One stage of the work of Washington was done in arms; yet he is not wholly like the men who in other days have won the freedom of nations on the battle-field. His work was not wholly like the work of the men who wrought the freedom of Jewry in defiance of the will and mandate of Asia, or of the men who wrought the freedom of Greece and Servia in defiance of the will and mandate of Europe. One stage of his work was done in peace, but it was not wholly like the work of the great reformers of other times, of Kleisthenês, of Licinius, or of Simon. More like was it to the work of a man most unlike himself, the man of wile and diplomacy who brought freedom like a thief in the night into Sikyôn and Corinth. More like was it to the work of the men of sturdy and enduring might who won victories for freedom on the field of Morgarten or among the dykes of Holland and Zealand. And yet the founder of the greatest of confederations holds a place not quite the same as that of the founders of the lesser confederations of other times. William of Orange called a free people into fuller being by breaking the yoke of a stranger far away who called himself their sovereign. So Washington called a free people into fuller being by breaking the yoke of a sovereign far away; but then that sovereign was not a stranger. Markos of Keryneia and Aratos of Sikyôn, and those whom the stern truth of history bids us call the nameless men who wrought the freedom of the Three Lands, had to deal with nearer enemies. They had to deal with enemies who were in some sort strangers, but who were still men of their own speech at their own doors. Washington and his fellows had in one sense to form a nation, in another sense to free a nation; they had to win the freedom of their own special land by breaking the yoke of the common chief of their whole people. They had to make the whole greater by rending away a part; they had to be the expanders of England, to enlarge the bounds of the folk of England; but they had to do it by breaking old ties asunder, by casting an old allegiance to the winds; they had, in short, to work the Expansion of England by working the dismemberment of the British Empire.