I have estimated that all the young men in America of approximately
Washington's age at that time could probably have been gathered into the
Roman colosseum back of the Pantheon; at any rate, into an American
university stadium. They could have been reached by the voice of one man.
(Which will intimate how small America was--one-fourth the size of Paris
when he was born, one-half the size of Paris when he became a major of
militia.)
They were practically all country-born. There were, indeed, no great
cities in which to be born. New York was little more than a town with only
eight or nine thousand inhabitants; and Boston, the largest city at that
time, had but thirteen thousand in the year 1732. They were men, as
Kipling says of the colonials in the Boer War, who could "shoot and ride."
And Washington was a strong athletic youth of fiery passions, which, given
free rein, would have made him a successful Indian chief. (Indeed, the
Indians admired him and called him Ha-no-da-ga-ne-ars--"the destroyer of
cities"--and at last admitted him, as a supreme tribute, to their Indian
paradise, the only white man found worthy of such canonization.
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