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Show Washington Keen ' Man of Business How does it come about that George Washington, a member of an agricultural agricul-tural family, living in an agricultural state, and concerned primarily with the occupation and use of land, may be styled with absolute truth as the best and the most fnrsighted business man of his time? It has been my fortune during the last three summers to search out the family history of Washington's ancestors, ances-tors, writes Albert Bushnell Hart, professor pro-fessor emeritus of history, Harvard university, In the Nation's Business. From William de Washington, who settled in the town of Washington, Palatinate of Durham, In 1185, we think we have a straight strain of 25 generations of Washingtons behind our George Washington that can be substantiated sub-stantiated ; and In that set of ancestors, ances-tors, father to son, among men of varied va-ried talents and intellectual powers, I have as yet failed to find a single scalawag. In that line you find the lawyer strain. You find judges. You find for the most part landowners, holders of considerable estates, which they administered successfully. Line of Successful Men. There is in the Washington line a strong strain of practical and highly successful business men. Otherwise it would be Impossible to account for the manner in which Washington reached out beyond his Immediate field as a landowner to greater enterprises; and how eventually he became the first practical tarnsportation man In the United States. Washington, of course, was a landowner. land-owner. That Is, his prime business was to run landed estates. It was a declining business when he took It up, when by the death of his father and then of his two brothers he came Into possession of very large properties, including in-cluding the Mount Vernon estate and a number of ad.iacent plantations. Altogether Al-together he had 9.000 acres of land, pretty ranch In one body along the Potomac, including Mount Vernon. That land he carried on as a business busi-ness enterprise, as you would do if you were charged with such a responsibility, respon-sibility, to make 9,000 acres of land pay If you could. He was the first Virginian to see that tobacco was played out because the land was worn out : that the land would not stand the pressure of continued tobacco crops. So he turned to the culture of wheat He built a mil) to utilize that wheat and he sent it to market. He had his own brand. Kept Accounts Faithfully. According to the customs of the time, he put up a distillery in onter to make a different disposition of a part of his product. That is to say, Washington sought all the different kinds of agriculture agri-culture that could be maintained on his farm. He raised blooded stock of n superior kind. The king of Spain made him a present of a very valuable jack, and he raised mules and apparently appar-ently raised them to advnntage. . Furthermore, Washington was a natural accountant, and the proof Is In his diaries and in his account books. Almost the last thing that he put on paper was a little bit of bookkeeping. He kept his records in a clear, legible hand. He kept them according to the customs of the times. That Is, he recorded re-corded whatever went on. His diaries have been published In four volumes but they tell you nothing of what Washington thought. He put down not wlmt he thought but what he did, who his visitors were. If he went to church or stayed at home. That Is, he kept a record to which he could refer to show very nearly where he was every day and what he was doing. do-ing. He was an analytic bookkeeper, and 1 suspect one of the first in America. Hence we find his accounts very carefully care-fully subdivided. We find an account for each plantation, a general account, how much he gained out of wheat, how much from tobacco, how many slaves he had. what the expense had been, and so on. He had that Inextinguishable Inex-tinguishable love of figures that affects af-fects some men. Even Gambling Losses Listed. Washington loved to keep books. One of his biographers has calculated his losses In gaming. lie lost 75 pounds In a year, and he kept the ac- |