ed
Washington as the only possible candidate for the Presidency. His last
public act was a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery. At
his death the government had not yet settled his accounts in its
service, and his country was left apparently his debtor; which, in a
sense still larger and deeper, she must remain as long as liberty
endures and union triumphs in the Republic.

Is not this, after all, the root of the whole matter? Is not this the
thing that is vitally and essentially true of all those great men,
clustering about Washington, whose fame we honor and revere with his?
They all left the community, the commonwealth, the race, in debt to
them. This was their purpose and the ever-favorite object of their
hearts. They were deliberate and joyful creditors. Renouncing the maxim
of worldly wisdom which bids men "get all you can and keep all you get,"
they resolved rather to give all they had to advance the common cause,
to use every benefit conferred upon them in the service of the general
welfare, to bestow upon the world more than they received from it, and
to leave a fair and unblotted account of business done with life which
should show a clear balance in their favor.

Thus, in brief outline, and in words which seem poor and inadequate, I
have ventured to interpret anew the story of Washington and the men who
stood with him: not as a stirring ballad of battle and danger, in which
the knights ride valiantly, and are renowned for their mighty strokes at
the enemy in arms; not as a philosophic epic, in which the development
of a great national idea is displayed, and the struggle of opposing
policies is traced to its conclusion; but as a drama of the eternal
conflict in the soul of man between self-interest in its Protean forms,
and loyalty to the right, service to a cause, allegiance to an ideal.

Those great actors who played in it have passed away, but the same drama
still holds the stage. The drop-curtain falls between the acts; the
scenery shifts; the music alters; but the crisis and its issues are
unchanged, and the parts which you and I play are assigned to us by our
own choice of "the ever favorite object of our hearts."

Men tell us that the age of ideals is past, and that we are now come to
the age of expediency, of polite indifference to moral standards, of
careful attention to the bearing of different policies upon our own
personal interests. Men tell us that the rights of man are a poetic