a boy, and he was hardly of age when he was carrying in his hands the defense of his colony and the heavy burden of other human lives.  Experience like this makes a man who is good for anything sober; but sobriety is not dullness, and if we look a little below the surface we find the ready refutation of such an idea.  In his letters and even in the silent diaries we detect the keenest observation.  He looked at the country, as he traveled, with the eye of the soldier and the farmer, and mastered its features and read its meaning with rapid and certain glance.  It was not to him a mere panorama of fields and woods, of rivers and mountains.  He saw the beauties of nature and the opportunities of the farmer, the trader, or the manufacturer wherever his gaze rested.  He gathered in the same way the statistics of the people and of their various industries.  In the West Indies, on the Virginian frontier, in his journeys when he was President, he read the story of all he saw as he would have read a book, and brought it home with him for use.

[Illustration:  NATHANAEL GREENE]

In the same way he read and understood men, and had that power of choosing among them which is essential in its highest form to the great soldier or statesman.  His selection never erred unless in a rare instance like that of Monroe, forced on him by political exigencies, or when the man of his choice would not serve.  Congress chose Gates for the southern campaign, but Washington selected Greene, in whom he saw great military ability before any one else realized it.  He took Hamilton, young and unknown, from the captaincy of an artillery company, and placed him on his personal staff.  He bore with Hamilton’s outbreak of temper, kept him ever in his confidence, and finally gave him the opportunity to prove himself the most brilliant of American statesmen.  In the crowd of foreign volunteers, the men whom he especially selected and trusted were Lafayette and Steuben, each in his way of real value to the service.  Even more remarkable than the ability to recognize great talent was his capacity to weigh and value with a nice exactness the worth of men who did not rise to the level of greatness.  There is a recently published letter, too long for quotation here, in which he gives his opinions of all the leading officers of the Revolution,[1] and each one shows the most remarkable insight, as well as a sharp definiteness of outline that indicates complete mastery.  These compact judgments were so sound that even the lapse of a century and all the study of historians and biographers find nothing in their keen analysis to alter and little to add.  He did not expect to discover genius everywhere, or to find a marshal’s baton in every knapsack, but he used men according to their value and possibilities, which is quite as essential as the preliminary work of selection.  His military staff illustrated this faculty admirably.  Every man, after a few trials and changes, fitted his place and did his particular