with a vast territory and seventy millions of people, cannot readily
understand. To many persons his word was law; to all that was best in
the community, everything he said had immense weight. This influence
he used with care and without waste. Every blow he struck went home.
It is impossible to estimate just how much he effected, but it is safe
to say that it is to Washington, aided first by Hamilton and then
by Madison, that we owe the development of public opinion and the
formation of the party which devised and carried the Constitution.
Events of course worked with them, but they used events, and did not
suffer the golden opportunities, which without them would have been
lost, to slip by.

When Washington wrote of the Shays rebellion to Lee, the movement
toward a better union, which he had begun, was on the brink of
success. That ill-starred insurrection became, as he foresaw, a
powerful spur to the policy started at Mount Vernon, and adopted by
Virginia and Maryland. From this had come the Annapolis convention,
and thence the call for another convention at Philadelphia. As soon
as the word went abroad that a general convention was to be held, the
demand for Washington as a delegate was heard on all sides. At first
he shrank from it. Despite the work which he had been doing, and which
he must have known would bring him once more into public service, he
still clung to the vision of home life which he had brought with him
from the army. November 18, 1786, he wrote to Madison, that from a
sense of obligation he should go to the convention, were it not that
he had declined on account of his retirement, age, and rheumatism to
be at a meeting of the Cincinnati at the same time and place. But
no one heeded him, and Virginia elected him unanimously to head
her delegation at Philadelphia. He wrote to Governor Randolph,
acknowledging the honor, but reiterating what he had said to Madison,