in the western counties of Pennsylvania and North Carolina.  In the former a meeting was held denouncing the law, pledging the people to “boycott” the officers, and hinting at forcible resistance.  If the people engaged in this business had stopped to consider the men with whom they had to deal, they would have been saved a great deal of suffering and humiliation.  The President and his Secretary of the Treasury were not men who could be frightened by opposition or violent speeches.  But angry frontiersmen, stirred up by demagogues, are not given to much reflection, and they meant to have their own way.

Washington was quite clear in his policy from the beginning.  He was ready to make every proper concession, but when this was done he meant on his side to have his own way, which was the way of law and order and good government.  He wrote to Hamilton in August, 1792:  “If, after these regulations are in operation, opposition to the due exercise of the collection is still experienced, and peaceable procedure is no longer effectual, the public interests and my duty will make it necessary to enforce the laws respecting this matter; and however disagreeable this would be to me, it must nevertheless take place.”

Meantime the disorders went on, and the officers were insulted and thwarted in the execution of their duty.  Washington’s next letter (September 7) has a touch of anger.  He hated disorder and riot anywhere, but he was disgusted when they came from the very people for whose defense the Indian war was pushed and the excise made necessary.  He approved of Hamilton’s sending out an officer to examine into the survey, and said:  “If, notwithstanding, opposition is still given to the due execution of the law, I have no hesitation in declaring, if the evidence of it is clear and unequivocal, that I shall, however reluctantly I exercise them, exert all the legal powers with which the executive is invested to check so daring and unwarrantable a spirit.  It is my duty to see the laws executed.  To permit them to be trampled upon with impunity would be repugnant to it; nor can the government longer remain a passive spectator of the contempt with which they are treated.  Forbearance, under a hope that the inhabitants of that survey would recover from the delirium and folly into which they were plunged, seems to have had no other effect than to increase the disorder.”

A few weeks later he issued a proclamation, declaring formally and publicly what he had already said in private.  He warned the people engaged in resistance to the law that the law would be enforced, and exhorted them to desist.  The proclamation was effective in the south, and the opposition died out in North Carolina.  Not so in Pennsylvania.  There the Scotch-Irish borderers who lived in the western counties were bent on having their way.  A brave, self-willed, hotheaded, turbulent people, they were going to have their fight out.  They had ridden rough-shod over the Quaker and German government in