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REMEMBER THAT GLOBAL RULES ONLY APPLY TO THE QUESTIONS THEMSELVES, NOT THE PASSAGES.

Passage 1 is adapted from John Richard Alden, George Washington. (C) 1984, by Louisiana State University Press. Passage 2 is adapted from James Thomas Fexner, Washington: The Indispensible Man. (C) 1974 by Little, Brown and Company.

Passage 1
At the end of his own time and for generations thereafter, he was acclaimed at home and abroad as the founder of the American nation. He achieved sainthood in the minds of the Americans who came after him. There was a tendency to look upon him as an archangel who possessed the genius of Caesar, the vision of Moses, and the morals of Galahad. A change came. Later Americans gave more and more attention to their rights, less and less to the man who was the principal begetter of those rights. Scholars and teachers in America offered more and more praise to men of the era of the Revolution who talked and wrote on behalf of liberty, to those who labored at European capitals for independence, to those who remodeled American institutions, to Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. There was also in the twentieth century a school of biographical "debunkers" who discovered that great men and women, American as well as European, were inconstant and incontinent, addicted to profanity, and menaced by insanity. Among them were writers who sought to destroy the hallowed Washington, to reduce him to mortal or smaller proportions. They found sin in the saint. So doing, they tended to make the Father of His Country into an important scamp. It was often forgotten that the sword can be more potent than the pen, that the bayonet can speak more decisively than the tongue of the diplomat, that Washington was the one man essential to the triumph of the Patriots in the War of Independence, to the creation of the American union, and perhaps even to the success of the democratic revolution throughout the world.

It is no secret that Washington was not born to the imperial purple. Nor was he by birth a member of the First Families of Virginia, the fabled Virginia aristocracy. He opened his eyes without fanfare of trumpets, with modest hereditary prestige, in a brick house near the junction of Pope's Creek with the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia, at 10 AM on February 11, 1732 - a day of the month that became February 22 when Britain and the British empire afterward condescended to strike eleven days from their defective calendar to match it with that of the remainder of the Western world. He was later duly baptized in the Episcopal church. He was not christened after King George III, who came into the world six years later. It has been urged that he was named after a George Eskridge, a benefactor of Washington's mother. It is not unlikely that the parents had King George II in mind.

Passage 2
On April 14, 1789, Washington received formal notification of his election. He set out on his coach "with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express."

Among the worries that now bothered him was a fear that the people might resent his return to public office after his promise that he would never do so. The enthusiasm with which he was greeted on the road not only extinguished this fear but raised its opposite. As he moved, he could not see the countryside because of the dust churned up by the horsemen who in relays surrounded his carriage. At every hamlet there were speeches; at every city he had to lead a parade and be toasted at a sumptuous dinner; everywhere and always people were jostling him, shaking his hand, cheering and cheering until his ears ached. Throughout the jubilations that stretched down the long days and late into the nights, Washington sensed a hysteria which he found "painful." How easily and with what frenzy could this irrational emotion turn, if the government did not immediately please, "into equally extravagant (though I will fondly hope unmerited) censures. So much is expected, so many untoward circumstances may intervene, in such a new and critical situation that I feel an insuperable diffidence in my own abilities."

The task which he was now approaching was both more uncertain and infinitely more important that that which had lain before him when in 1775 he had ridden north to take command of the Continental Army. His victories had been won ten thousand times, there was no philosophical reason to doubt that success was possible. And, if he did fail, the result would be sad for America, catastrophic perhaps for himself and his companions, but no more than a tiny footnote in the history of mankind.

Washington's present mission might change all history. As he himself put it, "the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." He was on his way to lead an enterprise which, if it succeeded, would prove to all the world, and for the future to time immemorial, the falsity of the contention that men were "unequal to the task of governing themselves and therefore made for a master." That contention had, down the ages, been accepted by many of the greatest thinkers. Supposing the failure of the American experiment should seem to prove them right? How long would it be before this "awful monument" to the death of liberty would be forgotten, before the experiment was tried again? And if, through inability of misunderstanding, Washington contributed to the catastrophe, how deep and eternal would be his personal guilt?