ion between the
states. In its main intent the society was to be a kind of masonic
brotherhood, charged with the duty of aiding the widows and the orphan
children of its members in time of need. Innocent as all this was,
however, the news of the establishment of such a society was greeted
with a howl of indignation all over the country. It was thought that its
founders were inspired by a deep-laid political scheme for centralizing
the government and setting up a hereditary aristocracy. The press teemed
with invective and ridicule, and the feeling thus expressed by the
penny-a-liners was shared by able men accustomed to weigh their words.
Franklin dealt with it in a spirit of banter, and John Adams in a spirit
of abhorrence; while Samuel Adams pointed out the dangers inherent in
the principle of hereditary transmission of honours, and in the
admission of foreigners into a secret association possessed of political
influence in America. What! cried the men of Massachusetts. Have we
thrown overboard the effete institutions of Europe, only to have them
straightway introduced among us again, after this plausible and
surreptitious fashion? At Cambridge it was thought that the general
sentiment of the university was in favour of suppressing the order by
act of legislature. One of the members, who was a candidate for senator
in the spring of 1784, found it necessary to resign in order to save his
chances for election. Rhode Island proposed to disfranchise such of her
citizens as belonged to the order, albeit her most eminent citizen,
Nathanael Greene, was one of them. AEdanus Burke, a judge of the Supreme
Court of South Carolina, wrote a violent pamphlet against the society of
the Cincinnati under the pseudonym of Cassius, the slayer of tyrants;
and this diatribe, translated and amplified by Mirabeau, awakened dull
echoes among readers of Rousseau and haters of privilege in all parts of
Europe. A swarm of brochures in rejoinder and rebutter issued from the
press, and the nineteenth century had come in before the controversy was
quite forgotten.

It is easy for us now to smile at this outcry against the Cincinnati as
much ado about nothing, seeing as we do that in the absence of
territorial jurisdiction or especial political privileges an order of
nobility cannot be created by the mere inheritance of empty titles or
badges. For example, since the great revolution which swept away the
landlordship and fiscal exemptions of the Fren