least, had no tyrants--instead, we have witnessed the spectacle, unique
in history, of a great general winning his country's freedom, and then
disbanding his army and retiring to his farm. "The Cincinnatus of the
West," Byron called him; and John Richard Green adds, "No nobler figure
ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life." He has emerged from the
mists of tradition, from the sanctimonious wrappings in which the early
biographers disguised him, has softened and broadened into the most
human of men, and has won our love as well as our veneration.

George Washington was the founder. Beside his name, two others stand
out, serene and dominant: Christopher Columbus, the discoverer; Abraham
Lincoln, the preserver. And yet, neither Columbus, nor Washington, nor
Lincoln was what we call a genius--a genius, that is, in the sense in
which Shakespeare or Napoleon or Galileo was a genius. But they combined
in singular degree those three characteristics without which no man may
be truly great: sincerity and courage and singleness of purpose.

It is not without a certain awe that we contemplate these men--men like
ourselves, let us always remember, but, in many ways, how different! Not
different in that they were infallible or above temptation; not
different in that they never made mistakes; but different in that they
each of them possessed an inward vision of the true and the eternal,
while most of us grope blindly amid the false and trivial. What that
vision was, and with what high faith and complete devotion they followed
it, we shall see in the story of their lives.

This is the basic difference between great men and little ones--the
little ones are concerned solely with to-day; the great ones think only
of the future. They have gained that largeness of vision and of
understanding which perceives the pettiness of everyday affairs and