e been deceived, but the country as well as himself had been most
basely betrayed; and for this reason he was relentless to Andre, whom
it is said he never saw, living or dead. The young Englishman had
taken part in a wretched piece of treachery, and for the sake of the
country, and as a warning to traitors, Washington would not spare him.
He would never have ordered a political prisoner to be taken out and
shot in a ditch, after the fashion of Napoleon; nor would he have
dealt with any people as the Duke of Cumberland dealt with the
clansmen after Culloden. Such performances would have seemed to him
wanton as well as cruel, and he was too wise and too humane a man
to be either. Indian atrocities, for instance, with which he was
familiar, never led him to retaliate in kind. But he was perfectly
prepared to exact the extremest penalty by just and recognized
methods; and had it not been for the urgent entreaties of his friends,
he would have sent Asgill to the scaffold, repugnant as it was to his
feelings, because he felt that the murder of Huddy was a crime for
which the English army was responsible, and which demanded a just and
striking vengeance. He was, it may be freely confessed, of anything
but a tame nature. There was a good deal of Berserker in his make-up,
and he was fierce in his anger when he believed that a great wrong had
been done. But because he was stern and unrelenting when he felt that
justice and his duty required him to be so, no more proves that he had
a cold heart than does the fact that he was silent, dignified, and
reserved. Cold-blooded men are not fierce in seeking to redress the
wrongs of others, nor are the fluent of speech the only kind and
generous members of the human family.

Washington's whole life, indeed, contradicts the charge that he was
cold of heart and sluggish of feeling. The man who wrote as he did in
his extreme youth, when Indians were harrying the frontier where he
commanded, was not lacking in humanity or sympathy; and such as he
then was he remained to the end of his life. A soldier by instinct and
experience, he never grew indifferent to the miseries of war. Human
suffering always appealed to him and moved him deeply, and when it was
wantonly inflicted stirred him to anger and to the desire for the wild
justice of revenge.

The goodness and kindness of man's heart, however, are much more truly
shown in the little details of life than in the great matters which
affect clas