Four American Leaders | Page 6

philosopher and an exhorter to a good life. His sagacity, intellectual
force, versatility, originality, firmness, fortunate period of service, and
longevity combined to make him a great leader of his people. In
American public affairs the generation of wise leaders next to his own
felt for him high admiration and respect; and the strong republic, whose
birth and youthful growth he witnessed, will carry down his fame as
political philosopher, patriot, and apostle of liberty through long
generations.

WASHINGTON
The virtues of Washington were of two kinds, the splendid and the
homely; I adopt, for my part in this celebration, some consideration of
Washington as a man of homely virtues, giving our far-removed
generation a homely example.
The first contrast to which I invite your attention is the contrast
between the early age at which Washington began to profit by the
discipline of real life and the late age at which our educated young men
exchange study under masters, and seclusion in institutions of learning,
for personal adventure and responsibility out in the world. Washington
was a public surveyor at sixteen years of age. He could not spell well;
but he could make a correct survey, keep a good journal, and endure the
hardships to which a surveyor in the Virginia wilderness was inevitably
exposed. Our expectation of good service and hard work from boys of
sixteen, not to speak of young men of twenty-six, is very low. I have

heard it maintained in a learned college faculty that young men who
were on the average nineteen years of age, were not fit to begin the
study of economics or philosophy, even under the guidance of skilful
teachers, and that no young man could nowadays begin the practice of a
profession to advantage before he was twenty-six or twenty-seven years
old. Now, Washington was at twenty-one the Governor of Virginia's
messenger to the French forts beyond the Alleghanies. He was already
an accomplished woodman, an astute negotiator with savages and the
French, and the cautious yet daring leader of a company of raw,
insubordinate frontiersmen, who were to advance 500 miles into a
wilderness with nothing but an Indian trail to follow. In 1755, at
twenty-three years of age, twenty years before the Revolutionary War
broke out, he was a skilful and experienced fighter, and a colonel in the
Virginia service. What a contrast to our college under-graduates of
to-day, who at twenty-two years of age are still getting their bodily
vigor through sports and not through real work, and who seldom seem
to realize that, just as soon as they have acquired the use of the
intellectual tools and stock with which a livelihood is to be earned in
business or in the professions, the training of active life is
immeasurably better than the training of the schools! Yet Washington
never showed at any age the least spark of genius; he was only "sober,
sensible, honest, and brave," as he said of Major-General Lincoln in
1791.
By inheritance and by marriage Washington became, while he was still
young, one of the richest men in the country; but what a contrast
between his sort of riches and our sorts! He was a planter and
sportsman--a country gentleman. All his home days were spent in
looking after his farms; in breeding various kinds of domestic animals;
in fishing for profit; in attending to the diseases and accidents which
befall livestock, including slaves; in erecting buildings, and repairing
them; in caring for or improving his mills, barns, farm implements, and
tools. He always lived very close to nature, and from his boyhood
studied the weather, the markets, his crops and woods, and the various
qualities of his lands. He was an economical husbandman, attending to
all the details of the management of his large estates. He was constantly
on horseback, often riding fifteen miles on his daily rounds. At

sixty-seven years of age he caught the cold which killed him by getting
wet on horseback, riding as usual about his farms.
Compare this sort of life, physical and mental, with the life of the
ordinary rich American of to-day, who has made his money in stocks
and bonds, or as a banker, broker, or trader, or in the management of
great transportation or industrial concerns. This modern rich man, in all
probability, has nothing whatever to do with nature or with country life.
He is soft and tender in body; lives in the city; takes no vigorous
exercise, and has very little personal contact with the elemental forces
of either nature or mankind. He is not like Washington an out-of-door
man. Washington was a combination of land-owner, magistrate, and
soldier,--the best combination for a leader of men which the feudal
system produced. Our modern rich man is apt to possess no one of