for the Cincinnati generally, and that, from what had passed between us at the commencement of that institution, I could not mean to include him.  When the first meeting was called for its establishment, I was a member of the Congress then sitting at Annapolis.  General Washington wrote to me, asking my opinion on that proposition, and the course, if any, which I thought Congress would observe respecting it.  I wrote him frankly my own disapprobation of it; that I found the members of Congress generally in the same sentiment; that I thought they would take no express notice of it, but that in all appointments of trust, honor, or profit, they would silently pass by all candidates of that order, and give an uniform preference to others.  On his way to the first meeting in Philadelphia, which I think was in the spring of 1784, he called on me at Annapolis.  It was a little after candle-light, and he sat with me till after midnight, conversing, almost exclusively, on that subject.  While he was feelingly indulgent to the motives which might induce the officers to promote it, he concurred with me entirely in condemning it; and when I expressed an idea that, if the hereditary quality were suppressed, the institution might perhaps be indulged during the lives of the officers now living, and who had actually served; ‘No,’ he said, ’not a fibre of it ought, to be left, to be an eye-sore to the public, a ground of dissatisfaction, and a line of separation between them and their country’:  and he left me with a determination to use all his influence for its entire suppression.  On his return from the meeting, he called on me again, and related to me the course the thing had taken.  He. said, that, from the beginning, he had used every endeavor to prevail on the officers to renounce the project altogether, urging the many considerations which would render it odious to their fellow-citizens, and disreputable and injurious to themselves; that he had at length prevailed on most of the old officers to reject it, although with great and warm opposition from others, and especially the younger ones, among whom he named Colonel W. S. Smith as particularly intemperate.  But that in this state of things, when he thought the question safe, and the meeting drawing to a close, Major L’Enfant arrived from France with a bundle of eagles, for which he had been sent there, with letters from the French officers who had served in.  America, praying for admission into the order, and a solemn act of their King permitting them to wear its ensign.  This, he said, changed the face of matters at once, produced an entire revolution of sentiment, and turned the torrent so strongly in an opposite direction, that it could be no longer withstood:  all he could then obtain, was a suppression of the hereditary quality.  He added, that it was the French applications, and respect for the approbation of the King, which saved the establishment in its modified and temporary form.  Disapproving thus