President Washington had no difficulty, even unaided by pugilistic M. C.’s or other metallic “rings,” in selecting gentlemen to fill the three newly created executive departments of Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War. Thomas Jefferson, forty-six years old, was requested to assist in managing our foreign relations and friends. Alexander Hamilton, in his thirty-second year, was solicited to pump something into that very dry cistern, the treasury. To the red-leaved portfolio of war was summoned General Henry Knox,—the Sherman of the Revolution. It was thought that the man who had, in times of Revolutionary discontent, wisely allayed the complaints of an army whose courage in the field he could nobly stimulate, and who had stroked the right way the rising fur of a disbanded soldiery, could deal justly with the approaching pension lists, and would fairly adjust the burdens of the seven lean years of war, to and through the many rank and good years which now appeared in the visions of our American Pharaohs. The new Secretary felt, in taking his place on the war bench, that he was summoned to a sort of military coroner’s inquest on the dead body of the late Revolution, which had served well in active duty, but which, like every such thing in our hurrying country,—old people, worn-out utensils, and other ex-useful machines,—was considered a respectable encumbrance. To the post of chief justice of the newly created Supreme Court President Washington nominated John Jay, and for Attorney-General, Edmund Randolph of Virginia. It is to be noted that the President, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General were all from the same State,—the greatest Cabinet-making, State-bureau manufactory in the Union. If Connecticut, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina sent any delegates to the President to remonstrate against the appointment of two gentlemen from the same State, the reporters of that time have shunned the bare mention of it. Nothing on earth, not even in the United States, is perfect; and in the United States especially things most perfect are always in order to be amended. Within the very first year of the ratification of the Constitution, ten amendments were proposed and carried, making it an old knife with new blades, and finishing it up into what some people, with great novelty, proclaim it to be, the most perfect instrument ever invented.