CHAP. III. go half way towards a reform....If they are not 1789. errors, he can explain and justify the motives of his actions.

"At a distance from the theatre of action, truth is not always related without embellish. ment, and sometimes is entirely perverted from a misconception of the causes which produced the effects that are the subject of censure.

"This leads me to think that a system which I found it indispensably necessary to adopt upon my first coming to this city, might have undergone severe strictures, and have had motives very foreign from those that governed me, assigned as causes thereof....I mean first, returning no visits: second, appointing certain days to receive them generally (not to the exclusion however of visits on any other days under particular circumstances;) and third, at first entertaining no company, and afterwards (until I was unable to entertain any at all) confining it to official characters. A few days evinced the necessity of the two first in so clear a point of view, that had I not adopted it, I should have been unable to have attended to any sort of business, unless I had applied the hours allotted to rest and refreshment to this purpose;...for, by the time I had done breakfast, and thence until dinner...and afterwards until bed. time, I could not get relieved from the ceremony of one visit before I had to attend to another. In a word, I had no leisure to read or to answer the dispatches that were pouring in upon me from all quarters."

In a subsequent letter written to the same CHAP. III gentleman, after his levees had been openly cen- 1789. sured by the enemies of his administration, he

thus expressed himself.

"Before the custom was established, which now accommodates foreign characters, strangers, and others who from motives of curiosity, respect to the chief magistrate, or any other cause, are induced to call upon me, I was unable to attend to any business whatsoever. For gentlemen, consulting their own convenience rather than mine, were calling from the time I rose from break fast ...often before...until I sat down to dinner. This, as I resolved not to neglect my public duties, reduced me to the choice of one of these alternatives; either to refuse them altogether, or to appropriate a time for the reception of them. The first would, I well knew, be disgusting to many;...the latter I expected, would undergo animadversion from those who would find fault with or without cause. To please every body was impossible. I therefore adopted that line of conduct which combined public advantage with private convenience, and which in my judgment was unexceptionable in itself.

"These visits are optional. They are made without invitation. Between the hours of three and four every tuesday, I am prepared to receive them. Gentlemen, often in great numbers, come and go;...chat with each other;...and act as they please. A porter shews them into the room; and they retire from it when they choose, and without ceremony. At their first entrance, they salute

CHAP. III. me, and I them, and as many as I can talk to, I 1789. do. What pomp there is in all this I am unable to discover. Perhaps it consists in not sitting. To this two reasons are opposed: first, it is unusual; secondly, (which is a more substantial one) because I have no room large enough to contain a third of the chairs which would be suffi cient to admit it. If it is supposed that ostentation, or the fashions of courts (which by the by I believe originate oftener in convenience, not to say necessity, than is generally imagined) gave rise to this custom, I will boldly affirm that no supposition was ever more erroneous; for were I to indulge my inclinations, every moment that I could withdraw from the fatigues of my station should be spent in retirement. That they are not, proceeds from the sense I entertain of the propriety of giving to every one as free access as consists with that respect which is due to the chair of government;...and that respect, I conceive, is neither to be acquired or preserved, but by maintaining a just medium between much state, and too great familiarity.

"Similar to the above, but of a more familiar and sociable kind, are the visits every friday afternoon to Mrs. Washington, where I always am. These public meetings, and a dinner once a week to as many as my table will hold, with the references to and from the different departments of state, and other communications with all parts of the union, is as much if not more than I am able to undergo; for I have already had within less than a year, two severe attacks;.

$7

the last worse than the first,...a third, it is more CHAP. III, than probable will put me to sleep with my 1789. fathers....at what distance this may be, I know

not."

ration and

congress

The ceremonies of the inauguration having His inaugu been adjusted by congress; on the 30th of April, speech to the president attended in the senate chamber, in order to take, in the presence of both houses, the oath prescribed by the constitution.

To gratify the public curiosity, an open gallery adjoining the senate chamber had been selected by congress, as the place in which the oath should be administered. Having taken it in the view of an immense concourse of people, whose loud and repeated acclamations attested the joy with which his being proclaimed president of the United States inspired them, he returned to the senate chamber where he delivered the following address. "Fellow citizens of the Senate

and of the

House of Representatives :

Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predeliction, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of

1789.

CHAP. III. frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature, and unpractised in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions, all I dare aver is, that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be effected. All I dare hope is, that, if in accepting this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow citizens and have thence too little consulted my incapacity, as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me; my ERROR will be palliated by the motives which misled me, and its consequences be judged by my country, with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

"Such being the impressions under which I have, in obedience to the public summons, repaired to the present station; it will be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe ;...who presides in the councils of nations,...and whose providential aids