George Washington | Page 9

very serious illness, he resigned from the army and returned to Mount Vernon to recuperate.
During the long and tedious weeks of sickness and recovery, Washington doubtless had time to think over, to clarify in his mind, and to pass judgment on the events in which he had shared during the past six or seven years. From boyhood that was his habit. He must know the meaning of things. An event might be as fruitless as a shooting star unless he could trace the relations which tied it to what came before and after. Hence his deliberation which gave to his opinions the solidity of wisdom. Audacious he might be in battle, but perhaps what seems to us audacity seemed to him at the moment a higher prudence. If there were crises when the odds looked ten to one against him, he would take the chance. He knew the incalculable value of courage. His experiences with the British regulars and their officers left a deep impression on him and colored his own decisions in his campaigns against the British during the Revolutionary War. To genius nothing comes amiss, and by genius nothing is forgotten. So we find that all that Washington saw and learned during his years of youth--his apprenticeship as surveyor, his vicissitudes as pioneer, tasks as Indian fighter and as companion of the defeated Braddock--all contributed to fit him for the supreme work for which Fate had created him and the ages had waited.
CHAPTER II
MARRIAGE. THE LIFE OF A PLANTER
War is like the wind, nobody can tell into whose garden it may blow desolation. The French and Indian War, generally called now the Seven Years' War, beginning as a mere border altercation between the British and French backwoodsmen on the banks of the upper Ohio River, grew into a struggle which, by the year 1758, when Washington retired from his command of the Virginia Forces, spread over the world. A new statesman, one of the ablest ever born in England, came to control the English Government. William Pitt, soon created Earl of Chatham, saw that the British Empire had reached a crisis in its development. Incompetence, inertia, had blurred its prestige, and the little victories which France, its chief enemy, had been winning against it piecemeal, were coming to be regarded as signs that the grandeur of Britain was passing. Pitt saw the gloomy situation, and the still gloomier future which it seemed to prophesy, but he saw also the remedy. Within a few months, under his direction, English troops were in every part of the world, and English ships of war were sailing every ocean, to recover the slipping elements and to solidify the British Empire. Just as Pitt was taking up his residence at Downing Street, Robert Clive was winning the Battle of Plassey in India, which brought to England territory of untold wealth. Two years later James Wolfe, defeating the French commander, Montcalm, on the Plains of Abraham, added not only Quebec, but all Canada, to the British Crown, and ended French rivalry north of the Great Lakes. Victories like these, seemingly so casual, really as final and as unrevisable as Fate, might well cause Englishmen to suspect that Destiny itself worked with them, and that an Englishman could be trusted to endure through any difficulties to a triumphant conclusion.
Beaten at every point where they met the British, the French, even after they had secured an alliance with Spain, which proved of little worth, were glad to make peace. On February 10, 1763, they signed the Treaty of Paris, which confirmed to the British nearly all their victories and left England the dominant Power in both hemispheres. The result of the war produced a marked effect on the people of the British Colonies in North America. "At no period of time," says Chief Justice Marshall, in his "Life of Washington," "was the attachment of the colonists to the mother country more strong, or more general, than in 1763, when the definitive articles of the treaty which restored peace to Great Britain, France, and Spain, were signed."[1] But we who know the sequel perceive that the Seven Years' War not only strengthened the attachment between the Colonies and the Mother Country, but that it also made the Colonies aware of their common interests, and awakened among them mutual friendship, and in a very brief time their sense of unity prevailed over their temporary enthusiasm for England. George III, a monarch as headstrong as he was narrow, with insanity lurking in his mind, succeeded to the throne in 1760, and he seized the first opportunity to get rid of his masterful Minister, William Pitt. He replaced him with the Earl of Bute, a Scotchman, and a man of ingenious parts, but with the incurable Tory habit of insisting