WASHINGTON


The virtues of Washington were of two kinds, the splendid and the
homely; I adopt, for my part in this celebration, some consideration of
Washington as a man of homely virtues, giving our far-removed generation
a homely example.

The first contrast to which I invite your attention is the contrast
between the early age at which Washington began to profit by the
discipline of real life and the late age at which our educated young men
exchange study under masters, and seclusion in institutions of learning,
for personal adventure and responsibility out in the world. Washington
was a public surveyor at sixteen years of age. He could not spell well;
but he could make a correct survey, keep a good journal, and endure the
hardships to which a surveyor in the Virginia wilderness was inevitably
exposed. Our expectation of good service and hard work from boys of
sixteen, not to speak of young men of twenty-six, is very low. I have
heard it maintained in a learned college faculty that young men who were
on the average nineteen years of age, were not fit to begin the study of
economics or philosophy, even under the guidance of skilful teachers,
and that no young man could nowadays begin the practice of a profession
to advantage before he was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. Now,
Washington was at twenty-one the Governor of Virginia's messenger to the
French forts beyond the Alleghanies. He was already an accomplished
woodman, an astute negotiator with savages and the French, and the
cautious yet daring leader of a company of raw, insubordinate
frontiersmen, who were to advance 500 miles into a wilderness with
nothing but an Indian trail to follow. In 1755, at twenty-three years of
age, twenty years before the Revolutionary War broke out, he was a