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 circumstances 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 destitution 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.