cumstances
and men than any of his contemporaries. He weighed facts in a juster
scale, with larger equity, and firmer equanimity. He best applied to
them the lessons of experience. With greater ascendancy of character he
held men to their appointed tasks; with more inspiring virtue he
commanded more implicit confidence. He bore a truer divining-rod, and
through a wilderness of contention he alone was the unerring Pathfinder
of the People. There can, indeed, be no right conception of Washington
that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not
say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton,
handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies
of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like
Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin,
or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius
were of a different order, it was of as rare and high an order. It dealt
with man in the concrete, with his vast concerns of business stretching
over a continent and projected into the ages, with his seething
passions; with his marvelous exertions of mind, body, and spirit to be
free. He knew the materials he dealt with by intuitive perception of the
heart of man, by experience and observation of his aspirations and his
powers, by reflection upon his complex relations, rights, and duties as
a social being. He knew just where, between men and states, to erect the
monumental mark to divide just reverence for authority from just
resistance to its abuse. A poet of social facts, he interpreted by his
deeds the harmonies of justice.

First to perceive, and swift to point out, the defects in the Articles
of Confederation, they became manifest to all long before victory
crowned the warfare conducted under them. Charged by them with the
public defense, Congress could not put a soldier in the field; and
charged with defraying expenses, it could not levy a dollar of imposts
or taxes. It could, indeed, borrow money with the assent of nine states
of the thirteen, but what mockery of finance was that, when the borrower
could not command any resource of payment.

The states had indeed put but a scepter of straw in the legislative hand
of the Confederation--what wonder that it soon wore a crown of thorns!
The paper currency ere long dissolved to nothingness; for four days the
army was without food, and whole regiments drifted