Meantime the disorders went on, and the officers were insulted and thwarted in the execution of their duty. Washington's next letter (September 7) has a touch of anger. He hated disorder and riot anywhere, but he was disgusted when they came from the very people for whose defense the Indian war was pushed and the excise made necessary. He approved of Hamilton's sending out an officer to examine into the survey, and said: "If, notwithstanding, opposition is still given to the due execution of the law, I have no hesitation in declaring, if the evidence of it is clear and unequivocal, that I shall, however reluctantly I exercise them, exert all the legal powers with which the executive is invested to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit. It is my duty to see the laws executed. To permit them to be trampled upon with impunity would be repugnant to it; nor can the government longer remain a passive spectator of the contempt with which they are treated. Forbearance, under a hope that the inhabitants of that survey would recover from the delirium and folly into which they were plunged, seems to have had no other effect than to increase the disorder." A few weeks later he issued a proclamation, declaring formally and publicly what he had already said in private. He warned the people engaged in resistance to the law that the law would be enforced, and exhorted them to desist. The proclamation was effective in the south, and the opposition died out in North Carolina. Not so in Pennsylvania. There the Scotch-Irish borderers who lived in the western counties were bent on having their way. A brave, self-willed, hotheaded, turbulent people, they were going to have their fight out. They had ridden rough-shod over the Quaker and German government in Pennsylvania before this, and they no doubt thought they could do the same with this new government of the United States. They merely made a mistake about the man at the head of the government; nothing more than that. Such mistakes have been made before. The Paris mob, for example, made a similar blunder on the 13th Vendémiaire, when Bonaparte settled matters by the famous whiff of grape-shot. There is some excuse for the error of our Scotch-Irish borderers in their past experience, more excuse still in the drift of other events that touched all men just then with the madness of France, and gave birth to certain democratic societies which applauded any resistance to law, even if the cause was no nobler than a whiskey still.