It is difficult for us to-day to put ourselves in the place of Washington and other men of his time. Washington was a Virginian, and was one of the Legislature. He was used to making laws and providing for the needs of the people of Virginia, but he was accustomed to look beyond Virginia to England. There the King was, and he was one of the subjects of the King. The King's officers came to Virginia, and when Washington saw, as he so often did, a British man-of-war lying in the river off Mount Vernon, his mind was thrilled with pleasure as he thought of the power of the empire to which he belonged. He had seen the British soldiers marching against the French, and he had himself served under a British general. He had an ardent desire to go to England, to see London, to see the King and his Court, and Parliament, and the Courts of Justice, and the great merchants who made the city famous; but as yet he had been unable to go. He had seen but little of the other colonies. He had made a journey to Boston, and that had given him some acquaintance with men; but wherever he went, he found people looking eagerly toward England and asking what the Ministry there would do about fighting the French on the Western borders. Though he and others might never have seen England, it was the center of the world to them. He thought of the other colonies not so much as all parts of one great country on this side of the Atlantic, as each separately a part of the British Empire. After all, however, and most of all, he was a Virginian. In Virginia he owned land. There was his home, and there his occupation. He was a farmer, a planter of tobacco and wheat, and it was his business to sell his products. As for the French, they were enemies of Great Britain, but they were also very near enemies of Virginia. They were getting possession of land in Virginia itself--land which Washington owned in part; and when he was busily engaged in driving them out, he did not have to stop and think of France, he needed only to think of Fort Duquesne, a few days' march to the westward.