Benjamin Lincoln to George Washington Regarding His Observations

answer to them yet I will make some observations
which shall involve in them the best answers to the several questions in my power to give.

"Are your people getting mad?" Many
of them appear to be absolutely so if an attempt to annihi-
-late our present constitution and dissolve the present
government can be considered as evidence of insanity.

"Are we to have the goodly fabric
that eight years were spent in raising pulled over
our heads?" There is I think great danger that it
will be so unless the tottering system shall be suppor-
ted by arms and even then a government which has no other
basis than the point of the bayonet, should one
be suspended thereon, is so totally different from y^e
one established, at least in idea, by the different
States that if we must have recourse to the sad expe-
riment of arms that it can hardly be said that we
have supported "the goodly fabric," in this view
of the matter it may be "pulled over our heads" this
probably will be the case for there doth not appear
to be virtue enough among the people to preserve
a perfect republican government.

"What is the cause of all these commotions?"
The causes are too many and too various for me to
pretend to trace & point them out. I therefore shall
only mention some of those which appear to be the principal
ones among those I may rank. The case with which property was acquired, with