The one thing which Washington regarded as likely and against which he wished to have every precaution taken, was a possible attempt of the English to pick a quarrel over some small matter and bring on a renewal of the war.  Fortunately for the Americans, this did not happen.  Washington knew our weakness so well that he could see how easy it would be for a bold and determined enemy to do us great if not fatal harm.  But he did not know that the English themselves were in an almost desperate plight.  By Rodney’s decisive victory at sea they began to recover their ascendancy against the Coalition, but it was then too late to disavow the treaty.  In Parliament George III had been defeated; the defeat meaning a very serious check to the policy which he had pursued for more than twenty years to fix royal tyranny on the British people.  King George’s system of personal government, himself being the person, had broken down and he could not revive it.  Nearly seventy years were to elapse before Queen Victoria, who was as putty in the hands of her German husband, Prince Albert, rejoiced that she had restored the personal power of the British sovereign to a pitch it had not known since her grandfather George III.

The American Revolution had illustrated the fatal weakness of the Congress as an organ of government, and the Articles merely embodied the vagueness of the American people in regard to any real regime.  The Congress has been much derided for its shortcomings and its blunders, although in truth not so much the Congress, as those who made it, was to blame.  They had refused, in their timidity, to give it power to exercise control.  It might not compel or enforce obedience.  It did require General Washington during the war to furnish a regular report of his military actions and it put his suggestions on file where many of them grew yellow and dusty; but he might not strike, do that decisive act by which history is born.  Their timidity made them see what he had accomplished not nearly so plainly as the dictator on horseback whom their fears conjured up.

During the war the sense of a common danger had lent the Congress a not easily defined but quite real coherence, which vanished when peace came, and the local ideals of the States took precedence.  Take taxation.  Congress could compute the quota of taxes which each State ought to pay, but it had no way of collecting or of enforcing payment.  It took eighteen months to collect five per cent of the taxes laid in 1783.  Of course a nation could not go on with such methods.  No law binding all the States could be adopted unless every one of the thirteen States assented.  Unanimity was almost unattainable; as when Governor Clinton of New York withheld his approval of a measure to improve a system of taxation to which the other twelve States had assented; so Rhode Island, the smallest of all, blocked another reform which twelve States had approved.  Our foreign relations must be described