Washington and his Comrades in Arms | Page 8

not learned self-restraint, his

temper would have been savage. This discipline he acquired. The task
was not easy, but in time he was able to say with truth, "I have no
resentments," and his self-control became so perfect as to be almost
uncanny.
The assumption that Washington fought against an England grown
decadent is not justified. To admit this would be to make his task seem
lighter than it really was. No doubt many of the rich aristocracy spent
idle days of pleasure-seeking with the comfortable conviction that they
could discharge their duties to society by merely existing, since their
luxury made work and the more they indulged themselves the more
happy and profitable employment would their many dependents enjoy.
The eighteenth century was, however, a wonderful epoch in England.
Agriculture became a new thing under the leadership of great
landowners like Lord Townshend and Coke of Norfolk. Already was
abroad in society a divine discontent at existing abuses. It brought
Warren Hastings to trial on the charge of plundering India. It attacked
slavery, the cruelty of the criminal law, which sent children to
execution for the theft of a few pennies, the brutality of the prisons, the
torpid indifference of the church to the needs of the masses. New
inventions were beginning the age of machinery. The reform of
Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a thousand other
improvements were being urged. It was a vigorous, rich, and arrogant
England which Washington confronted.
It is sometimes said of Washington that he was an English country
gentleman. A gentleman he was, but with an experience and training
quite unlike that of a gentleman in England. The young heir to an
English estate might or might not go to a university. He could, like the
young Charles James Fox, become a scholar, but like Fox, who knew
some of the virtues and all the supposed gentlemanly vices, he might
dissipate his energies in hunting, gambling, and cockfighting. He would
almost certainly make the grand tour of Europe, and, if he had little
Latin and less Greek, he was pretty certain to have some familiarity
with Paris and a smattering of French. The eighteenth century was a
period of magnificent living in England. The great landowner, then, as
now, the magnate of his neighborhood, was likely to rear, if he did not
inherit, one of those vast palaces which are today burdens so costly to
the heirs of their builders. At the beginning of the century the nation to

honor Marlborough for his victories could think of nothing better than
to give him half a million pounds to build a palace. Even with the
colossal wealth produced by modern industry we should be staggered at
a residence costing millions of dollars. Yet the Duke of Devonshire
rivaled at Chatsworth, and Lord Leicester at Holkham, Marlborough's
building at Blenheim, and many other costly palaces were erected
during the following half century. Their owners sometimes built in
order to surpass a neighbor in grandeur, and to this day great estates are
encumbered by the debts thus incurred in vain show. The heir to such a
property was reared in a pomp and luxury undreamed of by the frugal
young planter of Virginia. Of working for a livelihood, in the sense in
which Washington knew it, the young Englishman of great estate
would never dream.
The Atlantic is a broad sea and even in our own day, when instant
messages flash across it and man himself can fly from shore to shore in
less than a score of hours, it is not easy for those on one strand to
understand the thought of those on the other. Every community evolves
its own spirit not easily to be apprehended by the onlooker. The state of
society in America was vitally different from that in England. The plain
living of Virginia was in sharp contrast with the magnificence and ease
of England. It is true that we hear of plate and elaborate furniture, of
servants in livery, and much drinking of Port and Madeira, among the
Virginians: They had good horses. Driving, as often they did, with six
in a carriage, they seemed to keep up regal style. Spaces were wide in a
country where one great landowner, Lord Fairfax, held no less than five
million acres. Houses lay isolated and remote and a gentleman dining
out would sometimes drive his elaborate equipage from twenty to fifty
miles. There was a tradition of lavish hospitality, of gallant men and
fair women, and sometimes of hard and riotous living. Many of the
houses were, however, in a state of decay, with leaking roofs, battered
doors and windows and shabby furniture. To own land in Virginia did
not mean to live in luxurious ease. Land brought in truth no very