eat War except their own. Just
as to-day it is a surprise to a German to learn that Wellington won
Waterloo, so in the future it will be a surprise to an American to
learn that Britain and France by rivers of their blood won the Great
War. 'We won the war' has only begun as yet to run its course.

III

It was, however, at Mount Vernon, sixteen miles south of Washington,
that I seemed to be nearest to the soul of America. It was with a
quiet thankfulness that I left the city behind and went on pilgrimage
to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. There the scenes amid
which the Father of his country moved and had his being are unchanged.
In the city, the Washington monument, a shaft of white marble rising to
a height of '555 feet 5 1/8 inches,' confronts one's eyes at the end of
every vista. But here no monument challenges the world by its height.
The plain, wooden building, painted to resemble stone, with a piazza
extending along the whole front, consisting of two storeys and an attic
with dormer windows, surmounted by a small cupola and an ancient
weathervane, is just as it was when Washington lived and died. In
these rooms with the tables and chairs and bed and pictures, and the
books (duplicates mostly), just as they were a hundred and fifty years
ago, there were dreamed dreams that have changed half the world. Out
of this farm-house came the impulse and the power wherewith 'The
embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world.'

There could be found few spots on earth in which one could better muse
on the mutability of earthly affairs than in these rooms tenanted by
ghosts. Here in the main hall is the key of the Bastille, sent by
Lafayette from Paris as a gift to Washington after the capture of the
prison in 1789. 'Give me leave, my dear General,' wrote Lafayette, 'to
present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few
days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress
of despotism. It is a gift which I owe as a son to my adopted country,
as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a missionary of liberty to its
patriarch.' No nation ever owed so great a debt for its liberty as the
United States owed to France. George Washington won the War of
Independence because half the people of Britain sympathised with him,
knowing that he was fighting their battle for liberty as well as his
own; but mainly because France espoused his cause on sea and land, and