everything he said had immense weight.  This influence he used with care and without waste.  Every blow he struck went home.  It is impossible to estimate just how much he effected, but it is safe to say that it is to Washington, aided first by Hamilton and then by Madison, that we owe the development of public opinion and the formation of the party which devised and carried the Constitution.  Events of course worked with them, but they used events, and did not suffer the golden opportunities, which without them would have been lost, to slip by.

When Washington wrote of the Shays rebellion to Lee, the movement toward a better union, which he had begun, was on the brink of success.  That ill-starred insurrection became, as he foresaw, a powerful spur to the policy started at Mount Vernon, and adopted by Virginia and Maryland.  From this had come the Annapolis convention, and thence the call for another convention at Philadelphia.  As soon as the word went abroad that a general convention was to be held, the demand for Washington as a delegate was heard on all sides.  At first he shrank from it.  Despite the work which he had been doing, and which he must have known would bring him once more into public service, he still clung to the vision of home life which he had brought with him from the army.  November 18, 1786, he wrote to Madison, that from a sense of obligation he should go to the convention, were it not that he had declined on account of his retirement, age, and rheumatism to be at a meeting of the Cincinnati at the same time and place.  But no one heeded him, and Virginia elected him unanimously to head her delegation at Philadelphia.  He wrote to Governor Randolph, acknowledging the honor, but reiterating what he had said to Madison, and urging the choice of some one else in his place.  Still Virginia held the question open, and on February 3 he wrote to Knox that his private intention was not to attend.  The pressure continued, and, as usual when the struggle drew near, the love of battle and the sense of duty began to reassert themselves.  March 8 he again wrote to Knox that he had not meant to come, but that the question had occurred to him, “Whether my non-attendance in the convention will not be considered as dereliction of republicanism; nay, more, whether other motives may not, however injuriously, be ascribed for my not exerting myself on this occasion in support of it;” and therefore he wished to be informed as to the public expectation on the matter.  On March 28 he wrote again to Randolph that ill-health might prevent his going, and therefore it would be well to appoint some one in his place.  April 2 he said that if representation of the States was to be partial, or powers cramped, he did not want to be a sharer in the business.  “If the delegates assemble,” he wrote, “with such powers as will enable the convention to probe the defects of the constitution to the bottom and point out radical cures, it would be an honorable