ace, 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
countryman; 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!

The structure now standing before us, by its uprightness, its solidity,
its durability, is no unfit emblem of his character. His public virtues
and public principles were as firm as the earth on which it stands; his
personal motives, as pure as the serene heaven in which its summit is
lost. But, indeed, though a fit, it is an inadequate emblem. Towering
high above the column which our hands have builded, beheld, not by the
inhabitants of a single city or a single State, but by all the families
of man, ascends the colossal grandeur of the character and life of
Washington. In all the constituents of the one, in all the acts of the
other, in all its titles to immortal love, admiration, and renown, it is
an American production. It is the embodiment and vindication of our
transatlantic liberty. Born upon our soil, of parents also born upon it;
never for a moment having had sight of the Old World; instructed,
according to the modes of his time, only in the spare, plain, but
wholesome elementary knowledge which our institutions provide for the
children of the people; growing up beneath and penetrated by the genuine
influences of American society; living from infancy to manhood and age
amidst our expanding, but not luxurious civilization; partaking in our
great destiny of labor, our long contest with unreclaimed nature and
uncivilized man, our agony of glory, the war of Independence, our great
victory of peace, the formation of the Union, and the establishment of
the Constitution,--he is all, all our own! Washington is ours.

I claim him for America. In all the perils, in every darkened moment of
the state, in the midst of the reproaches of enemies and the misgivings
of friends, I turn to that transcendent name for courage and for
consolation. To him who denies or doubts whether our fervid liberty can
be combined with law, with order, with the s