Washington had closed some of the most troublesome foreign questions which he had inherited from Confederation days. The new republic was beginning to make a place for itself among the nations. Treaties of amity and commerce had been made with all the maritime nations. American ministers were to be seen at the principal European Courts. Britain, France, Spain, and Holland had honoured the new power by sending representatives to Philadelphia. The entire diplomatic horizon was clear except in the French portion, where the Jay Treaty was bound to give offence. Under its tacit permission, as the French sympathisers claimed, more than three hundred American vessels were captured within the next twelvemonth, and over one thousand American seamen impressed by Britain. During the same period only three vessels and a few sailors were taken by France. In its domestic relations, also, the United States, as the time of Washington's second term drew to a close, was exceedingly prosperous. The new Government was in full operation. No one longer questioned its success or its fitness for the task before it. Fears for individual rights had been quieted by the adoption of ten amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing the continuance of such birthrights as freedom of conscience, trial by jury, free possession of property, and habeas corpus. The Union had come off victorious in its first case of discipline. It had made practical demonstration that its laws would be enforced and that it could use State militia regardless of State lines in enforcing them. Its system of judges and marshals extended over the entire domain. Its Supreme Court had sustained the claim of a citizen of South Carolina against the State of Georgia. State sovereignty had received a blow and national supremacy an impulse. The Superior Court had also declared that a treaty of the United States predominated over a State law, and that no State could confiscate a debt owed to a British subject. According to another decision, the United States District Courts were sustained in their admiralty jurisdiction over the State courts. The validity and authority of a presidential proclamation was established by the prosecution in the circuit court at Richmond of an offender against Washington's neutrality proclamation. But the decision during Washington's administration which especially made for the Union was in the case of Penhallow _v_. Doane's executors, which sustained all the actions of the old Congress both during the Revolutionary period and under the Articles, and made its decisions final in cases of appeal from State tribunals. Thus was the national sovereignty, by a single decision, extended backward over local government to the very beginnings of independency and, at the same time, established for the future so long as the National Government should exist.