III. THE STRONG MIND FOR GREAT NEEDS
The union that is strength is always slow in the making. Minds get together slowly wherever there is freedom in thinking for thought-out individual responsibility.
In writing to Benjamin Harrison, Washington pointed out how detrimental it was for each colony to be centering itself on its own prosperity. To Colonel Joseph Reed, December, 1778, he wrote more freely of the “monopolizers, forestallers, and engrossers” who were “murderers of our cause.”
“It is much to be lamented,” he said, “that each state, long ere this, has not hunted them down as pests to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America. I would to God that some one of the most atrocious in each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.”
This shows how Washington loathed meanness and treachery and how he minced no words in saying so. Only such men are leaders of men. No man who believes anything and is afraid to say it has a place in the political meaning of America.
Benjamin Harrison, full of the same righteous resentment, writes at the time, “If I were to be called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men, from what I have seen, heard, and in part know, I should in one word say that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance seem to have laid fast hold of most of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration, and almost every order of men; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day.”
And so, to one patriot and then to another, Washington appealed for help to save the wasting fortunes of his country.
To George Mason he wrote that we are “fast verging to destruction.” The widespread demoralization of both army and people, the scramble for profit, and the unpatriotic plunder of vital interests at last became so evident under Washington’s ringing denunciations that the real patriots of the country awoke to the peril. Lafayette and the two Morrises took the lead in their respective fields of work. Writers and speakers took up the task of arousing the people and their officers in Congress, and at last the tide turned. The strong minds at last prevailed in uniting the people into a reliable force for the great need, and the American republic became an acknowledged part of the humanity of the earth.