interest in it whatever, because it was recommended to them as a cheap
way of preparing inexpensive though excellent foods. This modern temper
affords a most striking contrast to the practices and sentiments of
Washington, sentiments and practices which underlay his whole public
life as well as his private life.

If he were alive to-day, would he not be bewildered by much of our talk
about the rights of men and animals? Washington's mind dwelt very
little on rights and very much on duties. For him, patriotism was a
duty; good citizenship was a duty; and for the masses of mankind it was
a duty to clear away the forest, till the ground, and plant fruit trees,
just as he prescribed to the hoped-for tenants on his Ohio and Kanawha
lands. For men and women in general he thought it a duty to increase and
multiply, and to make the wilderness glad with rustling crops, lowing
herds, and children's voices. When he retired from the Presidency, he
expressed the hope that he might "make and sell a little flour
annually." For the first soldier and first statesman of his country,
surely this was a modest anticipation of continued usefulness. We think
more about our rights than our duties. He thought more about his duties
than his rights. Posterity has given him first place because of the way
in which he conceived and performed his duties; it will judge the
leaders of the present generation by the same standard, whatever their
theories about human rights.

Having said thus much about contrasts, let me now turn to some
interesting resemblances between Washington's times and our own. We may
notice in the first place the permanency of the fighting quality in the
English-American stock. Washington was all his life a fighter. The
entire American people is to-day a fighting people, prone to resort to
force and prompt to take arms, the different sections of the population