improper jealousies, and a train of evils which oftentimes in republican governments must be sorely felt before they can be removed.  The former, that is ignorance, being a fit soil for the latter to work in, tools are employed by them which a generous mind would disdain to use; and which nothing but time, and their own puerile or wicked productions, can show the inefficacy and dangerous tendency of.  I think often of our situation, and view it with concern.  From the high ground we stood upon, from the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen! so lost! it is really mortifying.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Ford, xi, 31.]

One of the chief causes of the discontents which troubled the public was the increasing number of persons who had been made debtors after the war by the more and more pressing demands of their creditors.  These debtors knew nothing about economics; they only knew that they were being crushed by persons more lucky than themselves.  In Massachusetts they broke out in actual rebellion named after the man who led it, Daniel Shays.  They were put down by the more or less doubtful appeal to veterans of the National Army, but their ebullition was not forgotten as a symptom of a very dangerous condition.  In 1786 representatives from five States met in a convention at Annapolis to consider the hard times and the troubles in trade.  Washington, Hamilton, and Madison were thought to be behind the convention, which accomplished little, but made it clear that a large general convention ought to meet and to discuss the way of securing a strong central government.  This convention was discussed during that summer and autumn, and a call was issued for a meeting in the following spring at Philadelphia.  Virginia turned first to Washington to be one of its delegates, but he had sincere scruples against entering public life again.  He wrote to James Madison on November 18th: 

Although I had bid adieu to the public walks of life in a public manner, and had resolved never more to tread upon public ground, yet if, upon an occasion so interesting to the well-being of the confederacy, it should have appeared to have been the wish of the Assembly to have employed me with other associates in the business of revising the federal system, I should, from a sense of obligation I am under for repeated proof of confidence in me, more than from any opinion I should have entertained of my usefulness, have obeyed its call; but it is now out of my power to do so with any degree of consistency.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Ford, XI, 87.]

Washington’s disinclination to abandon the quiet of Mount Vernon and the congenial work he found there, and to be plunged again into political labors, was perhaps his strongest reason for making this decision.  But a temporary aggravation ruled him.  The Society of the Cincinnati, of which he was president, had aroused much odium in the country among those who were jealous or envious that such a special privileged