to give to the Western World independence and freedom.
CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL.
* * * * *
Let him who looks for a monument to Washington look around the United
States. Your freedom, your independence, your national power, your
prosperity, and your prodigious growth are a monument to him.
KOSSUTH.
* * * * *
More than all, and above all, Washington was master of himself. If there
be one quality more than another in his character which may exercise a
useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total
disregard of self when in the most elevated positions for influence and
example.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS.
* * * * *
WASHINGTON'S RELIGIOUS CHARACTER
BY WILLIAM M'KINLEY
_In an Address, February 22, 1898_
Though Washington's exalted character and the most striking acts of his
brilliant record are too familiar to be recounted here, yet often as the
story is retold, it engages our love and admiration and interest. We
love to record his noble unselfishness, his heroic purposes, the power
of his magnificent personality, his glorious achievements for mankind,
and his stalwart and unflinching devotion to independence, liberty, and
union. These cannot be too often told or be too familiarly known.
A slaveholder himself, he yet hated slavery, and provided in his will
for the emancipation of his slaves. Not a college graduate, he was
always enthusiastically the friend of liberal education....
And how reverent always was this great man, how prompt and generous his
recognition of the guiding hand of Divine Providence in establishing and
controlling the destinies of the colonies and the Republic....
Washington states the reasons of his belief in language so exalted that
it should be graven deep in the mind of every patriot:
No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand
which conducts the affairs of man more than the people of the
United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the
character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished
by some token of providential agency; and in the important
revolution just accomplished in the system of their united
government the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consents of so
many distinguished communities from which the events resulted
cannot be compared with the means by wh
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