I could discover in
our quiet talk, much change or richness of intonation, but he
always spoke with earnestness, and his eyes (glorious conductors
of the light within) burned with a steady fire which no one could
mistake for mere affability; they were one grand expression of the
well-known line: "I am a man, and interested in all that concerns
humanity." In one hour and a half's conversation he touched on
every topic that I brought before him with an even current of good
sense, if he embellished it with little wit or verbal elegance. He
spoke like a man who had felt as much as he had reflected, more
than he had spoken; like one who had looked upon society rather in
the mass than in detail, and who regarded the happiness of America
but as the first link in a series of universal victories; for his
full faith in the power of those results of civil liberty which
he saw all around him led him to foresee that it would erelong,
prevail in other countries and that the social millennium of
Europe would usher in the political. When I mentioned to him the
difference I perceived between the inhabitants of New England
and of the Southern States, he remarked: "I esteem those people
greatly, they are the stamina of the Union and its greatest
benefactors. They are continually spreading themselves too, to
settle and enlighten less favored quarters. Dr. Franklin is a New
Englander." When I remarked that his observations were flattering
to my country, he replied, with great good humor, "Yes, yes,
Mr. Bernard, but I consider your country the cradle of free
principles, not their armchair. Liberty in England is a sort of
idol; people are bred up in the belief and love of it, but see
little of its doings. They walk about freely, but then it is
between high walls; and the error of its government was in
supposing that after a portion of their subjects had crossed the
sea to live upon a common, they would permit their friends at home
to build up those walls about them."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lodge, II, 338, 339.]

We find among the allusions of several strangers who travelled in
Virginia in Washington's later days, who saw him or perhaps even
stayed at Mount Vernon, some which are not complimentary. More than
one story implies that he was a hard taskmaster, not only with the
negroes, but with the whites. Some of the writers go