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EORGE Washington's efforts to promote internal improvement in Virginia and Maryland with special reference to the Middle West have been lightly sketched in other portions of this work. A more or less complete examination into the Potomac Company must be essayed here, for among the improvements of internal waterways in America that of the Potomac urged by Washington meant to the last quarter of the eighteenth century what the building of the Erie Canal meant to the first quarter of the nineteenth.

Having maintained with earnestness for many years that Virginia and Maryland should, through the Potomac River, secure the trade of the rising empire west of the