Excerpt from Washington, an Oration: Delivered at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, February 22, 1897

The whole Earth is the monument of illustri ous men. They are the words of Pericles, in his funeral speech over the Athenians who fell in battle for Athens at Samos. In the same strain Thucydides, writing of the great dramatic poet Euripides - the rival of Sophacles - said, All Greece is the monument of Euripides - although his home was in Athens and his bones rest in Macedon. There are passages in the works of antiquity, as a great writer of our own time has said, which to our ears and minds have the sound and depth of inspiration. Athens and Pericles are no more. The little town that lies at the foot of the Acrop olis is but a death-mask of the metropolis of ancient Greece. The splendor of that heroic rule of Pericles is but a far off after-glow from the days of Hellenic glory. The Parthenon, plundered alike by nations and individuals, is but a crumbled ruin. The noble works of Phydias have long since turned to dust. A Varangian Prince from a northern land unknown to the Greeks, sits now where Pericles sat, and Attica, the mother of the arts, of poetry, philosophy and eloquence, survives only in the undaunted courage, which belongs bynature to the Argive race, which no mutations of time, no decree of destiny, no misfortunes, and no Turkish tyranny have been able to quench. Yet the pregnant saying of Pericles and Thucydides still remains, and will forever remain, the grand expression of a great truth. The monument of which they spoke is built of the great deeds of great men enshrined in the memory of all man kind. It commemorates the lives of those im mortal men whose virtues and whose genius were great enough and strong enough to resist the ravages of time, and whose fame, like the sun in heaven, illumines all lands. In this great hand no name is more securely enrolled than that of him whose natal day we celebrate to-day - the champion of our struggling infancy - the great sol dier of the war of independence - the founder of our government, its first Chief Magistrate and greatest citizen - George \vashington.

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