eginning of each subsequent administration.

The acid test of efficiency was still to be applied to the new machinery
of government. But Americans then, as now, were an adaptable people,
with political genius, and they would have been able to make almost any
form of government succeed. If the Federal Convention had never met,
there is good reason for believing that the Articles of Confederation,
with some amendments, would have been made to work. The success of the
new government was therefore in a large measure dependent upon the favor
of the people. If they wished to do so, they could make it win out in
spite of obstacles. In other words, the new government would succeed
exactly to the extent to which the people stood back of it. This was the
critical moment when the slowly growing prosperity, described at length
and emphasized in the previous chapters, produced one of its most
important effects. In June, 1788, Washington wrote to Lafayette:

"I expect, that many blessings will be attributed to our new government,
which are now taking their rise from that industry and frugality into
the practice of which the people have been forced from necessity. I
really believe that there never was so much labour and economy to be
found before in the country as at the present moment. If they persist
in the habits they are acquiring, the good effects will soon be
distinguishable. When the people shall find themselves secure under an
energetic government, when foreign Nations shall be disposed to give us
equal advantages in commerce from dread of retaliation, when the burdens
of the war shall be in a manner done away by the sale of western lands,
when the seeds of happiness which are sown here shall begin to expand
themselves, and when every one (under his own vine and fig-tree) shall
begin to taste the fruits of freedom--then all these blessings (for all
these blessings will come) will be referred to the fostering influence
of the new government. Whereas many causes will have conspired to
produce them."

A few months later a similar opinion was expressed by Crevecoeur in
writing to Jefferson:

"Never was so great a change in the opinion of the best people as has
happened these five years; almost everybody feels the necessity of
coercive laws, government, union, industry, and labor.... The exports of
this country have singularly increased within these two years, and the
imports have decreased in proportion."

The new Federal Gov