[Illustration:  LOTTERY TICKET SIGNED BY WASHINGTON]

As these extensive land ventures bespoke a national characteristic, so a liking for other forms of speculation was innate in the great American.  During the Revolution he tried to secure an interest in a privateer.  One of his favorite flyers was chances in lotteries and raffles, which, if now found only in association with church fairs, were then not merely respectable, but even fashionable.  In 1760 five pounds and ten shillings were invested in one lottery.  Five pounds purchased five tickets in Strother’s lottery in 1763.  Three years later six pounds were risked in the York lottery and produced prizes to the extent of sixteen pounds.  Fifty pounds were put into Colonel Byrd’s lottery in 1769, and drew a half-acre lot in the town of Manchester, but out of this Washington was defrauded.  In 1791 John Potts was paid four pounds and four shillings “in part for 20 Lottery tickets in the Alexa. street Lottery at 6/ each, 14 Dollrs. the Bal. was discharged by 2.3 Lotr prizes.”  Twenty tickets of Peregrine and Fitzhugh’s lottery cost one hundred and eighty-eight dollars in 1794.  And these are but samples of innumerable instances.  So, too, in raffles, the entries are constant,—­“for glasses 20/,” “for a Necklace L1.,” “by profit & loss in two chances in raffling for Encyclopadia Britannica, which I did not win L1.4,” two tickets were taken in the raffle of Mrs. Dawson’s coach, as were chances for a pair of silver buckles, for a watch, and for a gun; such and many others were smaller ventures Washington took.

There were other sources of income or loss besides.  Before the Revolution he had a good sized holding of Bank of England stock, and an annuity in the funds, besides considerable property on bond, the larger part of which, as already noted, was liquidated in depreciated paper money.  This paper money was for the most part put into United States securities, and eventually the “at least L10,000 Virginia money” proved to be worth six thousand two hundred and forty-six dollars in government six per cents and three per cents.  A great believer in the Potomac Canal Company, Washington invested twenty-four hundred pounds sterling in the stock, which produced no income, and in time showed a heavy shrinkage.  Another and smaller loss was an investment in the James River Canal Company.  Stock holdings in the Bank of Columbia and in the Bank of Alexandria proved profitable investments.

None the less Washington was a successful businessman.  Though his property rarely produced a net income, and though he served the public with practically no profit (except as regards bounty lands), and thus was compelled frequently to dip into his capital to pay current expenses, yet, from being a surveyor only too glad to earn a doubloon (seven dollars and forty cents) a day, he grew steadily in wealth, and when he died his property, exclusive of his wife’s and the Mount Vernon estate, was valued at five hundred and thirty thousand dollars.  This made him one of the wealthiest Americans of his time, and it is to be questioned if a fortune was ever more honestly acquired or more thoroughly deserved.