mer him that smiteth the anvil." As D'Artagnan and the motto of the Swiss Republic say, all Americans say, "Each for all and all for each." As far back as the older Earls of Southampton their crest was "Ung par tout, tout par ung." But alas! a statement so democratic has died out in the country of its birth. Every obtrusive color distinctly fades out in presence of the union of states, the union of the people, and the communion of religions. There is no aristocracy of wealth, of education, or birth. All the same, the leaders lead; all the same, every man and every woman is encouraged by the "mutual faith of you and me."
It is hardly necessary to add to these general considerations references to the individual men who in what are now nearly three centuries have illustrated what may be called the American Ideal. To say that George Washington at the age of twenty-one could "give points," as modern slang would say, as to American warfare to martinets twice his age trained in Europe—this is sufficient illustration of the worth of American biography. Even in the letters of the Winthrops of the first two generations, in the letters and other publications of Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, Ezra Stiles, before the Revolution, the reader sees how much wider was the view of life which they took than was possible to Englishmen who knew no more of life than their own island could show them. So soon as the Revolutionary literature opens upon us we find that the papers on statesmanship or government written by such men as John Dickinson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Morris, Thomas Jefferson, and a little later, Gouverneur Morris, Timothy Pickering, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Tom Paine show characteristics not to be found till their time in American literature. It is said that when the word independence was first uttered in an American town meeting, the children who were present did not know the meaning of the word. Its earliest use in the English language was the limited use which the "Independents" gave to it who were pleading for freedom of individual
