dishonesty. It was to Massachusetts, however, that his attention was
most strongly attracted by the social disorders which culminated in
the Shays rebellion. There the miserable condition of public affairs
was bearing bitter fruit, and Washington watched the progress of the
troubles with profound anxiety. He wrote to Lee: "You talk, my
good sir, of employing influence to appease the present tumults in
Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or,
if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders.
_Influence_ is not _government_. Let us have a government by which our
lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the
worst at once." Through "all this mist of intoxication and folly,"
however, Washington saw that the Shays insurrection would probably be
the means of frightening the indifferent, and of driving those who
seemed impervious to every appeal to reason into an active support
of some better form of government. He rightly thought that riot and
bloodshed would prove convincing arguments.

In order to understand the utter demoralization of society, politics,
and public opinion at that time, the offspring of a wasting civil war
and of colonial habits of thought, it is interesting to contrast the
attitude of Washington with that of another distinguished American in
regard to the Shays rebellion. While Washington was looking solemnly
at this manifestation of weakness and disorder, and was urging strong
measures with passionate vehemence, Jefferson was writing from Paris
in the flippant vein of the fashionable French theorists, and uttering
such ineffable nonsense as the famous sentence about "once in twenty
years watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants." There
could be no better illustration of what Washington was than this
contrast between the man of words and the man of action, between the
astute leader of a party, the shrewd manager of men, and the silent