Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/150

1803. bank of the United States at New Orleans. "This institution is one of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution," he wrote to Gallatin; "ought we to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?" Gallatin was clear that the business of the Treasury required such aid, and Jefferson again acquiesced. Gallatin was also allowed and encouraged to enforce the restrictions on the importation of slaves into Louisiana. "It seems that the whole Cabinet," wrote the French chargé to his government, "put the utmost weight on this prohibition. Mr. Jefferson is earnestly bent on maintaining it, and his Secretary of the Treasury takes the severest measures to insure its execution."

As though the annexation of Louisiana alone made not enough change in the old established blances of the Constitution, Congress took up another matter which touched the mainspring of the compact. A new Presidential election was at hand. The narrow escape of 1800 warned the party in power not again to risk society by following the complicated arrangements of 1788. In the convention which framed the Constitution no single difficulty was more serious than that of compromising the question of power between the large and small states. Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Connecticut