Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and, George Washington, the Expander of England.: Two Lectures with an AppendixFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and, George Washington, the Expander of England.: Two Lectures with an Appendix
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Great Britain -- Colonies; Imperial federation; Washington, George, 1732-1799
badge of our conquest over another race. Washington is a name in our
own tongue, a badge, not of conquest but of fellowship. And the man
whose birth one hundred and fifty-four years back is this day kept as
a high day by no small part of the English folk, should be honoured,
and is honoured, by every branch of the English folk alike. It is in
no small measure his work and the work of them that wrought with him,
that the speech and law which one age of English settlement bore from
the European mainland to the European island, which another age of
English settlement bore from the European island to the vaster mainland
of America, are the speech and law of millions of men in either
hemisphere, of more millions of men than are numbered by any other
branch of the common European family.
There may be ears in which the title which I have chosen for my
panegyric speech of this day may perchance sound strange. I speak of
Washington as the Expander of England. The Expansion of England is a
form of words which of late we have often heard, and to some of those
on whose lips that form is most familiar it may indeed seem strange to
hear the first President of the United States claimed as the foremost
in the work of that expansion. Yet some, I trust, there may be who
will at once see that among the worthies of our people there is none
on whom that name can more truly be bestowed. The place of Washington
in the history of mankind, more truly the place of a band of men of
whom Washington was but the foremost, is one which is well-nigh without
a fellow. It is not the place of the founders, real or mythical, of
cities and realms in earlier or later days. It is not the place of the
men who fenced in the hill by the Ilissos to become the home of the
teachers of mankind or the hill by the Tiber to become the home of
their rulers. A city bears the name of Washington, but Washington was
not its founder; a mighty land calls him the Father of his Country,
but, like him who first bore that name, he was not the creator of its
freedom but the preserver. His place is not the place of the men who
won new homes for their folk in other lands, the men who carried the
life of Hellas to the Naxos of Sicily or the life of England to the
Ebbsfleet of Kent. Men like them had gone before him; his work needed
theirs as its forerunner; Virginia, Massachusetts, and their fellows,
needed to be called into being before he should come whose calling was
to weld them into one greater whole. Nor was his place wholly that of
the men who have won the freedom of their own or of some other land
from tyrants from within or from oppressors from without. Most like him
among the men of old in pure and unselfish virtue is he, great alike
in war and peace, who freed alike the mother and the daughter, the man
who freed both his own land and her greatest colony. Yet the work of
Washington is not the same as the work of Timoleôn either at Corinth or
at Syracuse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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