s day, because he was
the greatest man of his time, with a splendid breadth of vision.

When he first went among the New England troops at the siege of
Boston, the rough, democratic ways of the people jarred upon him, and
offended especially his military instincts, for he was not only a
Virginian but he was a great soldier, and military discipline is
essentially aristocratic. These volunteer soldiers, called together
from the plough and the fishing-smack, were free and independent men,
unaccustomed to any rule but their own, and they had still to learn
the first rudiments of military service. To Washington, soldiers who
elected and deposed their officers, and who went home when they felt
that they had a right to do so, seemed well-nigh useless and quite
incomprehensible. They angered him and tried his patience almost
beyond endurance, and he spoke of them at the outset in harsh terms by
no means wholly unwarranted. But they were part of his problem, and he
studied them. He was a soldier, but not an aristocrat wrapped up in
immutable prejudices, and he learned to know these men, and they came
to love, obey, and follow him with an intelligent devotion far better
than anything born of mere discipline. Before the year was out, he
wrote to Lund Washington praising the New England troops in the
highest terms, and at the close of the war he said that practically
the whole army then was composed of New England soldiers. They stayed
by him to the end, and as they were steadfast in war so they remained
in peace. He trusted and confided in New England, and her sturdy
democracy gave him a loyal and unflinching support to the day of his
death.

This openness of mind and superiority to prejudice were American in
the truest and best sense; but Washington showed the same qualities in
private life and toward individuals which he displayed in regard to
communities. He was free, of course, from the cheap claptrap which
abuses the name of democracy by saying that birth, breeding, and
education are undemocratic, and therefore to be reckoned against a
man. He valued these qualities rightly, but he looked to see what a
man was and not who he was, which is true democracy. The two men who
were perhaps nearest to his affections were Knox and Hamilton. One
was a Boston bookseller, who rose to distinction by bravery and good
service, and the other was a young adventurer from the West Indies,
without either family or money at his back. It was the