elligent industrial or commercial adventurer or promoter, in the good
sense of those terms. He takes risks and assumes burdens on a large
scale, and has a chance to develop will, mind, and character, just as
Queen Elizabeth's adventurers did all over the then known world.

Again, Washington, as I have already indicated, was an economical
person, careful about little expenditures as well as great, averse to
borrowing money, and utterly impatient of waste. If a slave were
hopelessly ill, he did not call a doctor, because it would be a useless
expenditure. He insisted that the sewing woman, Carolina, who had only
made five shirts in a week, not being sick, should make nine. He entered
in his account "thread and needle, one penny," and used said thread and
needle himself. All this closeness and contempt for shiftlessness and
prodigality were perfectly consistent with a large and hospitable way of
living; for during many years of his life he kept open house at Mt.
Vernon. This frugal and prudent man knew exactly what it meant to
devote his "life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in, if
needful," as he wrote in 1774. This was not an exaggerated or emotional
phrase. It was moderate, but it meant business. He risked his whole
fortune. What he lost through his service in the Revolutionary War is
clearly stated in a letter written from Mt. Vernon in 1784: "I made no
money from my estate during the nine years I was absent from it, and
brought none home with me. Those who owed me, for the most part, took
advantage of the depreciation, and paid me off with sixpence in the
pound. Those to whom I was indebted, I have yet to pay, without other
means, if they will wait, than selling part of my estate, or distressing
those who were too honest to take advantage of the tender laws to quit
scores with me." Should we not all be glad if to-day a hundred or two
multi-millionaires could give such an account as that of their losses
incurred in the public service, even if they had not, like Washington,
risked their lives as well? In our times we have come to think that a
rich man should not be frugal or economical, but rather wasteful or
extravagant. We have even been asked to believe that a cheap coat makes
a cheap man. If there were a fixed relation between a man's character
and the price of his clothes, what improvement we should have seen in
the national character since 1893! At Harvard University, twelve hundred
students take three meal