very, the cruelty of the criminal law,
which sent children to execution for the theft of a few pennies, the
brutality of the prisons, the torpid indifference of the church to the
needs of the masses. New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.
The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a thousand
other improvements were being urged. It was a vigorous, rich, and
arrogant England which Washington confronted.

It is sometimes said of Washington that he was an English country
gentleman. A gentleman he was, but with an experience and training quite
unlike that of a gentleman in England. The young heir to an English
estate might or might not go to a university. He could, like the young
Charles James Fox, become a scholar, but like Fox, who knew some of the
virtues and all the supposed gentlemanly vices, he might dissipate
his energies in hunting, gambling, and cockfighting. He would almost
certainly make the grand tour of Europe, and, if he had little Latin and
less Greek, he was pretty certain to have some familiarity with Paris
and a smattering of French. The eighteenth century was a period of
magnificent living in England. The great landowner, then, as now, the
magnate of his neighborhood, was likely to rear, if he did not inherit,
one of those vast palaces which are today burdens so costly to the heirs
of their builders. At the beginning of the century the nation to honor
Marlborough for his victories could think of nothing better than to
give him half a million pounds to build a palace. Even with the colossal
wealth produced by modern industry we should be staggered at a residence
costing millions of dollars. Yet the Duke of Devonshire rivaled at
Chatsworth, and Lord Leicester at Holkham, Marlborough's building
at Blenheim, and many other costly palaces were erected during the
following half century. Their owners sometimes built in order to surpass
a neighbor in grandeur, and to this day great estates are encumbered by
the debts thus incurred in vain show. The heir to such a property was
reared in a pomp and luxury undreamed of by the frugal young planter of
Virginia. Of working for a livelihood, in the sense in which Washington
knew it, the young Englishman of great estate would never dream.

The Atlantic is a broad sea and even in our own day, when instant
messages flash across it and man himself can fly from shore to shore in
less than a score of hours, it is not easy for those on one strand t