e 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 endur