In the debates over the ratification of the US Constitution, the Anti-Federalists often resorted to predictions of the worst case of the future. The understood human nature better than the Federalists did, but they lacked the ability to hope that the American people would rise above that nature.
George Washington had strongly supported ratification, but by this day in 1796, he was exhausted. Not just by war, but by the Presidency not being quite what he had hoped or expected it to be. As he said farewell to the nation, he was seeing the Anti-Federalist warnings beginning to come to fruition. He himself would not become one of them, but his warning to the nation would be along so many of the same lines of thinking.
As we take a few moments today to consider the Farewell Address of Washington, we must ask those same questions of ourselves.

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