THE HEARDS OF HIS COUNTRYMEN

On Monday the American people will burn their anevillees to is a great name. George Washington had been atripped of all that was human within him; he is bereft of all those principles which made him the Father of his Country. Americans have looked at their fair land and found it good and they have, with native ingenuity, endowed Washington with all those attributes which they descry in the government and life of the United States. He has become a republican, a man of the people, a temple to house the homely precepts of American faith. The man has been lost from sight and magnified to the proportions of a god, a god erected by the people out of their own liearts and minds.

This is an altogether natural transition, but by deification Washington loses his significance. He was not omniscient, omnipotent, and divine. His genius was the sober brilliance of a thoughtful man. His life was determined by essential principles of which he never lost sight. He was a gentleman reared in and almost feudal civilization, maintaining to the last the virtues and the blemishes of that civilization. He was a leader of bright, if restricted vision, a politician of sound, if conventional theory, a man of careful, tranquil thought. Like Lincoln he possessed that rare ability of assessing human values.

For what he was Washington remains a great man, for what he has become, he is a magnificent tradition. But he no longer is of value to Americans, beyond the comfortable knowledge that once in the old days there were giants upon the earth. It is enough for the present to wave flags, to beat drums, to construct tales of a hatchet and a cherry tree. The sober mind, the common sense, the courageous, generous spirit lie with, and are of, an age that is past.