We love Andrew Jackson for his irascible
wrong-headedness, Farragut for his burst of wrath in Mobile harbor,
Lincoln for his homely wisdom.
I have said that, read as the record of man's failures and successes,
history is an inspiring thing. Perhaps of the history of no country is
this so true as of that of ours. By far the larger part of our great men
have started at the very bottom of the ladder, in poverty and obscurity,
and have fought their way up round by round against all the forces of
society. Nowhere else have inherited wealth and inherited position
counted for so little as in America. Again, we have had no wars of greed
or ambition, unless the war with Mexico could be so called. We have, at
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.
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