Four American Leaders | Page 8

first soldier and first statesman of his country,
surely this was a modest anticipation of continued usefulness. We think
more about our rights than our duties. He thought more about his duties
than his rights. Posterity has given him first place because of the way in
which he conceived and performed his duties; it will judge the leaders
of the present generation by the same standard, whatever their theories
about human rights.
Having said thus much about contrasts, let me now turn to some
interesting resemblances between Washington's times and our own. We
may notice in the first place the permanency of the fighting quality in
the English-American stock. Washington was all his life a fighter. The
entire American people is to-day a fighting people, prone to resort to
force and prompt to take arms, the different sections of the population
differing chiefly in regard to the nature and amount of the provocation
which will move them to violence and combat. To this day nothing
moves the admiration of the people so quickly as composure, ingenuity,
and success in fighting; so that even in political contests all the terms
and similes are drawn from war, and among American sports the most
popular have in them a large element of combat. Washington was
roused and stimulated by the dangers of the battlefield, and utterly
despised cowards, or even men who ran away in battle from a
momentary terror which they did not habitually manifest. His early
experience taught him, however, that the Indian way of fighting in
woods or on broken ground was the most effective way; and he did not
hesitate to adopt and advocate that despised mode of fighting, which
has now, one hundred and fifty years later, become the only possible
mode. The Indian in battle took instantly to cover, if he could find it. In

our Civil War both sides learned to throw up breastworks wherever
they expected an engagement to take place; and the English in South
Africa have demonstrated that the only possible way to fight with the
present long range quick-firing guns, is the way in which the
"treacherous devils," as Washington called the Indians, fought General
Braddock, that is, with stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade; with hiding
and crawling behind screens and obstacles; with the least possible
appearance in open view, with nothing that can glitter on either arms or
clothes, and with no visible distinction between officers and men. War
is now a genuinely Indian performance, just as Washington saw one
hundred and fifty years ago that it ought to be.
The silent Washington's antipathy to the press finds an exact parallel in
our own day. He called the writers of the press "infamous scribblers."
President Cleveland called them "ghouls." But it must be confessed that
the newspapers of Washington's time surpassed those of the present day
in violence of language, and in lack of prophetic insight and just
appreciation of men and events. When Washington retired from the
Presidency the Aurora said, "If ever a Nation was debauched by a man,
the American Nation has been debauched by Washington."
Some of the weaknesses or errors of the Congresses of Washington's
time have been repeated in our own day, and seem as natural to us as
they doubtless seemed to the men of 1776 and 1796. Thus, the
Continental Congress incurred all the evils of a depreciated currency
with the same blindness which afflicted the Congress of the Southern
Confederacy and the Union Congress during the Civil War, or the
Democrat-Populist party of still more recent times. The refusal of the
Congress of 1777 to carry out the agreement made with the Hessian
prisoners at Saratoga reminds one of the refusal of Congress, in spite of
the public exhortations of our present Executive, and his cabinet, to
carry out the understanding with Cuba in regard to the commercial
relations of the island with the United States. In both cases the honor of
the country was tarnished.
The intensity of party spirit in Washington's time closely resembles that
of our own day, but was certainly fiercer than it is now, the reason

being that the questions at issue were absolutely fundamental. When
the question was whether the Constitution of the United States was a
sure defence for freedom or a trap to ensnare an unsuspecting people,
intensity of feeling on both sides was well-nigh inevitable. During
Washington's two administrations a considerable number of the most
eminent American publicists feared that dangerous autocratic powers
had been conferred on the President by the Constitution. Washington
held that there was no ground for these fears, and acted as if the
supposition was absurd. When the question was whether we should
love and adhere to revolutionary France, or rather become partisans of
Great Britain--the power from which we had just