On the whole the records make painful reading.  The prevailing tone of public life was one of dull and narrow provincialism, at times thickening into stupidity, at times sharpening into spite, although ordinarily made respectable by a serious attitude to life and by a stolid fortitude in facing whatever the distracted times might present.  It was the influence of a few great men that made America a nation.  If one is not subject to the spirit of ancestor worship that has long ruled American history, one is bound to say that—­apart from some forceful pamphleteering of transient purpose—­the voluminous political literature of the formative period displays much pedantic erudition but has little that goes really deep.  The Federalist, the artillery of a hard fought battle, is a striking exception.  So, too, is the series of reports by Hamilton.  But his plans could not prevail by force of reason against the general spirit of selfish particularism.  Although on March 2 a motion adverse to assumption in committee of the whole was defeated by a vote of 28 to 22, it was then known that a majority could not be procured for enactment, and on April 12 the assumption bill was defeated outright in the House, 31 to 29.  Maclay, who went over to the House from the Senate to witness the event, gloated over the defeat in his diary: 

“Sedgwick, from Boston, pronounced a funeral oration over it.  He was called to order; some confusion ensued; he took his hat and went out.  When he returned, his visage bore the visible marks of weeping.  Fitzsimmons reddened like scarlet; his eyes were brimful.  Clymer’s color, always pale, now merged to a deadly white; his lips quivered, and his nether jaw shook with convulsive motions; his head, neck, and breast contracted with gesticulations resembling those of a turkey or goose nearly strangled in the act of deglutition.  Benson bungled like a shoemaker who has lost his end....  Wadsworth hid his grief under the rim of a round hat.  Boudinot’s wrinkles rose in ridges and the angles of his mouth were depressed and assumed a curve resembling a horse’s shoe.”  The defeat did not discourage Hamilton.  He had successfully handled a more difficult situation in getting New York to ratify the Constitution, and, resorting now to the same means he had then employed, he used pressure of interest to move those who could not be stirred by reason.  The intense concern felt by members in the choice of the site of the national capital supplied him with the leverage which he brought to bear on the situation.  Most of the members were more stirred by that question than by any other before Congress.  It was a prominent topic in Madison’s correspondence from the time the Constitution was adopted.  Maclay’s diary abounds with references to the subject.  Some of his bitterest sentences are penned about the conduct of those who preferred some other site to that on the Susquehanna River which he knew to be the best because he lived