Elenore Ray smiled, kindly, a little sadly, as she saw Sên King-lo’s hand clench on the frame of her chair.
“You are disappointed,” she told him gently.
“In Young China?” he replied frankly. “In some of its surface tricks—candidly yes. Yes, Dr. Ray, I carry two anxieties now.”
“So I thought.”
“But,” he added stoutly, “every new movement has its scum, and scum always rises to the top.”
“Always,” she agreed. “But fulfilled dreams are sorry things often. I sometimes have wondered what George Washington would think of the Chicago Board of Trade when it’s busy, and of the stock-yards.”
“But the cause for which he lived and fought and worked was supremely right,” Sên reminded her.
“We Americans like to think so,” the woman told him; “but right gets terribly twisted in human hands again and again. And the longer I live, the deeper I probe, the more convinced I grow that ‘causes’ count for strangely little, individual lives for almost everything—everything that really matters.”
“And you believe,” Sên King-lo questioned slowly—thinking as he spoke of a Chinese Emperor of whom Dr. Ray never had heard—“that in his record of personal character, Washington left his nation a greater heritage than he did in the victory of the War of Independence and in all the great national foundation he and Hamilton built after Yorktown?”
“Just that,” was the quiet reply. “In mental equipment and achievement, I incline to believe that Alexander Hamilton was the greatest genius in history, and certainly the greatest of our country. But George Washington was the greater man—because he was the more entirely good.”