t not to be national and not sectional, independent and not
colonial? Is it not to have a high conception of what this great new
country should be, and to follow out that ideal with loyalty and
truth?

Has any man in our history fulfilled these conditions more perfectly
and completely than George Washington? Has any man ever lived who
served the American people more faithfully, or with a higher and truer
conception of the destiny and possibilities of the country? Born of an
old and distinguished family, he found himself, when a boy just out of
school, dependent on his mother, and with an inheritance that promised
him more acres than shillings. He did not seek to live along upon what
he could get from the estate, and still less did he feel that it was
only possible for him to enter one of the learned professions. Had
he been an Englishman in fact or in feeling, he would have felt very
naturally the force of the limitations imposed by his social position.
But being an American, his one idea was to earn his living honestly,
because it was the creed of his country that earning an honest living
is the most creditable thing a man can do. Boy as he was, he went out
manfully into the world to win with his own hands the money which
would make him self-supporting and independent. His business as a
surveyor took him into the wilderness, and there he learned that the
first great work before the American people was to be the conquest of
the continent. He dropped the surveyor's rod and chain to negotiate
with the savages, and then took up the sword to fight them and the
French, so that the New World might be secured to the English-speaking
race. A more purely American training cannot be imagined. It was not
the education of universities or of courts, but that of hard-earned
personal independence, won in the backwoods and by frontier fighting.
Thus trained, he gave the prime of his manhood to leading the
Revolution which made his country free, and his riper years to
building up that independent nationality without which freedom would
have been utterly vain.

He was the first to rise above all colonial or state lines, and grasp
firmly the conception of a nation to be formed from the thirteen
jarring colonies. The necessity of national action in the army was of
course at once apparent to him, although not to others; but he carried
the same broad views into widely different fields, where at the time
they wholly escaped notice. It was W