Has any man in our history fulfilled these conditions more perfectly and completely than George Washington?  Has any man ever lived who served the American people more faithfully, or with a higher and truer conception of the destiny and possibilities of the country?  Born of an old and distinguished family, he found himself, when a boy just out of school, dependent on his mother, and with an inheritance that promised him more acres than shillings.  He did not seek to live along upon what he could get from the estate, and still less did he feel that it was only possible for him to enter one of the learned professions.  Had he been an Englishman in fact or in feeling, he would have felt very naturally the force of the limitations imposed by his social position.  But being an American, his one idea was to earn his living honestly, because it was the creed of his country that earning an honest living is the most creditable thing a man can do.  Boy as he was, he went out manfully into the world to win with his own hands the money which would make him self-supporting and independent.  His business as a surveyor took him into the wilderness, and there he learned that the first great work before the American people was to be the conquest of the continent.  He dropped the surveyor’s rod and chain to negotiate with the savages, and then took up the sword to fight them and the French, so that the New World might be secured to the English-speaking race.  A more purely American training cannot be imagined.  It was not the education of universities or of courts, but that of hard-earned personal independence, won in the backwoods and by frontier fighting.  Thus trained, he gave the prime of his manhood to leading the Revolution which made his country free, and his riper years to building up that independent nationality without which freedom would have been utterly vain.

He was the first to rise above all colonial or state lines, and grasp firmly the conception of a nation to be formed from the thirteen jarring colonies.  The necessity of national action in the army was of course at once apparent to him, although not to others; but he carried the same broad views into widely different fields, where at the time they wholly escaped notice.  It was Washington, oppressed by a thousand cares, who in the early days of the Revolution saw the need of Federal courts for admiralty cases and for other purposes.  It was he who suggested this scheme, years before any one even dreamed of the Constitution; and from the special committees of Congress, formed for this object in accordance with this advice, came, in the process of time, the Federal judiciary of the United States.[1] Even in that early dawn of the Revolution, Washington had clear in his own mind the need of a continental system for war, diplomacy, finance, and law, and he worked steadily to bring this policy to fulfilment.

[Footnote 1:  See the very interesting memoir on this subject by the Hon. J.C.  Bancroft Davis.]