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WASHINGTON'S ROAD

dreams found their setting in the rough, free land on whose Indian trails and in whose meadow lands he had, as it were, found a new world. Washington's seven or eight thousand acres near the Potomac were not his only landed possessions. He counted his estates in far western Pennsylvania, along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha. Something of his interest in and solicitation for the future of the West must be attributed to his interest in his own possessions. But his efforts for the West benefited every acre of land and every insignificant squatter, and no one can say with a shadow of reason that Washington's hope for the West was a selfish hope. Yet his personal interest must not be forgotten by a fair narrator. Together with his personal interest must be mentioned the state pride which Washington had—and which every healthy, hopeful, patriotic man should have. Washington was a Virginian of Virginians and in view of the vast interests which his native state had in the West (granted by ancient charter), his state pride and ambition must have had large, appreciable influence in his contemplation of