me the very climax of popular absurdity and madness....  Requisitions are actually little better than a jest and a byword throughout the land.  If you tell the legislatures they have violated the treaty of peace, and invaded the prerogatives of the confederacy, they will laugh in your face....  It is much to be feared, as you observe, that the better kind of people, being disgusted with the circumstances, will have their minds prepared for any revolution whatever....  I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical government without horror.  From thinking proceeds speaking; thence to acting is often but a single step.  But how irrevocable and tremendous!  What a triumph for our enemies to verify their predictions!...  It is not my business to embark again upon a sea of troubles.  Nor could it be expected that my sentiments and opinions would have much weight on the minds of my countrymen.  They have been neglected, though given as a last legacy in the most solemn manner.  I had then perhaps some claims to public attention.  I consider myself as having none at present.”

It is interesting to observe the ease and certainty with which, in dealing with the central question, he grasped all phases of the subject and judged of the effect of the existing weakness with regard to every relation of the country and to the politics of each State.  He pointed out again and again the manner in which we were exposed to foreign hostility, and analyzed the designs of England, rightly detecting a settled policy on her part to injure and divide where she had failed to conquer.  Others were blind to the meaning of the English attitude as to the western posts, commerce, and international relations.  Washington brought it to the attention of our leading men, educating them on this as on other points, and showing, too, the stupidity of Great Britain in her attempt to belittle the trade of a country which, as he wrote Lafayette in prophetic vein, would one day “have weight in the scale of empires.”

He followed with the same care the course of events in the several States.  In them all he resisted the craze for issuing irredeemable paper money, writing to his various correspondents, and urging energetic opposition to this specious and pernicious form of public dishonesty.  It was to Massachusetts, however, that his attention was most strongly attracted by the social disorders which culminated in the Shays rebellion.  There the miserable condition of public affairs was bearing bitter fruit, and Washington watched the progress of the troubles with profound anxiety.  He wrote to Lee:  “You talk, my good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts.  I know not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is not government.  Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.”  Through “all this mist of intoxication and folly,” however, Washington saw that the Shays insurrection would probably be the means of frightening the indifferent, and of driving those who seemed impervious to every appeal to reason into an active support of some better form of government.  He rightly thought that riot and bloodshed would prove convincing arguments.