“Americans can never be adequately grateful that George Washington possessed the power and the will to intervene effectively in what may well have been the most dangerous hour the United States has ever known.”
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Contrast Washinton’s self-possessed demeanor and carefully regulated behavior with that of Canada’s first Totalitarian Mammy-singer.
And it took him most of his life to reach that point.
Washington had a ferocious temper. You could pile one straw after another on his camel's back, but the straw that broke it would send him into a blue rage that would make him physically ill for days. Then he would have to go around, hat in hand, to apologize to the people he had wronged. When you saw Washington's jawline tighten, it was considered prudent to leave the premises.
It was the spiritual exercises of the Freemasons, the meditations, that permitted him to get that temper of his under an iron discipline. Martha Washington noted that he had managed to keep his temper "under exquisite control."