402 GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND 



not upon our knees, but with our most wistful and worshiping 

 intelligence that the concrete wisdom of the lords of exchequers 

 will rescue us from panic, and our words are still the same: 

 "Lord, help thou mine unbelief." 



It was this feeling of pious homage Daniel Webster paid 

 to Alexander Hamilton in the metaphor of God appearing to 

 Moses, of Jesus raising Lazarus. 



"He smote the rock of the national resources and abun- 

 dant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead 

 corpse of the public credit and it sprang upon its feet. The 

 fabled birth of Minerva from the brain of Jove was hardly 

 more sudden or more perfect than the financial system of the 

 United States as it burst forth from the conceptions of Alex- 

 ander Hamilton." 



Having applied the religious figures of both the Jewish 

 and Christian scriptures to his hero, Webster added from the 

 mythology of the ancients another religious tribute. The 

 country heart of Webster, his luxurious blood, his waste of 

 revenue, his literary incapacity to do more than earn fees 

 and salaries, had yet the justice and discernment to see that 

 the founder of the American treasury was a universal provi- 

 dence. 



So all those who continue Hamilton's task, the wise mer- 

 chants who were Hamilton's consulters and their continuers 

 to the present day, the savers of money and the utilizers of 

 savings, the upright and public hearted bankers, the youth 

 who join their seniors in holding up the hands of men of fiscal 

 supervision, are of the new elect and patriotism of the saints. 



Before Hamilton existed business had its public opinion 

 and general convictions. But the exact mathematics, the 

 precise and long projections, the Scotch and the French com- 

 bination in Hamilton, enabled him to do the work of John 

 Law, his Franco-Scotch predecessor, upon the more certain 

 resources of the United States. 



Law, the founder of the bank of France, died about 

 thirty years before Hamilton was born; he was of the gambling 

 class of Cammack, Villard and Woerishoffer, but he had studied 

 the bank of Amsterdam on the spot, while a very young man, 

 and it was as old as Jamestown and Captain John Smith, and 



