ize them.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

He left as fair a reputation as ever belonged to a human
character.... Midst all the sorrowings that are mingled on this
melancholy occasion I venture to assert that none could have felt
his death with more regret than I, because no one had higher
opinions of his worth.... There is this consolation, though, to
be drawn, that while living no man could be more esteemed, and
since dead none is more lamented.
--Washington, on the Death of Tilghman

[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON]

Dean Stanley has said that all the gods of ancient mythology were once
men, and he traces for us the evolution of a man into a hero, the hero
into a demigod, and the demigod into a divinity. By a slow process, the
natural man is divested of all our common faults and frailties; he is
clothed with superhuman attributes and declared a being separate and
apart, and is lost to us in the clouds.

When Greenough carved that statue of Washington that sits facing the
Capitol, he unwittingly showed how a man may be transformed into a Jove.

But the world has reached a point when to be human is no longer a cause
for apology; we recognize that the human, in degree, comprehends the
divine.

Jove inspires fear, but to Washington we pay the tribute of affection.
Beings hopelessly separated from us are not ours: a god we can not love, a
man we may. We know Washington as well as it is possible to know any man.
We know him better, far better, than the people who lived in the very
household with him. We have his diary showing "how and where I spent my
time"; we have his journal, his account-books (and no man was ever a more
painstaking accountant); we have hundreds of his letters, and his own
copies and first drafts of hundreds of others, the originals of which have
been lost or destroyed.

From these, with contemporary history, we are able to make up a close
estimate of the man; and we find him human--splendidly human. By his books
of accounts we find that he was often imposed upon, that he loaned
thousands of dollars to people who had no expectation of paying; and in
his last will, written with his own hand, we find him canceling these
debts, and making bequests to scores of relatives; giving freedom to his
slaves, and acknowledging his obligation to servants and various other
obscure persons. He was a man in very sooth. He was a man in that he had
in him the appetites, the ambitions