Usually these revolutions are warlike, but sometimes
they are benign, as was the revolution over which General Washington,
our first great "Progressive," presided, when the rotting Confederation,
under his guidance, was converted into a relatively excellent
administrative system by the adoption of the Constitution.
Taken for all in all, I conceive General Washington to have been the
greatest man of the eighteenth century, but to me his greatness chiefly
consists in that balance of mind which enabled him to recognize when an
old order had passed away, and to perceive how a new order could be best
introduced. Joseph Story was ten years old in 1789 when the Constitution
was adopted; his earliest impressions, therefore, were of the
Confederation, and I know no better description of the interval just
subsequent to the peace of 1783, than is contained in a few lines in his
dissenting opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case:--
"In order to entertain a just view of this subject, we must go back to
that period of general bankruptcy, and distress and difficulty
(1785).... The union of the States was crumbling into ruins, under the
old Confederation.
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