Vernon, stands about twelve miles lower down the river and here, no
doubt, Washington often stood, looking on the site he had chosen.
If his spirit could stand there now and look around upon the masses
of soldiers by which his capital is surrounded, how would it address
the city of his hopes? When he saw that every foot of the
neighboring soil was desecrated by a camp, or torn into loathsome
furrows of mud by cannon and army wagons--that agriculture was gone,
and that every effort both of North and South was concentrated on
the art of killing; when he saw that this was done on the very spot
chosen by himself for the center temple of an everlasting union,
what would he then say as to that boast made on his behalf by his
countrymen, that he was first in war and first in peace? Washington
was a great man, and I believe a good man. I, at any rate, will not
belittle him. I think that he had the firmness and audacity
necessary for a revolutionary leader, that he had honesty to
preserve him from the temptations of ambition and ostentation, and
that he had the good sense to be guided in civil matters by men who
had studied the laws of social life and the theories of free
government. He was justus et tenax propositi; and in periods that
might well have dismayed a smaller man, he feared neither the throne
to which he opposed himself nor the changing voices of the fellow-
citizens for whose welfare he had fought. But sixty or seventy
years will not suffice to give to a man the fame of having been
first among all men. Washington did much, and I for one do not
believe that his work will perish. But I have always found it
difficult--I may say impossible--to sound his praises in his own
land. Let us suppose that a courteous Frenchman ventures an opinion
among Englishmen that Wellington was a great general, would he feel
disposed to go on with his eulogium when encountered on two or three
sides at once with such observations as the following: "I should