wishes to the public will, I must consent to the request made by Congress, which you have had the goodness to transmit me, and in doing this, I need not say, I cannot say, what a sacrifice of individual feeling I make to a sense of public duty.”  The intended monument at the capital was never erected.  Martha Washington lies beside her husband where she wished to be, in the family vault at Mount Vernon.  From her chamber window in the upper story of the Mount Vernon house she could look across the field to the vault.  She died in 1802, a woman of rare discretion and good sense who, during forty years, proved herself the worthiest companion of the founder of his country.

I have wished to write this biography of George Washington so that it would explain itself.  There is no need of eulogy.  All eulogy is superfluous.  We see the young Virginia boy, born in aristocratic conditions, with but a meagre education, but trained by the sports and rural occupations of his home in perfect manliness, in courage, in self-reliance, in resourcefulness.  Some one instilled into him moral precepts which fastened upon his young conscience and would not let him go.  At twenty he was physically a young giant capable of enduring any hardship and of meeting any foe.  He ran his surveyor’s chain far into the wilderness to the west of Mount Vernon.  When hardly a man in age, the State of Virginia knew of his qualities and made him an officer in its militia.  At only twenty-three he was invited to accompany General Braddock’s staff, but neither he nor angels from heaven could prevent Braddock from plunging with typical British bull-headedness into the fatal Indian ambush.  He gave up border warfare, but did not cease to condemn the inadequacy of the Virginia military equipment and its training.  He devoted himself to the pursuits of a large planter, and on being elected a Burgess, he attended regularly the sessions at Williamsburg.  Wild conditions which in his boyhood had reached almost to Fauquier County, had drifted rapidly westward.  Within less than ten years of Braddock’s defeat, Fort Duquesne had become permanently English and the name of Pittsburgh reminded men of the great British statesman who had urged on the fateful British encroachment on the Ohio River.  For Washington in person, the lasting effect of the early training and fighting in western Pennsylvania was that it gave him direct knowledge of the Indian and his ways, and that it turned his imagination to thinking out the problem of developing the Middle West, and of keeping the connections between the East and the West strong and open.