t in the range of human affairs, I yet feel inclined,
nay compelled, to bear witness to the greatness of his heart, soul and
understanding. He was human. He had his faults. He made his mistakes.
But I would not detract a line from any eulogium of him ever uttered.
Words have never yet been penned that do him justice.

CHAPTER VII

AGRICULTURAL OPERATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

A detailed account of all of Washington's agricultural experiments would
require several hundred pages and would be tedious reading. All that I
shall attempt to do is to give some examples and point the way for any
enthusiast to the mass of his agricultural papers in the Library of
Congress and elsewhere.

At the outset it should be stated that he worked under extremely
different conditions from those of to-day. Any American farmer of the
present who has a problem in his head can have it solved by writing to
the nearest government experiment station, a good farm paper, an
agricultural college, the department of agriculture, or in some favored
districts by consulting the local county "agent." Washington had no such
recourse. There was not an agricultural college or agricultural paper in
the whole country; the department of agriculture was not created until
near the end of the next century; county "agents" were as unthought of
as automobiles or electric lights; there was not a scientific farmer in
America; even the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture
was not founded until 1785. In his later years our Farmer could and did
write to such foreign specialists as Arthur Young and Sir John Sinclair,
but they were Englishmen unfamiliar with American soils and climate and
could rarely give a weighty answer propounded to them by an American. If
Washington wished to know a thing about practical farming, he usually
had to find it out for himself.

This state of affairs accounts for his performing some experiments that
seem absurd. Thus in the fall of 1764 we find him sowing "a few Oats to
see if they would stand the winter." Any country boy of to-day could
tell him that ordinary oats sown under such conditions in the latitude
of Mount Vernon would winter kill too badly to be of much use, but
Washington could not know it till he had tried.

In another category was his experiment in March, 1760, with lucerne.
Lucerne is alfalfa. It will probably be news to most readers that
alfalfa--the wonderful forage crop of the