America has furnished to the world the character of Washington!  And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.

Washington!  “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen!” Washington is all our own!  The enthusiastic veneration and regard in which the people of the United States hold him, prove them to be worthy of such a countryman; while his reputation abroad reflects the highest honor on his country.  I would cheerfully put the question to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what character of the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of history, most pure, most respectable, most sublime; and I doubt not, that, by a suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be Washington!

The structure now standing before us, by its uprightness, its solidity, its durability, is no unfit emblem of his character.  His public virtues and public principles were as firm as the earth on which it stands; his personal motives, as pure as the serene heaven in which its summit is lost.  But, indeed, though a fit, it is an inadequate emblem.  Towering high above the column which our hands have builded, beheld, not by the inhabitants of a single city or a single State, but by all the families of man, ascends the colossal grandeur of the character and life of Washington.  In all the constituents of the one, in all the acts of the other, in all its titles to immortal love, admiration, and renown, it is an American production.  It is the embodiment and vindication of our Transatlantic liberty.  Born upon our soil, of parents also born upon it; never for a moment having had sight of the Old World; instructed, according to the modes of his time, only in the spare, plain, but wholesome elementary knowledge which our institutions provide for the children of the people; growing up beneath and penetrated by the genuine influences of American society; living from infancy to manhood and age amidst our expanding, but not luxurious civilization; partaking in our great destiny of labor, our long contest with unreclaimed nature and uncivilized man, our agony of glory, the war of Independence, our great victory of peace, the formation of the Union, and the establishment of the Constitution,—­he is all, all our own!  Washington is ours.  That crowded and glorious life,

    “Where multitudes of virtues passed along,
    Each pressing foremost, in the mighty throng
    Ambitious to be seen, then making room
    For greater multitudes that were to come,”—­

that life was the life of an American citizen.

I claim him for America.  In all the perils, in every darkened moment of the state, in the midst of the reproaches of enemies and the misgiving of friends, I turn to that transcendent name for courage and for consolation.  To him who denies or doubts whether our fervid liberty can be combined with law, with order, with the security of property, with the pursuits and advancement of happiness; to him who denies that our forms of government are capable of producing exaltation of soul, and the passion of true glory; to him who denies that we have contributed any thing to the stock of great lessons and great examples;—­to all these I reply by pointing to Washington!