On the whole, however, when Washington left the presidency, his Indian policy had been a marked success.  In place of uncertainty and weakness, a definite general system had been adopted.  The northern and western tribes had been beaten and pacified, and the southern incursions and disorders had been much checked.  The British posts, the most dangerous centres of Indian intrigue, had been abandoned, and the great regions of the west and northwest had been opened to the tide of settlement.  These results were due to a well-defined plan, and above all to the persistent vigor which pushed steadily forward to its object without swinging, as had been done before, between feverish and often misdirected activity on the one side and complete and feeble inaction on the other.  They were achieved, too, amid many difficulties, for there was anything but a unanimous support of the government in its Indian affairs.  The opposition grumbled at the expense, and said that money needlessly raised by taxation was squandered in Indian wars, while the great body of the people, living safely along the eastern coast, thought but little about the frontier.  Some persons took the sentimental view and considered the government barbarous to make causeless war.  Others believed that altogether too much of the public time and money were wasted in looking after outlying settlements.  The borderers themselves, on the other hand, thought that the general government was in league with the savages, and broke through treaties, and destroyed so far as they could the national policy.  St. Clair was hissed and jeered as he traveled home, but a wakeful opposition turned from the unsuccessful general to a vain attempt to prove that ambushed savages and sleeping sentries were due to a weak war department and a corrupt and inefficient treasury.  The mass of moderate people, no doubt, desired tranquillity on the frontier, and sustained the President’s labors for that end, but for the most part they were silent.  The voices that Washington heard most loudly joined in a discordant chorus of disapproval around his Indian policy.  No one understood that here was an important part of a scheme to build up a nation, to make all the movements of the United States broad and national, and to open the vast west to the people who were to make it theirs.  Washington heard all the criticism and saw all the opposition, and still pressed forward to his goal, not attaining all he wished, but fighting in a very clear and manful spirit, and not laboring in vain.

The Indian question in its management touched, as has been seen, at various points our financial policy and our foreign relations, on which the history of the country really turned in those years.  The latter had not risen to their later importance when the government began, but the former was knocking importunately at the door of Congress when it first assembled.  The condition of affairs is soon told.  The Revolution narrowly escaped shipwreck on the financial