h shall close the drama with the day,
Time's noblest offspring is the last";--

how could this imposing, swelling, final scene be appropriately opened,
how could its intense interest be adequately sustained, but by the
introduction of just such a character as our Washington?

Washington had attained his manhood when that spark of liberty was
struck out in his own country, which has since kindled into a flame, and
shot its beams over the earth. In the flow of a century from his birth,
the world has changed in science, in arts, in the extent of commerce, in
the improvement of navigation, and in all that relates to the
civilization of man. But it is the spirit of human freedom, the new
elevation of individual man, in his moral, social, and political
character, leading the whole long train of other improvements, which has
most remarkably distinguished the era. Society, in this century, has
not made its progress, like Chinese skill, by a greater acuteness of
ingenuity in trifles; it has not merely lashed itself to an increased
speed round the old circles of thought and action; but it has assumed a
new character; it has raised itself from _beneath_ governments to a
participation _in_ governments; it has mixed moral and political objects
with the daily pursuits of individual men; and, with a freedom and
strength before altogether unknown, it has applied to these objects the
whole power of the human understanding. It has been the era, in short,
when the social principle has triumphed over the feudal principle; when
society has maintained its rights against military power, and
established, on foundations never hereafter to be shaken, its competency
to govern itself.

It was the extraordinary fortune of Washington, that, having been
intrusted, in revolutionary times, with the supreme military command,
and having fulfilled that trust with equal renown for wisdom and for
valor, he should be placed at the head of the first government in which
an attempt was to be made on a large scale to rear the fabric of social
order on the basis of a written constitution and of a pure
representative principle. A government was to be established, without a
throne, without an aristocracy, without castes, orders, or privileges;
and this government, instead of being a democracy, existing and acting
within the walls of a single city, was to be extended over a vast
country, of different climates, interests, and habits, and of various
communions