The Wonderful Story of Washington Part 13

"The first foundations of the social compact would be broken up were we definitely to refuse to its members the protection of their persons and property while in their lawful pursuits."

"The persons and property of our citizens are ent.i.tled to the protection of our government in all places where they may lawfully go."

"We must make the interest of every nation stand surety for their justice, and their own loss to follow injury to us as effect follows its cause."

"The times do certainly render it inc.u.mbent on all good citizens, attached to the rights and honor of their country, to bury in oblivion all internal differences and rally round the standard of their country in opposition to the outrages of foreign nations."

"We are alarmed with the apprehensions of war, and sincerely anxious that it may be avoided; but not at the expense either of our faith or our honor."

"It is an eternal truth that acquiescence under insult is not the way to escape war."

"When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality."

CHAPTER XVII

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS ON THE CHARACTER AND CAREER OF WASHINGTON

I. THE WASHINGTON IDEAL AS THE FIRST GREAT AMERICAN IDEAL

Washington's religious belief has been the object of considerable controversy, because there is no standard or measure for a man's religious belief until the one investigating it gives his precise definition of what he means by religion, and that probably can not be done, for any basis of general agreement. It is not so easy to map out the interest and meaning of human feeling. Somehow no great man has ever felt that what he accomplished was done by his unaided self.

Everyone has in some form believed in a superior Guide. So a statement of Washington in 1778 may be taken as the keynote of his religious belief. He said, "The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked that has not grat.i.tude enough to acknowledge his obligations."

His faith in the benevolence of order and law as divinely designed is shown in his statement in 1791 that, "The great Ruler of events will not permit the happiness of so many millions to be destroyed." In 1792, he said, "As the All-Wise Disposer of events has. .h.i.therto watched over my steps, I trust that, in the important one I may be soon called upon to take, he will mark the course so plainly as that I cannot mistake the way."

That this faith was necessary to his purpose and mind, to help him through the long series of trials, in both the war and presidency, no one can doubt, who reads the detailed history of those periods,--they were so often desperately discouraging, so often both helpless and hopeless to any human foresight or judgment.

A few phrases taken from the "Mount Vernon Tribute" express the Americanism of Washington. The author of that inscription is unknown, but whoever it was he knew. The tribute was transcribed from a ma.n.u.script copy on the back of a picture frame containing a portrait of Washington, found hanging in one of the rooms at Mount Vernon after Washington's death. There he is called "The Defender of His Country," "The Founder of Liberty," "The Friend of Man," and "Benefactor of Mankind." "He triumphantly vindicated the Rights of Humanity," "Magnanimous in Youth, Glorious through Life, Great in Death"; "His Highest Ambition the Happiness of Mankind." According to this definition of patriotism, the meaning is not limited to a political area of square miles or boundary lines.

The n.o.ble tributes to Washington's character and work would fill many volumes, but a few will show how his life is regarded as a model for the youths of America.

Senator Vance of North Carolina said, "The youth of America who aspire to promote their own and their country's welfare should never cease to gaze upon his great example, or to remember that the brightest gems in the crown of his immortality, the qualities which uphold his fame on earth and plead for him in heaven, were those which characterized him as the patient, brave Christian gentleman."

James Bryce, the English statesman, publicist, and historian, said, "Washington stands alone and unapproachable, like a snow-peak rising above its fellows into the clear air of morning, with a dignity, constancy, and purity which have made him the ideal type of civic virtue to succeeding generations."

Henry Lee, who was beloved by Washington like a son, has given us the great picture of him, "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life; pious, just, humane, temperate, and sincere, uniform, dignified, and commanding, his example was as edifying to all around him as were the effects of that example lasting."

Lord Byron wrote,

"Where may the wearied eyes repose, When gazing on the great, Where neither guilty glory glows, Nor despicable state?

Yes,--one, the first, the last, the best, The Cincinnatus of the West, Whom envy dared not hate, Bequeathed the name of Washington, To make men blush, there was but one."

Louis Kossuth, the great Hungarian patriot, said, "Let him who looks for a monument to Washington look around the United States. Your freedom, your independence, your national power, your prosperity, and your prodigious growth are a monument to him."

Lord Macaulay says that he had in his character, "The sobriety, the self-command, the perfect soundness of judgment, the perfect rect.i.tude of intention, to which the history of revolutions furnishes no parallel, or furnishes a parallel in Washington alone."

The tribute of the greatest American to the greatest American, for, so alike are these two in divinity of mind for the divinity of America and humanity that they can thus be thought of only as one, should be known to all. Abraham Lincoln says, "Washington's is the mightiest name on earth--long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name no eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe p.r.o.nounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor leave it shining on."

II. NOT BIRTH BUT CHARACTER MAKES AMERICANS

Washington and Lincoln are two names inseparately connected in the making and preservation of America. Each became the leader in his country's interests at a period of almost unspeakable dissention and of indescribable peril to freedom as the condition of social civilization. In the midst of that terrible turmoil, through every form of abuse, intrigue and obstruction, they kept clear the way that America should go, and upheld the America that all freeborn men believed to be the ideal and opportunity of humanity and mankind.

