_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