And singularly enough this very journey led not only to the establishment of those paths between the east and west, the national road, the canals reaching toward the sources of the rivers, and ultimately the trans- Alleghany railroad, but to the making of that unmatched document, the Constitution of the United States. And in this wise: Washington called the attention of Virginia and Maryland to the importance of opening a communication between the Potomac and James and the western waters. He writes to Lafayette of being at the meeting of the Maryland Assembly in that interest. [Footnote: John Pickell, "New Chapter in the Early Life of Washington in Connection with the Narrative History of the Potomac Company, 1856," pp. 133-4.] These two States appointed commissioners to confer concerning this and other matters. Their recommendations resulted in the calling of a more widely representative convention, and this in turn in the convening of a body to revise the entire federal system. So this peaceful journey of the warrior over the mountains to the great meadows and down into the tangled ravines of West Virginia became not only the prophecy of the indissoluble bond between the east and west; it became the first step in that movement which led the original States themselves into that more perfect union. The sequence, which did not occur to me until I read recently the diary of that trans-Alleghany journey, gives Washington a new, if a homelier, majesty. Napoleon the Great has spoken his praise of Washington as a general. Many of our own historians agree that it is very doubtful if without Washington the struggle for independence would have succeeded. Other men were important. He was indispensable. This intimates the occasion we have for gratitude that the commander of the French let him march out of Fort Necessity in 1754. The world has for a century been repeating the eulogies that have outlived the invective of his day--and that are only now becoming humanized by the new school of historians who will not sacrifice facts to glowing periods. Washington is now more of a human being and less of a god than the Washington whom Lincoln found in Weems's "Life." Yet with all the humanizing is he the austere, rugged, inaccessible mountain, its fiery passions hidden, its head above the forests. And so will he stand in history the justest of men, a man of highest purity of purpose and of greatest practical wisdom; but, if as a mountain, then as one that hides somewhere in its slopes such a path as we have learned to know in our journeys over this course, a portage path between two great valleys which its summit has blessed, for he was as a portage path between the eastern and western waters, between the institutions of New England and the fleur-de-lis fields of Nouvelle France.