ch nobility, a marquisate
or a dukedom in France is of scarcely more political importance than a
doctorate of laws in a New England university. Men were nevertheless not
to be blamed in 1783 for their hostility toward that ghost of the
hereditary principle which the Cincinnati sought to introduce. In a free
industrial society like that of America it had no proper place or
meaning; and the attempt to set up such a form might well have been
cited in illustration of the partial reversion toward militancy which
eight years of warfare had effected. The absurdity of the situation was
quickly realized by Washington, and he prevailed upon the society, in
its first annual meeting of May, 1784, to abandon the principle of
hereditary membership. The agitation was thus allayed, and in the
presence of graver questions the much-dreaded brotherhood gradually
ceased to occupy popular attention.

The opposition to the Cincinnati is not fully explained unless we
consider it in connection with Nicola's letter, the Newburgh address,
and the flight of Congress to Princeton. The members of the Cincinnati
were pledged to do whatever they could to promote the union between the
states; the object of the Newburgh address was to enlist the army in
behalf of the public creditors, and in some vaguely-imagined fashion to
force a stronger government upon the country; the letter of Nicola shows
that at least some of the officers had harboured the notion of a
monarchy; and the weakness of Congress had been revealed in the most
startling manner by its flight before a squad of mutineers. It is one of
the lessons of history that, in the virtual absence of a central
government for which a need is felt, the want is apt to be supplied by
the strongest organization in the country, whatever that may happen to
be. It was in this way that the French army, a few years later, got
control of the government of France and made its general emperor. In
1783, if the impotence of Congress were to be as explicitly acknowledged
as it was implicitly felt, the only national organization left in the
country was the army, and when this was disbanded it seemed nevertheless
to prolong its life under a new and dangerous form in the secret
brotherhood of the Cincinnati. The cession of western lands to the
confederacy was, moreover, completed at about this time, and one of the
uses to which the new territory was to be put was the payment of claims
due to the soldiers. It was distin