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.

If the poetical prediction, uttered a few years before his birth, be
true; if indeed it be designed by Providence that the grandest
exhibition of human character and human affairs shall be made in this
theater of the Western world; if it be true that,

"The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last";

how could this imposing, swelling, final scene be appropriately opened,
how could its intense interest be adequately sustained but by the
introduction of just such a character as our Washington?

_The Spark of Human Freedom_

Washington had attained his manhood when that spark of liberty was
struck out in his own country which has since kindled into a flame and
shot its beams over the earth. In the flow of a century from his birth,
the world has changed in science, in arts, in the extent of commerce, in
the improvement of navigation, and in all that relates to the
civilization of man. But 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, in this century, has not
made its progress, like Chinese skill, by a greater acuteness of