WASHINGTON

ANONYMOUS

We are met to testify our regard for him whose name is intimately
blended with whatever belongs most essentially to the prosperity, the
liberty, the free institutions, and the renown of our country. That name
was a power to rally a nation in the hour of thick-thronging public
disasters and calamities; that name shone amid the storm of war, a
beacon light to cheer and guide the country's friends; its flame, too,
like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name in the days of peace was a
loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole
people's love, and the whole world's respect; that name, descending
with all time, spread over the whole earth, and uttered in all the
languages belonging to the tribes and races of men, will forever be
pronounced with affectionate gratitude by everyone in whose breast there
shall arise an aspiration for human rights and human liberty.

Washington stands at the commencement of a new era, as well as at the
head of the New World. A century from the birth of Washington has
changed the world. The country of Washington has been the theater on
which a great part of that change has been wrought, and Washington
himself a principal agent by which it has been accomplished. His age and
his country are equally full of wonders, and of both he is the chief.

It is the spirit of human freedom, the new elevation of individual man,
in his moral, social, and political character, leading the whole long
train of other improvements, which has most remarkably distinguished the
era. Society has assumed a new character; it has raised itself from