Part 24

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More than any other individual, and as much as to one individual was possible, has he contributed to found this, our wide spreading empire, and to give to the Western World independence and freedom.

CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL.

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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.

KOSSUTH.

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More than all, and above all, Washington was master of himself. If there be one quality more than another in his character which may exercise a useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total disregard of self when in the most elevated positions for influence and example.

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.

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WASHINGTON'S RELIGIOUS CHARACTER

BY WILLIAM M'KINLEY

In an Address, February 22, 1898

Though Washington's exalted character and the most striking acts of his brilliant record are too familiar to be recounted here, yet often as the story is retold, it engages our love and admiration and interest. We love to record his noble unselfishness, his heroic purposes, the power of his magnificent personality, his glorious achievements for mankind, and his stalwart and unflinching devotion to independence, liberty, and union. These cannot be too often told or be too familiarly known.

A slaveholder himself, he yet hated slavery, and provided in his will for the emancipation of his slaves. Not a college graduate, he was always enthusiastically the friend of liberal education....

And how reverent always was this great man, how prompt and generous his recognition of the guiding hand of Divine Providence in establishing and controlling the destinies of the colonies and the Republic....

Washington states the reasons of his belief in language so exalted that it should be graven deep in the mind of every patriot:

No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of man more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency; and in the important revolution just accomplished in the system of their united government the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consents of so many distinguished communities from which the events resulted cannot be compared with the means by which most governments have been established, without some return of pious gratitude, along with an humble anticipation of the future blessings which the same seems to presage. The reflections arising out of the present crisis have forced themselves strongly upon my mind. You will join me, I trust, in thinking that there are none under the influence of which the proceedings of a new and free government are more auspiciously commenced.

In his Farewell Address, Washington contends in part:

(1) For the promotion of institutions of learning;

(2) for cherishing the public credit;

(3) for the observance of good faith and justice toward all nations....

At no point in his administration does Washington appear in grander proportions than when he enunciates his ideas in regard to the foreign policy of the government:

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all; religion and morality enjoin this conduct. Can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.

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WASHINGTON

ANONYMOUS

We are met to testify our regard for him whose name is intimately blended with whatever belongs most essentially to the prosperity, the liberty, the free institutions, and the renown of our country. That name was a power to rally a nation in the hour of thick-thronging public disasters and calamities; that name shone amid the storm of war, a beacon light to cheer and guide the country's friends; its flame, too, like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name in the days of peace was a loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole people's love, and the whole world's respect; that name, descending with all time, spread over the whole earth, and uttered in all the languages belonging to the tribes and races of men, will forever be pronounced with affectionate gratitude by everyone in whose breast there shall arise an aspiration for human rights and human liberty.