Contributions to American Educational History (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: commandant of the French posts iu the Ohio Valley. From this expe lition of Washington, at the age of twenty-one, when he surveyed French forts and French schemes with all the skill with which he had formerly surveyed land, proceeded the entire train of English policy leading to war with the French for the possession of the territory lying hack of the Alleghanies. This frontier war established the military reputation of Washington, and made him commander-iu-chief of the Virginia forces. His frontier record in the French and Indian war was the stepping stone which raised him at the outbreak of the American Revolution to the position of commander-iii-chief of the continental army. If the Revolutionary war had never occurred, George Washington would have been one of the foremost men of his time. His superiority would have appeared in great economic enterprises for the public good, enterprises growing out of that original office of county surveyor which actually led him by a development process to take the office of surveyor general of Virginia and that of general-in chief of the armies of the United States. Of course that humble agrarian office, conferred upon a, young Virginian by the College of William and Mary, did not make its iuatrfffbent great, but it gave till upttortuuity for greatness to develop. L Washington's genius was econommJ His mind grasped the, practical questionsof'his time?the laud question in theOhio Valley, and its connection with the opening of a channel of trade between the Atlantic seaboard and the Ohio River. The conquest of that territory by the English, the search in that quarter for good bounty lands, the instincts of an explorer and of a civil engineer, made Washington appreciate more keenly perhaps than most of his countrymen the economic significance...