itself.  Washington also sent Knox to travel from State to State, to see the various governors, and lay the situation of affairs before them; yet even with such a text it was a difficult struggle to get the States to make quick and strong exertions sufficient to prevent a partial mutiny from becoming a general revolt.  The lesson, however, had had its effect.  For the moment, at least, the cause was saved.  The worst defects were temporarily remedied, and something was done toward supplies and subsistence.  The army would be able to exist through another winter, and face another summer.  Then the next campaign might bring the decisive moment; but still, who could tell?  Years, instead of months, might yet elapse before the end was reached, and then no man could say what the result would be.

Washington saw plainly enough that the relief and improvement were only temporary, and that carelessness and indifference were likely to return, and be more case-hardened than ever.  He was too strong and sane a man to waste time in fighting shadows or in nourishing himself with hopes.  He dealt with the present as he found it, and fought down difficulties as they sprang up in his path.  But he was also a man of extraordinary prescience, with a foresight as penetrating as it was judicious.  It was, perhaps, his most remarkable gift, and while he controlled the present he studied the future.  Outside of the operations of armies, and the plans of campaign, he saw, as the war progressed, that the really fatal perils were involved in the political system.  At the beginning of the Revolution there was no organization outside the local state governments.  Congress voted and resolved in favor of anything that seemed proper, and the States responded to their appeal.  In the first flush of revolution, and the first excitement of freedom, this was all very well.  But as the early passion cooled, and a long and stubborn struggle, replete with sufferings and defeat, developed itself, the want of system began to appear.

One of the earliest tasks of Congress was the formation of articles for a general government, but state jealousies, and the delays incident to the movements of thirteen sovereignties, prevented their adoption until the war was nearly over.  Washington, suffering from all the complicated troubles of jarring States and general incoherence, longed for and urged the adoption of the act of confederation.  He saw sooner than any one else, and with more painful intensity, the need of better union and more energetic government.  As the days and months of difficulties and trials went by, the suggestions on this question in his letters grew more frequent and more urgent, and they showed the insight of the statesman and practical man of affairs.  How much he hoped from the final acceptance of the act of confederation it is not easy to say, but he hoped for some improvement certainly.  When at last it went into force, he saw almost at once that it would not do, and in the spring of 1780 he knew it to be a miserable failure.  The system which had been established was really no better than that which had preceded it.  With alarm and disgust Washington found himself flung back on what he called “the pernicious state system,” and with worse prospects than ever.