What did George Washington say about political parties?

The subject of political parties — or factions, as I more often called them — was one upon which I felt most urgently compelled to speak before I withdrew from public life. In my Farewell Address of 1796, I warned my countrymen with as much force as I could summon. My central fear was that the spirit of party, left unchecked, would corrode the republic from within. As I wrote in that address, “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” That is no small charge — I was saying that faction itself bears the seeds of tyranny. I acknowledged what some will argue: that parties serve as useful checks on government. But I answered that argument directly in the same address: “in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged” A fire that warms in moderation will consume if left unattended. Perhaps most gravely, I warned that faction opens the door to foreign manipulation — that a country divided against itself becomes susceptible to the designs of foreign powers working through those very passions of party. My counsel was not that such a spirit could be extinguished — human nature forbids that — but that a wise people would labor steadily to restrain it.