GEORGE WASHINGTON

By Gilbert Charles Stuart, 1755-1828.

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ILBERT CHARLES STUART was born at Narragansett, Rhode Island, Dec. 3, 1755. In 1772 he went to Edinburgh with a Scotch painter named Alexander, with whom he studied his art. Soon after this his master died and left him to shift for himself, and after struggling awhile at the University of Glasgow he came back to Newport and from there to Boston, where he painted portraits until 1775 or 8, when the stir of the Revolution drove him to New York and thence to London; where after two years of poverty, friendlessness, and ill success, he became acquainted with Benjamin West, in whom he found a friend and master. A full-length portrait of West, now in the National Gallery, gained for him reputation and opportunity. He soon rose to eminence in London and painted people of rank--George III., the Prince of Wales, Joshua Reynolds, etc. The Duke of Ruthland invited him to Dublin, where he lived in splendor as an artist of the nobility. In Paris he met with similar fortune, having as a sitter Louis XVI. A desire to revisit his native country and paint the portrait of Washington, whom he profoundly revered, led him to return to the United States in 1792 when at the very height of his success and fame. After working two years in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, he settled at Boston for the rest of his life. He exhibited thirteen pictures at the Royal Academy, but the bulk of his work is in America. He painted most of the leading Americans of his time, including the presidents, Washington, John Adams, and Jefferson. He died at Boston, July 27, 1828.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE UNITED STATES

THE SITUATION of the United States even after the adoption of the new Constitution was extremely critical. The Continental Congress had had so little power that it had not been able to raise money to pay its debts, and it had practically no credit whatever. In 1784 Amsterdam bankers had refused to lend it the trifling sum of $300,000. The states themselves had to borrow money to help carry on the war, and were as unable to pay as the general government. The total national and state debts amounted to $70,000,000. Paper money and notes were worthless. The state courts disagreed. Congress was unattended. Everything was disorganized.

Perhaps the only act of the Continental Congress which had strengthened the union of the colonies since the war was the acceptance of the great Northwest Territory from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, and the legislation providing for its territorial government (1787). The ordinance provided for the details of the government of the territory, against primogeniture, and that the lands north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi should be used to form only free states. This territory gave the states something in common, and the new nation a vast property to hold in trust for its future inhabitants.

The organizer in Washington's cabinet was Alexander Hamilton. He believed in the strongest possible national government, and his measures were most of them directed to strengthening the central power. Under his leadership the government assumed the debts of the Continental Congress, and even went so far as to assume the state debts,