Long live the United States of America! Filled with the free, magnanimous spirit, crowned by the wisdom, blessed by the moderation, hovered over by the angel of Washington's example, may they be ever worthy in all things to be defended by the blood of the brave, who know the rights of man and shrink not from their assertion; may they be each a column, and all together, under the Constitution, a perpetual Temple of Peace, unshadowed by a Cæsar's palace, at whose altar may freely commune all who seek the union of liberty and brotherhood.
Long live our country! Oh, long through the undying ages may it stand far removed in fact as in space from the Old World's feuds and follies; alone in its grandeur and its glory, itself the immortal monument of him whom Providence commissioned to teach man the power of truth and to prove to the nations that their redeemer liveth.
THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON [ToC]
BY HENRY CABOT LODGE
For many years I have studied minutely the career of Washington, and with every step the greatness of the man has grown upon me; for analysis has failed to discover the act of his life which, under the conditions of the time, I could unhestitatingly pronounce to have been an error. Such has been my experience, and, although my deductions may be wrong, they at least have been carefully and slowly made. I see in Washington a great soldier, who fought a trying war to a successful end impossible without him; a great statesman, who did more than any other man to lay the foundations of a republic which has endured in prosperity for more than a century. I find in him a marvelous judgment which was never at fault, a penetrating vision which beheld the future of America when it was dim to other eyes, a great intellectual force, a will of iron, an unyielding grasp of facts, and an unequaled strength of patriotic purpose. I see in him, too, a pure and high-minded gentleman of dauntless courage and stainless honor, simple and stately of manner, kind and generous of heart. Such he was in truth. The historian and the biographer may fail to do him justice, but the instinct of mankind will not fail. The real hero needs not books to give him worshipers. George Washington will always receive the love and reverence of men, because they see embodied in him the noblest possibilities of humanity.