ashington, oppressed by a thousand
cares, who in the early days of the Revolution saw the need of Federal
courts for admiralty cases and for other purposes. It was he who
suggested this scheme, years before any one even dreamed of the
Constitution; and from the special committees of Congress, formed for
this object in accordance with this advice, came, in the process of
time, the Federal judiciary of the United States.[1] Even in that
early dawn of the Revolution, Washington had clear in his own mind the
need of a continental system for war, diplomacy, finance, and law, and
he worked steadily to bring this policy to fulfilment.

[Footnote 1: See the very interesting memoir on this subject by the
Hon. J.C. Bancroft Davis.]

When the war was over, the thought that engaged his mind most was
of the best means to give room for expansion, and to open up the
unconquered continent to the forerunners of a mighty army of settlers.
For this purpose all his projects for roads, canals, and surveys were
formed and forced into public notice. He looked beyond the limits of
the Atlantic colonies. His vision went far over the barriers of the
Alleghanies; and where others saw thirteen infant States backed by the
wilderness, he beheld the germs of a great empire. While striving thus
to lay the West open to the march of the settler, he threw himself
into the great struggle, where Hamilton and Madison, and all who
"thought continentally," were laboring for that union without which
all else was worse than futile.

From the presidency of the convention that formed the Constitution, he
went to the presidency of the government which that convention brought
into being; and in all that followed, the one guiding thought was to
clear the way for the advance of the people, and to make that people
and their government independent in thought, in policy, and in
character, as the Revolution had made them independent politically.
The same spirit which led him to write during the war that our battles
must be fought and our victories won by Americans, if victory and
independence were to be won at all, or to have any real and solid
worth, pervaded his whole administration. We see it in his Indian
policy, which was directed not only to pacifying the tribes, but
to putting it out of their power to arrest or even delay western
settlement. We see it in his attitude toward foreign ministers, and in
his watchful persistence in regard to the Mississippi, which e