Private persons as well as the government had vainly tried to induce Washington to accept a reward for his services. A stock company which had been formed, on Washington’s advice, to make two rivers navigable, received the approval of Congress for its work. The opportunity was seized as a new means of rewarding him, for he was responsible for the drawing up of the well-considered plan. The board of directors determined to turn over to him 150 shares at 100 pounds sterling each. The presentation was made in such a way that Washington feared that a refusal to accept might be construed as a lack of respect. Therefore he accepted the shares, adding, however, that he intended to use them for the public welfare. And in his will we read that he set aside that sum for the building of a university in the central part of the United States. [Illustration: _WASHINGTON AS PROPRIETOR_] Chapter XVI Last Days Washington had enjoyed the pleasures of retirement on his estate for four years when his country again claimed his services for the general good and he was unanimously elected President of the United States. He had misgivings as to his ability to fulfil the duties of the highest office in the government. His success in the military field, he argued, did not guarantee that he was capable of becoming a wise administrator. The people, however, thought otherwise. In the countless decrees and orders which Washington had issued during the long period of the war, the great statesman had been apparent as well as the great general. And especially at the moment when the constitution, which had been amended in the meanwhile, was to receive its first trial, every one felt that no hand could hold the rudder of State so securely as Washington’s. His friends urged him to sacrifice his love of private life once more for his country. He hesitatingly accepted. “To-day,” he writes in his diary on April 16, 1789, “I bade farewell to private life and domestic felicity. I am so overwhelmed with care and painful emotion that words fail me to express it. I have set out on the journey to New York to obey the call of my country with the best intentions to serve her in every possible way, but with poor prospect of fulfilling her expectations.”