as ignominious.  Jefferson had taken Franklin’s place as Minister to France, but we had no credit and he could not secure the loan he was seeking.  John Adams in London, and John Jay in Madrid, were likewise balked.  Jay had to submit to the closing of the lower Mississippi to American shipping.  He did this in the hope of thereby conciliating Spain to make a commercial treaty which he thought was far more important than shipping.  Our people in the Southwest, however, regarded the closing of the river as portending their ruin, and they threatened to secede if it were persisted in.  Pennsylvania and New Jersey threw their weight with the Southerners and Congress voted against the Jay treaty.  That was the time when the corsairs of the Barbary States preyed upon American shipping in the Mediterranean and seized crews of our vessels and sold them into slavery in Northern Africa.  That there was not in the thirteen States sufficient feeling of dignity to resent and punish these outrages marks both their dispersed power and lack of regard for National honor.

After 1783 the States, virtually bankrupt at home, discordant, fickle, and aimless, and without credit or prestige abroad, were filled with many citizens who recognized that the system was bad and must be amended.  The wise among them wrote treatises on the remedies they proposed.  The wisest went to school of experience and sought in history how confederations and other political unions had fared.  Washington wrote for his own use an account of the classical constitutions of Greece and Rome and of the more modern states; of the Amphictyonic Council among the ancient, and the Helvetic, Belgic, and Germanic among the more recent.  John Adams devoted two massive volumes to an account of the medieval Italian republics.  James Madison studied the Achaian League and other ancient combinations.  There were many other men less eminent than these—­there was a Peletiah Webster, for instance.

Washington viewed the situation as a pessimist.  Was it because the high hopes that he had held during the war, that America should be the noblest among the nations, had been disappointed, or was it because he saw farther into the future than his colleagues saw?  On May 18, 1786, he writes intimately to John Jay: 

...  We are certainly in a delicate situation; but my fear is that the people are not yet sufficiently misled to retract from error.  To be plainer, I think there is more wickedness than ignorance mixed in our councils.  Under this impression I scarcely know what opinion to entertain of a general convention.  That it is necessary to revise and amend the Articles of Confederation, I entertain no doubt; but what may be the consequences of such an attempt is doubtful.  Yet something must be done, or the fabric must fall, for it certainly is tottering.

Ignorance and design are difficult to combat.  Out of these proceed illiberal sentiments,