The age-herald., 1901-02-22
The Greatest i.lan.

man who studies history said last night:
 Tn what manner, if any, the public schools shall observe this anniversary of Washlngton's birthday I know not; but it would be of incalculable good in the national life of the future If every child in every school in America were instruct ed by intelligent teacher concerning the main facts pertaining to the real career of the first of all Americans.
 Tt would be of vast value to the na- tion if every one of its twenty millions Of school children could this day be made to perceive the chief characteristics of the man Washington not the demi-god of the nursery and the picture books of juvenility.
 Boys and girls alike, and all unin- formed men as for that matter, should be impressed today with the eternal fact that the boy George was not an angel and the man Washington was not a saint; that, boy and man, through the sixty seven years of his life, he was intensely and profoundly human, and that he was enabled to create a nation because he was human.
 "Unwise teachers, of whom there are always many in the world, and foolish descendants of the incompetent Sparks,
 of whom there have been a multitude,
 have labored to deify Washington, and have thereby worked so much mischief that there Is no reasonable hope that even blythe two hundredth anniversary of the
 mans birth shall he be reasonably well known by the people he created
 No serious objection can be urged against the teaching of the parable of the hatchet and the cherry tree; the Lord of our spiritual creation spoke in para bea, and so one parable may not be de- nied to the Lord of our political life The familiar hatchet story serves good pur-
 pose ir impressing the children of the
 nation that Washington created, whose
 minds are in process of formantion, the priceless value of truth, Of being strong against dissembling and lying, prevarl- cation and evasion of given or existing facts. Anything in reason Is execusable,
 even commendable, in impressing upon vices; that he who lies will steal. and
 that he who steals Is bound for the devil
 "rhe supreme and eternal value of truth could not by other means be so forcefully and so happily impressed upon the children of America as though some
 relation of George Washington, and no | better parable could be devised than that of the cherry tree and. the hatchet. But the greatest general good can be
 accomplished by teaching the young by
 impressing upon minds in process of for
 nation the great facts of Washington's
 unparalleled career; that he was a man,
 human being, with mans natural faults and weaknesses, impulses and sinfulness, but that he oyercame the ef- fects of the clements of common human ity that make for the subversion of high impulses and noble purposes. and the de- | struction of that divine spiritual life | that Is born in every soul God sends into | the world; that this man George Wash | ington, this Tom Robertson, Bill Jones' | Jack Brown, of the eighteenth century | this flesh and blood laughing and weep | ing rejoicing and acheing everyday kind | of man of Virginia, rose superior to the ordinary failings and shortcomings of
 mankind such as laziness. prevarica- | ton, improvidence and affronting forms | of wickedness, and through sheer efforts of his own rose to be the greatest gen | eral of his time, the father of his coun- | try and in many essentials the greatest | and most luminous character in all the
 mighty range of the worlds mighty his | tory!
 Let the boys in the schools on this an | niversary of Great Washingtons birth | day be instructed that he was a boy like | themselves, and that when he was going to school the outlook for him, his chance for becoming great, wasn't hundredth or a thousandth part as great as the
 chance of every honest, healthy, we'll
 meaning schoolboy in Birmingham or in America on this one hundred and sixty
 ninth anniversary of Washington's birth day He played games, had his little fights and his little love affairs and may be got punished and kept in occasionally, for all the world like schoolboys of to- day"