power to read men aright and see the truth in them and about
them is a power more precious than any other bestowed by the kindest
of fairy godmothers. The lame devil of Le Sage looked into the secrets
of life through the roofs of houses, and much did he find of the
secret story of humanity. But the great man looking with truth and
kindliness into men's natures, and reading their characters and
abilities in their words and acts, has a higher and better power than
that attributed to the wandering sprite, for such a man holds in his
hand the surest key to success. Washington, quiet and always on the
watch, after the fashion of silent greatness, studied untiringly the
ever recurring human problems, and his just conclusions were powerful
factors in the great result. He was slow, when he had plenty of time,
in adopting a policy or plan, or in settling a public question, but
he read men very quickly. He was never under any delusion as to Lee,
Gates, Conway, or any of the rest who engaged against him because they
were restless from the first under the suspicion that he knew them
thoroughly. Arnold deceived him because his treason was utterly
inconceivable to Washington, and because his remarkable gallantry
excused his many faults. But with this exception it may be safely
said that Washington was never misled as to men, either as general or
President. His instruments were not invariably the best and sometimes
failed him, but they were always the best he could get, and he knew
their defects and ran the inevitable risks with his eyes open. Such
sure and rapid judgments of men and their capabilities were possible
only to a man of keen perception and accurate observation, neither of
which is characteristic of a slow or common-place mind.

[Footnote 1: _Magazine of American History_, vol. iii., 1879, p. 81.]

[Footnote 2: _Memoir of Rt. Rev. William Meade_, by Philip Slaughter,
D.D., p. 7.]

These qualities were, of course, gifts of nature, improved and
developed by the training of a life of action on a great scale. He had
received, indeed, little teaching except that of experience, and the
world of war and politics had been to him both school and college. His
education had been limited in the extreme, scarcely going beyond the
most rudimentary branches except in mathematics, and this is very
apparent in his early letters. He seems always to have written a
handsome hand and to have been good at figures, but his spelling at
the out