emies and detractors in
abundance. During the Revolution he was abused and intrigued against,
thwarted and belittled, to a point which posterity in general scarcely
realizes. Final and conclusive victory brought an end to this, and
he passed to the presidency amid a general acclaim. Then the attacks
began again. Their character has been shown in a previous chapter, but
they were of no real moment except as illustrations of the existence
and meaning of party divisions. The ravings of Bache and Freneau,
and the coarse insults of Giles, were all totally unimportant in
themselves. They merely define the purposes and character of the party
which opposed Washington, and but for him would be forgotten. Among
his eminent contemporaries, Jefferson and Pickering, bitterly opposed
in all things else, have left memoranda and letters reflecting upon
the abilities of their former chief. Jefferson disliked him because he
blocked his path, but with habitual caution he never proceeded beyond
a covert sneer implying that Washington's mental powers, at no time
very great, were impaired by age during his presidency, and that he
was easily deceived by practised intriguers. Pickering, with more
boldness, set Washington down as commonplace, not original in his
thought, and vastly inferior to Hamilton, apparently because he was
not violent, and did not make up his mind before he knew the facts.

Adverse contemporary criticism, however, is slight in amount and vague
in character; it can be readily dismissed, and it has in no case
weight enough to demand much consideration. Modern criticism of the
same kind has been even less direct, but is much more serious and
cannot be lightly passed over. It invariably proceeds by negations
setting out with an apparently complete acceptance of Washington's
greatness, and then assailing him by telling us what he was not. Few
persons who have not given this matter a careful study realize how far
criticism of this sort has gone, and there is indeed no better way
of learning what Washington really was than by examining the various
negations which tell us what he was not.

Let us take the gravest first. It has been confidently asserted that
Washington was not an American in anything but the technical sense.
This idea is more diffused than, perhaps, would be generally supposed,
and it has also been formally set down in print, in which we are more
fortunate than in many other instances where the accusation has not