Unbelievers may gainsay, and disappointed aspirants may rail at these deductions, but they nevertheless do no more than justice to the character of our people, before whom every public question and the acts and opinions of every public man, be he whom he may, may be freely canvassed. All that can be asked of him who seeks to vindicate and perpetuate the truth of history, is that he shall deal justly and candidly with his subject. From a scrutiny so conducted, no citizen will ask or expect that any public transaction, or the course of any public man shall be exempted. No man could have accepted office with fewer temptations to depart from the line of duty than offered themselves to President Washington. His claims to the admiration of his countrymen and of the world were complete; reasonable in all his desires and happy in his domestic relations, he was possessed of property beyond either his wants or his desires, and was without children to inherit his estate or to succeed to the glories already attached to his name. The advantages to be derived by a republican magistrate from the consciousness of occupying such a position and of its being also appreciated by his constituents, are very great. The confidence inspired by these considerations was also strengthened by the fact that in the high and responsible stations in which he had been placed he had never failed to increase the good-will and respect of those by whom he had been appointed. But these circumstances of encouragement did not blind his cautious mind to a proper sense of the difficulties incident to the new duties he had assumed and to his want of experience in regard to them. In addition to the command of all the military force in the country in a more plenary form than that in which he had before possessed it, he was now intrusted with the superintendence and direction of large portions of the domestic and of all the foreign concerns of a great people just taking their position in the family of nations. First on the list of his responsible duties stood that of organizing a government constructed upon new and to a great extent untried principles, at a moment when the tendency of the French Revolution had been sufficiently developed to threaten political convulsions more portentous and more difficult to be dealt with than any that the world had ever witnessed; and he was called to the performance of this delicate task amidst party dissensions at home of the most violent nature, which many people apprehended might extend to a revolution in the character of the government itself. Firm in all his purposes Washington did not shrink from the application of his well-balanced mind to a survey of the difficulties that stood in his way, in making which no exaggerated estimate of his own capacities prevented him from foreseeing the embarrassments that might arise, and to some extent must arise, from the difference in the nature of many of