And the star of peace return.”
AMERICA’S GIFTS TO EUROPE.
MERICA has furnished to Europe proof of the fact that popular institutions, founded on equality and the principle of representation, are capable of maintaining governments, able to secure the rights of person, property, and reputation. America has proved that it is practicable to elevate the mass of mankind—that portion which in Europe is called the laboring or lower class—to raise them to self-respect, to make them competent to act a part in the great right and great duty of self-government; and she has proved that this may be done by education and the diffusion of knowledge. She holds out an example, a thousand times more encouraging than ever was presented before, to those nine-tenths of the human race who are born without hereditary fortune or hereditary rank.
America has furnished to the world the character of Washington; and if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind. Washington! “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” Washington is all our own! The enthusiastic veneration and regard in which the people of the United States hold him, prove them to be worthy of such a country, while his reputation abroad reflects the highest honor on his country.
I would cheerfully put the question to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, “What character of the century, upon the whole, stands out, in the relief of history, most pure, most respectable, most sublime?” and I doubt not that, by a suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be, Washington!
