task better than any one else could have done it.  Colonel Meade, loyal and gallant, a good soldier and planter, said that Hamilton did the headwork of Washington’s staff and he the riding.  When the war was drawing to a close, Washington said one day to Hamilton, “You must go to the Bar, which you can reach in six months.”  Then turning to Meade, “Friend Dick, you must go to your plantation; you will make a good farmer, and an honest foreman of the grand jury."[2] The prediction was exactly fulfilled, with all that it implied, in both cases.  But let it not be supposed that there was any touch of contempt in the advice to Meade.  On the contrary, there was a little warmer affection, if anything, for he honored success in any honest pursuit, especially in farming, which he himself loved.  But he distinguished the two men perfectly, and he knew what each was and what each meant.  It seems little to say, but if we stop to think of it, this power to read men aright and see the truth in them and about them is a power more precious than any other bestowed by the kindest of fairy godmothers.  The lame devil of Le Sage looked into the secrets of life through the roofs of houses, and much did he find of the secret story of humanity.  But the great man looking with truth and kindliness into men’s natures, and reading their characters and abilities in their words and acts, has a higher and better power than that attributed to the wandering sprite, for such a man holds in his hand the surest key to success.  Washington, quiet and always on the watch, after the fashion of silent greatness, studied untiringly the ever recurring human problems, and his just conclusions were powerful factors in the great result.  He was slow, when he had plenty of time, in adopting a policy or plan, or in settling a public question, but he read men very quickly.  He was never under any delusion as to Lee, Gates, Conway, or any of the rest who engaged against him because they were restless from the first under the suspicion that he knew them thoroughly.  Arnold deceived him because his treason was utterly inconceivable to Washington, and because his remarkable gallantry excused his many faults.  But with this exception it may be safely said that Washington was never misled as to men, either as general or President.  His instruments were not invariably the best and sometimes failed him, but they were always the best he could get, and he knew their defects and ran the inevitable risks with his eyes open.  Such sure and rapid judgments of men and their capabilities were possible only to a man of keen perception and accurate observation, neither of which is characteristic of a slow or common-place mind.

[Footnote 1:  Magazine of American History, vol. iii., 1879, p. 81.]

[Footnote 2:  Memoir of Rt.  Rev. William Meade, by Philip Slaughter, D.D., p. 7.]