If he were alive to-day, would he not be bewildered by much of our talk about the rights of men and animals?  Washington’s mind dwelt very little on rights and very much on duties.  For him, patriotism was a duty; good citizenship was a duty; and for the masses of mankind it was a duty to clear away the forest, till the ground, and plant fruit trees, just as he prescribed to the hoped-for tenants on his Ohio and Kanawha lands.  For men and women in general he thought it a duty to increase and multiply, and to make the wilderness glad with rustling crops, lowing herds, and children’s voices.  When he retired from the Presidency, he expressed the hope that he might “make and sell a little flour annually.”  For the first soldier and first statesman of his country, surely this was a modest anticipation of continued usefulness.  We think more about our rights than our duties.  He thought more about his duties than his rights.  Posterity has given him first place because of the way in which he conceived and performed his duties; it will judge the leaders of the present generation by the same standard, whatever their theories about human rights.

Having said thus much about contrasts, let me now turn to some interesting resemblances between Washington’s times and our own.  We may notice in the first place the permanency of the fighting quality in the English-American stock.  Washington was all his life a fighter.  The entire American people is to-day a fighting people, prone to resort to force and prompt to take arms, the different sections of the population differing chiefly in regard to the nature and amount of the provocation which will move them to violence and combat.  To this day nothing moves the admiration of the people so quickly as composure, ingenuity, and success in fighting; so that even in political contests all the terms and similes are drawn from war, and among American sports the most popular have in them a large element of combat.  Washington was roused and stimulated by the dangers of the battlefield, and utterly despised cowards, or even men who ran away in battle from a momentary terror which they did not habitually manifest.  His early experience taught him, however, that the Indian way of fighting in woods or on broken ground was the most effective way; and he did not hesitate to adopt and advocate that despised mode of fighting, which has now, one hundred and fifty years later, become the only possible mode.  The Indian in battle took instantly to cover, if he could find it.  In our Civil War both sides learned to throw up breastworks wherever they expected an engagement to take place; and the English in South Africa have demonstrated that the only possible way to fight with the present long range quick-firing guns, is the way in which the “treacherous devils,” as Washington called the Indians, fought General Braddock, that is, with stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade; with hiding and crawling behind screens and obstacles; with the least possible appearance in open view, with nothing that can glitter on either arms or clothes, and with no visible distinction between officers and men.  War is now a genuinely Indian performance, just as Washington saw one hundred and fifty years ago that it ought to be.