotiations conducted at Ghent. After months of tedious delay, during which the British, flushed with their successes on the continent over Napoleon, made exorbitant demands, a treaty was signed on Christmas day of 1814. Gallatin's biographer, Henry Adams, says: “Far more than contemporaries ever supposed, or than is now imagined, the treaty of Ghent was the special work and the peculiar triumph of Mr. Gallatin.” John Austin Stevens says: “By his political life Mr. Gallatin acquired an American reputation; by his management of the finances of the United States he placed himself among the first political economists of the day; but his masterly conduct of the treaty of Ghent showed him the equal of the best of European statesmen on their own peculiar ground of diplomacy.” His services were rewarded with the appointment of minister to France in February, 1815, but he spent some time in travel both in Europe and in the United States, finally entering on the duties of his office in January, 1816. Meanwhile he took part in the commercial convention held in London during the summer of 1815. During his career in Paris he aided John Quincy Adams in preparing a commercial treaty with Great Britain, and also was associated with William Eustis in negotiating a treaty with the Netherlands in 1817. He left France in 1823, and returned to the United States, where he was occupied for some time in attention to his private affairs, refusing a seat in the cabinet as secretary of the navy, and declining to be a candidate for the vice-presidency, to which he was nominated by the Democratic party. In 1826, at the solicitation of President Adams, he accepted the appointment of envoy extraordinary to Great Britain, and negotiated commercial treaties by means of which full indemnification was obtained from England for injuries that had been sustained by citizens of the United States in consequence of violations of the treaty of Ghent. On his return to the United States he settled in New York city, where from 1831 till 1839, he was president of the National bank of New York. In 1831 he published his “Considerations on the Currency and Banking System of the United States,” and during the same year he was a member of the free-trade convention held in Philadelphia, preparing for that body the memorial which was submitted to congress. Mr. Gallatin was likewise associated in the movement which led in October, 1830, to the foundation of the New York university. He became the first president of the council, but resigned at the end of the year. After his resignation from the bank, his life was devoted to literature, and especially to historical and ethnological researches. In 1839 he prepared an argument in behalf of the United States to be laid before the king of the Netherlands as an umpire on the Maine boundary question, and in connection with this undertaking he collected a statement of the facts, which he revised and, together with the speech of Daniel Webster, a copy of the Jay treaty, and eight maps, published at his own expense as the “Right of the United States to the Northeastern Boundary” (New York, 1840). He presided in 1844 at a meeting held in New York to protest against the annexation of Texas, and, in the course of the address which he made, said that “the resolution of the house declaring the treaty of annexation by the United States of America and the republic of Texas to be the fundamental law of union between them was a direct and undisguised usurpation of power and a violation of the constitution.” The war with Mexico he regarded as “the only blot
