Henry Cabot Lodge: “He was a colonial American, of course, but he was as intensely an American as any man who has lived on this continent…”

George Washington will always hold the love and reverence of men because they see embodied in him the noblest possibilities of humanity.

It was a difficult thing for men who had been born colonists to rise to a sense of national opportunities, but Washington passed at a single step from being a Virginian to being an American, and in so doing he stood alone.

No man of that time, with the exception of Hamilton, ever grasped and realized as he did the imperial future which stretched before the United States.

This was not a safe man for the gentlemen of Pennsylvania to cross too far, nor could they swerve him, with all his sense of public opinion, one jot from what he meant to do.