the stead of oaks and undergrowth, broad streets, a populous city, magnificent buildings, outrivaling the temples of antiquity—the Federal City, the Capital of the vast Republic yet to be! The dreary camp, the weary march, privation, cold, hunger, bloodshed, revolution, patient victory at last, all these were to be endured, outlived, before the beautiful Capital of his future was reached. Did the youth foresee these, also? Many toiling, struggling, suffering years bridged the dream of the young surveyor and the first faint dawn of its fulfillment. After the Declaration of Independence, before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, its government moved slowly and painfully about on wheels. As the exigencies of war demanded, Congress met at Philadelphia, Baltimore, Lancaster, York, Princeton, Annapolis, Trenton, and New York. During these troubled years it was the ambition of every infant State to claim the seat of government. For this purpose New York offered Kingston; Rhode Island, Newport; Maryland, Annapolis; Virginia, Williamsburg. June 21, 1783, Congress was insulted at Philadelphia by a band of mutineers, which the State authorities could not subdue. The body adjourned to Princeton; and the troubles and trials of its itinerancy caused the subject of a permanent national seat of government to be taken up and discussed with great vehemence from that time till the formation of the Constitution. The resolutions offered, and the votes taken in these debates, indicate that the favored site for the future Capital lay somewhere between the banks of the Delaware and the Potomac—“near Georgetown,” says the most oft-repeated sentence. October 30, 1784, the subject was discussed by Congress, at Trenton. A long debate resulted in the appointment of three commissioners, with full power to lay out a district not exceeding three, nor less than two miles square, on the banks of either side of the Delaware, for a Federal town, with power to buy soil and to enter into contracts for the building of a Federal House, President’s house, house for Secretaries, etc.