Excerpt from Journal of the Canadian Bankers' Association, Vol. 4: October-1896 Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury under the present constitution of the United States. Hamilton had given much attention to economic, and especially to financial questions, long before he was called upon to lay the financial foundations of the young republic. The ability and thoroughness with which he studied questions of banking and general finance are shown in the radical changes which his own ideas underwent, and the frankness with which he afterwards exposed the fallacy of ideas which he had earnestly supported at earlier stages of his own progress. It is quite true that several of his ideas afterwards proved to be inadequate or erroneous, but, compar ing them with the best ideas then current on the subjects of paper money, credit and banking, we have to admit that Ham ilton was singularly sane and practical in the principles which he laid down. In his work on the History of Banking in the United States, Professor Sumner is inclined to be rather severe in his criticism of Hamilton, but the force of his criticism falls not so much on Hamilton as on those who achieved disastrous results by a one-sided and often deliberately perverse develop ment of certain Of Hamilton's ideas. It could be pointed out also that these ideas, and others of a similar nature, in the hands of different men, did not have the same evil consequences in Canada or in Scotland. However, this is merely by the way. Our present task is to Show what were Hamilton's principles and how they came to be adopted in Canada. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.