Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/347

 1789] The new Government. 315 sloth, all the torpor of the old. The Senate was to consist of twenty-two members and the House of fifty -nine. Yet, while the cannon were firing and the bells ringing, there were but eight Senators and thirteen Repre- sentatives in the city. The sixth of April arrived before both Houses had a quorum. Then the electoral votes were counted ; and Washington and Adams were declared respectively President and Vice-President. On April 22 Adams was inaugurated ; and a week later Washington, standing on the balcony of the Federal Hall, took the oath of office in the presence of a great crowd of his fellow-citizens. The task which now lay before him was unique. No such duty had ever before been laid on any man. " My station," said he to the crowd that saw him take the oath of office for the first time, " is new. I walk on untrodden ground." He did indeed walk on untrodden ground. When the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, scarce a vestige of government existed. The Continental Congress, a body whose name should never be mentioned without a grateful recollection of its noble work, had months before expired ignominiously for want of a quorum. Save a Secretary of Foreign Affairs with scarce a letter to write, a Secretary of War with an army of eighty men, a Board of Treasury in whose coffers there was not a shilling, not a piece of the machinery of the defunct and discarded system remained in operation. About the President on every side lay the wreckage of a demolished government, and in his hand was a brand-new Constitution investing him with untried powers of the largest kind. A man who in our time comes to the Presidency finds his way made straight by customs, traditions, precedents, and established forms, and administers government under a Constitution simplified by the interpretations of a hundred years. To Washington these helps were all denied. On him rested the solemn responsibility of so starting the young Republic on its way that its future career should not fail to be honourable to itself and beneficial to mankind. The United States was at that time a small country. On the west it just touched the Mississippi river. It nowhere touched the Gulf of Mexico, and it contained but half as many human beings as to-day dwell within the borders of Pennsylvania. Its foreign relations were strained and in disorder. There was as yet no commercial treaty with Great Britain, and none of any sort with Spain, Portugal, or Italy, or with any commercial nation of Europe, save France, Holland, and Prussia. In spite of the Treaty of Independence, British troops still held the frontier forts from Lake Champlain to Michigan. In defiance of right, Spain held part of what is now Alabama and Mississippi, and displayed her flag on the site of what is now Memphis. The finances were in confusion. On the books of the treasury was a debt due to France, Spain, and Holland, the principal of which had begun to fall due and the interest on which had often been unpaid. To the people the State owed a still greater debt, the paper evidence of which en. ix.