Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1910 — Washington and Lincoln. [ARTICLE]

Washington and Lincoln.

Happy is the nation whose mightiest events are grouped about great personalities, knowable, humanly complete, heart-satisfying. In them is embodied the spirit of the historical movements they commanded. Through them the best ideals of their contemporaries are clear to us. Their biographies are national epics. Without Washington America, by weight of growing nationality, would have parted sooner or later from the mother country. Fifty years ago the forces that tended to national unity were stronger than those that made for disunion, aqd in the end unity must have prevailed, even without Lincoln. But in Washington and Lincoln are concentrated the meaning of the nation’s great triumphs. The young nation scrambling to its feet after the struggle for independence, uncertain, untried, became instantly personified in the grave wisdom of Washington. The spirit of union, so sorely crippled by the Civil War, and long suspected by many Americans to be but the spirit of tyranny in disguise, took before all men’s eyes the shape of Lincoln, so that Whitman thought of unionism as “a new virtue, unknown to other lands,’’ to be added to Lincoln’s honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience. That the nation bred, each for' his time, the man who led and typified his fellow men justifies democracy in its hope for the future. Washington was the product of transplanted English civilization, adopting when the time came ideals hostile to the traditional order, but preserving the essence of that order In his conservatism and gracious dignity. Lincoln was the perfect fruit of a half-century of national independence, realizing a democracy that

was not in Washington’s blood, but which he believed in and hoped for. The new nation had made a new man. We can easily forget or fail to learn the principles of events long past. But the men who were the nation’s soul, them we can understand; w© hear their voices; we see their faces; we love their living presence. And so patriotism cannot grow cold. The heart of American history is In these vivid personalities, and its spirit looks out From behind this bending, rough-cut mask, These lights and shades, this drama of the whole. —Youth’s Companion.