e family circles, among all
ages and sexes, gladdened voices to-day bespeak grateful hearts and a
freshened recollection of the virtues of the Father of his Country. And
it will be so, in all time to come, so long as public virtue is itself
an object of regard. The ingenuous youth of America will hold up to
themselves the bright model of Washington's example, and study to be
what they behold; they will contemplate his character till all its
virtues spread out and display themselves to their delighted vision; as
the earliest astronomers, the shepherds on the plains of Babylon, gazed
at the stars till they saw them form into clusters and constellations,
overpowering at length the eyes of the beholders with the united blaze
of a thousand lights.

_A Wonderful Age and Country_

Gentlemen, we are at a point of a century from the birth of Washington;
and what a century it has been! During its course, the human mind has
seemed to proceed with a sort of geometric velocity, accomplishing for
human intelligence and human freedom more than had been done in fives or
tens of centuries preceding. Washington stands at the commencement of a
new era, as well as at the head of the New World. A century from the
birth of Washington has changed the world. The country of Washington has
been the theater on which a great part of that change has been wrought,
and Washington himself a principal agent by which it has been
accomplished. His age and his country are equally full of wonders; and
of both he is the chief.

If the poetical prediction, uttered a few years before his birth, be
true; if indeed it be designed by Providence that the grandest
exhibition of human character and human affairs shall be made in this
theater of the Western world; if it be true that,

"The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last";

how could this imposing, swelling, final scene be appropriately opened,
how could its intense interest be adequately sustained but by the
introduction of just such a character as our Washington?

_The Spark of Human Freedom_

Washington had attained his manhood when that spark of liberty was
struck out in his own country which has since kindled into a flame and
shot its beams over the earth. In the flow of a century from his birth,
the world has changed in science, in arts, in the extent of commerce, in
the improvement of navigation, and in all that rela