Washington’s Farewell Address: good faith

This paragraph belongs to the part of the address about how a republic should treat other countries. Washington calls an example of steady justice and benevolence a novel thing for mankind, and asks whether good policy does not require it anyway. He wrote at the end of two terms, when he had decided to go back to his farm at Mount Vernon. The whole address runs to about six thousand words.

Where this text comes fromThe passage makes an unusual move for a farewell speech: it proposes that a country behaving decently toward others would be something genuinely new in human history, and then, rather than resting on the moral claim, asks whether it would not also simply be good policy. That second question is the harder one and it is left hanging. Two arguments are being offered at once to two different kinds of listener, and neither is asked to accept the other’s reasons.

What you might not noticeThe word Nations is capitalized in the middle of a sentence, a convention of the period that treated states as proper entities, and the address applies it consistently throughout. Source

What it trainsThree sentences, six commas, two semicolons and one question mark in 399 characters, so the passage keeps changing what kind of unit it is delivering: a command, then a statement, then a question. Six capitals, three of them inside sentences on words a modern text would leave lower case. One semicolon sits inside the opening instruction, dividing two orders that could have been separate sentences; the second falls in the sentence after it. Three words tie for longest at eleven letters, enlightened, benevolence and magnanimous, and all three are abstract nouns of the kind that are typed by shape rather than by letter.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource