pointed out the dangers inherent in the principle of hereditary transmission of honours, and in the admission of foreigners into a secret association possessed of political influence in America. What! cried the men of Massachusetts. Have we thrown overboard the effete institutions of Europe, only to have them straightway introduced among us again, after this plausible and surreptitious fashion? At

Cambridge it was thought that the general sentiment of the university was in favour of suppressing the order by act of legislature. One of the members, who was a candidate for senator in the spring of 1784, found it necessary to resign in order to save his chances for election. Rhode Island proposed to disfranchise such of her citizens as belonged to the order, albeit her most eminent citizen, Nathanael Greene, was one of them. Ædanus Burke, a judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, wrote a violent pamphlet against the society of the Cincinnati under the pseudonym of Cassius, the slayer of tyrants; and this diatribe, translated and amplified by Mirabeau, awakened its dull echoes among readers of Rousseau and haters of privilege in all parts of Europe. A swarm of brochures in rejoinder and rebuttal issued from the press, and the nineteenth century had come in before the controversy was quite forgotten.

It is easy for us now to smile at this outcry against the Cincinnati as much ado about nothing, seeing as we do that in the absence of territorial jurisdiction or especial political privileges an order of nobility cannot be created by the mere inheritance of empty titles or badges. For example, since the great revolution which swept away the landlordship and fiscal exemptions of the French nobility, a marquisate or a dukedom in France is of scarcely more political importance than a doctorate of laws in a New England university. Men were nevertheless not to be blamed in 1783 for their hostility toward that ghost of the hereditary principle which the Cincinnati sought to introduce. In a free industrial society like that of America it had no proper place or meaning; and the attempt to set up such a form might well have been cited in illustration of the partial reversion toward militancy which eight years of warfare had effected. The absurdity of the situation was quickly realized by Washington, and he prevailed upon the new society, in its first annual meeting of May, 1784, to abandon the principle of hereditary membership. The agitation was thus allayed, and in the presence of graver questions the much-dreaded brotherhood gradually ceased to occupy popular attention.

The opposition to the Cincinnati is not fully explained unless we consider it in connection

with Nicola's letter, the Newburgh address, and the flight of Congress to Princeton. The members of the Cincinnati were pledged to do whatever they could to promote the union between the states; the object of the Newburgh address was to enlist the army in behalf of the public creditors, and in some vaguely imagined fashion to force a stronger government upon the country; the letter of Nicola shows that at least some of the officers had harboured the notion of a monarchy; and the weakness of Congress had been revealed in the most startling manner by its flight before a squad of mutineers. It is one of the lessons of history that, in the virtual absence of a central government for which a need is felt, the want is apt to be supplied by the strongest organization in the country, whatever that may happen to be. It was in this way that the French army, a few years later, got control of the government of France and made its general emperor. In 1783, if the impotence of Congress were to be as explicitly acknowledged as it was implicitly felt, the only national organization left in the country was the army, and when this was disbanded it seemed nevertheless to prolong its life under a new and dangerous form in the brotherhood of the Cincinnati. The cession of western lands to the confederacy was, moreover, completed at about this time, and one of the uses to which

the new territory was to be put was the payment of claims due to the soldiers. It was distinctly feared, as is shown in a letter from Samuel Adams to Elbridge Gerry, that the members of the Cincinnati would acquire large tracts of western land under this arrangement, and, importing peasants from Germany, would grant farms to them on terms of military service and fealty, thus introducing into America a kind of feudal system. In order to forestall any such movement, it was provided by Congress that in any new states formed out of the western territory no person holding a hereditary title should be admitted to citizenship.

From the weakness of Congress as illustrated in its inability to raise money to pay the public. debt and meet the current expenses of government, and from the popular dread of military usurpation which went along with the uneasy consciousness of that weakness, we have now to turn to another group of affairs in which the same point is still further illustrated and emphasized. We have seen how the commissioners of the United States in Paris had succeeded in making a treaty of peace with Great Britain on extremely favourable terms. So unpopular was the treaty in England, on account of the great concessions made to the Americans, that, as we have seen, the fall of Lord Shelburne's ministry was occasioned thereby. As an offset

to these liberal concessions, of which the most considerable was the acknowledgment of the

Congress finds itself

unable to carry out the provisions of

the treaty

American claim to the northwestern territory, our confederate government was pledged to do all in its power to effect certain concessions which

were demanded by England. That the American loyalists, whose property had been confiscated by various state governments, should be indemnified for their losses was a claim which, whatever Americans might think of it, England felt bound in honour to urge. That private debts, due from American to British creditors, should be faithfully discharged was the plainest dictate of common honesty. Congress, as we have seen, was bound by the treaty to recommend to the several states to desist from the persecution of Tories, and to give them an opportunity of recovering their estates; and it had been further agreed that all private debts should be discharged at their full value in sterling money. It now turned out that Congress was powerless to carry out the provisions of the treaty upon either of these points. The recommendations concerning the Tories were greeted with a storm of popular indignation. Since the beginning of the war these unfortunate persons had been treated with severity both by the legislatures and by the people. Many had been banished; others had