Republic of Texas, which had separated itself from Mexico and which
claimed besides the great State of Texas a considerable territory
reaching north-west to the upper portions of the Arkansas River; the
apportionment to the Union by a delimitation treaty with Great Britain in
1846 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