The only remedy which “the wise and good” could use to avert the calamity of having thirteen feeble little nations at war with one another was to supplant the “Articles of Confederation” with a Federal Constitution, and, at last, this was accomplished, with so many compromises and concessions to so-called “state rights” that it required a frightful four years’ civil war to establish the meaning of the Federal Constitution, so that the United States grammarians and politicians could agree to say the United States “is” instead of saying that the United States “are.” With the adoption of the Federal Constitution, it was provided that electors should be chosen whose duty it was to select a president for the United States. There could be but one man seriously considered. The landed gentleman who had become a soldier and won liberty for the Western world was soon seen to be destined, by the nation he had made, to be its first president, and henceforth by nature, if not by the providence of God, to be statesman, and the “First Citizen of America.” Accordingly, George Washington was chosen first president of the Western republic, to begin a term of four years from the fourth of March, 1789. III. LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERTY AND LAW Through the desperate eight years of war, in which the devastations of the British could hardly be called worse than the wrangling differences of opinion and sordid interests among the colonies, Washington had conserved and guided the struggle for American liberty, so that, at the close of the war, with the disembarkation for Halifax of troops, royalists and tories, there was a unanimous voice of harmony for a new America. Then came the divisions under the rivalry of the colonies as a loose confederation of separate republics. After that Washington was again at the head of American interests and for another eight years. It was a period of reconstruction. The opportunity to have a new nation, that human beings might have a place of freedom in the sun, was supplied by the eight years of revolutionary struggle, but the foundations for that nation were not laid firmly until there were eight years’ labor upon the Constitutional form of government under Washington. Probably no man, with the exception of Lincoln, has been so loved and so hated, or ever will be in America, as Washington. It is the most pathetic thing in all the weakness of intelligence, or rather the strength of prejudice, that the world always hates, and sometimes kills, its benefactors, its friends and saviors. But somehow, with all the storm and stress of things, notwithstanding the hate and revenge of disappointed greed, the rights of life are carried on, and the values of humanity prevail.