n, all men, no matter what tongue they
spake or what country they came from, were to be dealt with on a
footing of simple equality, and treated according to their merits.
There was to him no glamour in the fact that this man was a Frenchman
and that an Englishman. His own personal pride extended to his people,
and he bowed to no national superiority anywhere. Hamilton was
national throughout, but he was born outside the thirteen colonies,
and knew his fellow-citizens only as Americans. Franklin was national
by the force of his own commanding genius. John Adams grew to the same
conception, so far as our relations to other nations were concerned.
But beyond these three we may look far and closely before we find
another among all the really great men of the time who freed himself
wholly from the superstition of the colonist about the nations of
Europe.

When Washington drew his sword beneath the Cambridge elm he stood
forth as the first American, the best type of man that the New World
could produce, with no provincial taint upon him, and no shadow of the
colonial past clouding his path. It was this great quality that gave
the struggle which he led a character it would never have attained
without a leader so constituted. Had he been merely a colonial
Englishman, had he not risen at once to the conception of an American
nation, the world would have looked at us with very different eyes.
It was the personal dignity of the man, quite as much as his fighting
capacity, which impressed Europe. Kings and ministers, looking on
dispassionately, soon realized that here was no ordinary agitator
or revolutionist, but a great man on a great stage with great
conceptions. England, indeed, talked about a militia colonel, but this
chatter disappeared in the smoke of Trenton, and even England came to
look upon him as the all-powerful spirit of the Revolution. Dull men
and colonial squires do not grasp a great idea and carry it into
action on the world's stage in a few months. To stand forward at the
head of raw armies and of a colonial people as a national leader,
calm, dignified, and far-seeing, requires not only character, but
intellect of the highest and strongest kind. Now that we have come
as a people, after more than a century's struggle, to the national
feeling which Washington compassed in a moment, it is well to consider
that single achievement and to meditate on its meaning, whether in
estimating him, or in gauging what he was to