Washington is often declared to have been so much of his life an Englishman that he cannot be regarded as a real born American. With this declaration it is also a.s.serted that Lincoln was the first complete representative of real Americanism. This is as much as to say that one born into the richest family in the early days of a town is not as much of a citizen as one born in the poorest house in the town when it has become a city. Search can nowhere reveal any Americanism in either of those great souls that was not also in the other.

Physical surroundings had much to do with the details of their minds, characters and careers, but nothing to do with their principles of humanity which were indistinguishably the same. The glorious largeness of their hearts and their manhood made the same supreme American.

Though less in leadership and in effect upon the life of their country, there were thousands, if not millions, as perfectly synonymous with Americanism as either Washington or Lincoln. It is thus character and not birth that makes Americans, and therefore it is not place but humanity that makes America.

The hereditary mansion and the log hut were but the outer form of those two great men. The faith, hope and love within for the freedom of humanity, in the truth that makes men free, were the same in both hut and mansion.

Those numerous malcontents who vilified Washington, and whose subsequents poisoned the atmosphere around Lincoln, could not see an hour beyond their own dog's day, and were unable to measure any value greater than their own personal interests. The very names which they strove to make great in the historical vision of posterity have vanished, or their perversions have been forgiven as repented fully.

In contrast to them are such n.o.ble heroes ill.u.s.trated, for instance by John d.i.c.kinson, who did not believe it was their duty to leave wealth to their children, but it was necessary to leave them a heritage of liberty; by Samuel Adams, who was impoverished by his stand for American freedom, and yet scornfully refused an honored office that was meant to bribe him away from the American cause; by Robert Morris, who gave his fortune to feed the starving troops in the darkest period of the war; and by Benjamin Franklin, rich, famous and old, past seventy years of age, accepting the dangerous, laborious and sacrificing mission to France, in the name of human union, for a liberty-loving world. It required the profoundest devotion and heroism for one so old as Franklin to break with friends of a lifetime, as shown when he wrote,

"You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy and I am yours, "B. FRANKLIN."

Likewise, when he signed the Declaration of Independence, saying, "We must now all hang together or hang separately."

The foundations of Americanism rest on Americans and when they are needed they always come forth to keep the faith.

III. THE AMERICAN LESSON LEARNED FROM THE GREATEST LEADERS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA

Washington was no prodigy, and it belittles both him and Lincoln to be rated as miracles. The study of their lives teaches us above all things that there was no accident about them. They built themselves up out of the material of their experiences and circ.u.mstances into manhood and character, ready for the tasks of their human world.

No man of colonial times lived more under English aristocratic influence than Washington, and yet it only served as a contrast in which to define his principles of liberty, his meaning of manhood and his vision of humanity. So, also, no man of his times was more under the belittling trivialities of frontier dest.i.tution and ignorance than Abraham Lincoln, but it only served as inspiration and revelation for his moral duty in the supreme crisis of the American nation.

The lives of these two great men, from such widely different origins, and yet coming to oneness in such a mutual cause and character, are vital inspiration to every aspiring youth, showing that the value of character is in every one's own hands if he will but look around and get the true measure of what are life, and mind, and humanity. Those careers show that the rights of man are never found in fragments, nor exclusive in parties or single nations.

Larned says, in his "Study of Greatness in Men," that "A man more perfectly educated than Abraham Lincoln, in the true meaning of education, did not exist in the world. When the time came for his doing a great work, he had perfected his powers, and the simple story of the simple methods of self-culture and self-training, by which he was nature-led to that perfect result, holds the whole philosophy of education."

Washington's life was a fine human model through all the periods of his career, but the heartening lesson of Lincoln was in his unconquerable struggle to master a way of life, in the course of which could appear his worthy human task.

Lincoln's man-making process especially proves, even as Washington's life had already shown, that there must be a fundamental honesty of purpose in building up the mind or no one can ever arrive at manhood, character or more abundant life.

Washington and Lincoln were continuously expressing themselves in word or deed, but always striving for the reasonable in a clear-minded way.

Their mind-making was always the process of achieving a humanity-mind capable of clear world-wisdom. In that kingdom alone is the Americanism that is human liberty, the rights of man and the moral redemption of the world.

The cruel martyrdom of Lincoln's death no doubt threw a glamor of hero-worship over Lincoln, which does him more injustice than honor, for the simple reason that the merit of his life belongs to his own heroic soul, and its desperate struggle up to the light. Washington's real life and character have been much obscured by the romance of his times and the hero-worship which so much prevailed in the literature of his period. It is doubtless of more real value to American patriotism, personal character and moral humanity, for both the heroic and the trivial to fade from our interest in the lives of Washington and Lincoln, and from the meaning of their lives for the rights of man. We need to appreciate the human struggle within themselves that made them admirable men, and we need to know it in relation to the human work around them that made them admirable Americans. More and more we can see in their earnest endeavor for the right-minded way, not only the making of men and the making of Americans, but also the making of America and the making of the World.

END