Thank you for suggesting that Freepers read these words again, today.
Congressman Billybob
"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and, sooner or later, the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purpose of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty."
Obvuously UNION was of paramount importance to him, and he foresaw difficulties between competing regional interests between the South and the North and also East to the West.
Interestingly -- and something to think about -- he called for the formation of a national university, to which a national military academy (West Point) was an secondary proposal. He argued that nation needed the resource to train our young, and only a nationally funded school could pay the level of professorial salaries needed. That was in his eighth annual address, 7 December 1796.
The topic of national funding of college education is of current concern, and clearly Washington believed that to some extent it was a proper national expense, for the common defense.
To that end, national defense, he also wondered -- asking in open questions -- as to the level of national support for domestic "manufacture", a term as he used it the includes both industry and agriculture. He appeared to think that some level of national support was appropriate for those manufactures needed for that common defense, and that to allow outsourcing (modern term, not his) was a dangerous and unacceptable risk.