the pages of the book and stand before you; give him a personality.  Watch for his humors, his mistakes, his failings—­be sure he had them, however exalted he may have been—­they will help to make him human.  The spectacle of Washington, riding forward in a towering rage at the battle of Monmouth, has done more to make him real for us than any other incident in his life.  So the picture that Franklin gives of his landing at Philadelphia and walking up Market street in the early morning, a loaf of bread under either arm, brings him right home to us; though this simple, kindly, and humorous philosopher is one of the realest figures on the pages of history.  We love Andrew Jackson for his irascible wrong-headedness, Farragut for his burst of wrath in Mobile harbor, Lincoln for his homely wisdom.

I have said that, read as the record of man’s failures and successes, history is an inspiring thing.  Perhaps of the history of no country is this so true as of that of ours.  By far the larger part of our great men have started at the very bottom of the ladder, in poverty and obscurity, and have fought their way up round by round against all the forces of society.  Nowhere else have inherited wealth and inherited position counted for so little as in America.  Again, we have had no wars of greed or ambition, unless the war with Mexico could be so called.  We have, at least, had no tyrants—­instead, we have witnessed the spectacle, unique in history, of a great general winning his country’s freedom, and then disbanding his army and retiring to his farm.  “The Cincinnatus of the West,” Byron called him; and John Richard Green adds, “No nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation’s life.”  He has emerged from the mists of tradition, from the sanctimonious wrappings in which the early biographers disguised him, has softened and broadened into the most human of men, and has won our love as well as our veneration.

George Washington was the founder.  Beside his name, two others stand out, serene and dominant:  Christopher Columbus, the discoverer; Abraham Lincoln, the preserver.  And yet, neither Columbus, nor Washington, nor Lincoln was what we call a genius—­a genius, that is, in the sense in which Shakespeare or Napoleon or Galileo was a genius.  But they combined in singular degree those three characteristics without which no man may be truly great:  sincerity and courage and singleness of purpose.

It is not without a certain awe that we contemplate these men—­men like ourselves, let us always remember, but, in many ways, how different!  Not different in that they were infallible or above temptation; not different in that they never made mistakes; but different in that they each of them possessed an inward vision of the true and the eternal, while most of us grope blindly amid the false and trivial.  What that vision was, and with what high faith and complete devotion they followed it, we shall see in the story of their lives.