ing the great natural forces which bring to pass crops and the
seasons, they seem to work in and through him also. The banker, the
broker, even the merchant, lives in a series of whirlwinds, or seems
to be pursuing a mirage or groping his way through a fog. The
farmer, although he be not beyond the range of accident, deals more
continually with causes which regularly produce certain effects. He
knows a rainbow by sight and does not waste his time and money in
chasing it.

No better idea of Washington's activity as a planter can be had than
from his brief and terse journals as an agriculturist. He sets down
day by day what he did and what his slaves and the free employees did
on all parts of his estate. We see him as a regular and punctual man.
He had a moral repugnance to idleness. He himself worked steadily and
he chided the incompetent, the shirkers, and the lazy.

A short experience as landowner convinced him that slave labor was the
least efficient of all. This conviction led him very early to believe
in the emancipation of the slaves. I do not find that sentiment or
abstract ideals moved him to favor emancipation, but his sense of
fitness, his aversion to wastefulness and inefficiency made him
disapprove of a system which rendered industry on a high plane
impossible. Experience only confirmed these convictions of his, and in
his will he ordered that many slaves should be freed after the death
of Mrs. Washington. He was careful to apportion to his slaves the
amount of food they needed in order to keep in health and to work the
required stint. He employed a doctor to look after them in sickness.
He provided clothing for them which he deemed sufficient. I do not
gather that he ever regarded the black man as being essentially made
of the same clay as the white man, the chief difference being the
color of their skin. To Washington, the Slave System seemed bad, not
so much because it represented a debased moral standard, but because
it was economically and socially inadequate. His true character
appears in his making the best of a system which he recognized as most
faulty. Under his management, in a few years, his estate at Mount
Vernon became the model of that kind of plantation in the South.

Whoever desires to understand Washington's life as a planter should
read his diaries with their brief, and one might almost say brusque,
entries from day to day.[1] Washington's care involved not only
bringing the Mount Vernon