Washington’s Farewell Address: on knowledge

Washington never spoke this address aloud. The address appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper, the American Daily Advertiser, on September 19, 1796, telling the country he would not seek a third term. Alexander Hamilton helped him shape the final wording from an earlier draft by James Madison. The Senate has marked Washington’s birthday with a reading of the address every year since 1896.

Where this text comes fromThe sentence is an instruction with a hedge built into it. It tells the country to promote institutions for spreading knowledge and calls that a matter of primary importance, but the phrasing keeps the recommendation general rather than naming what should be built or who should pay. That vagueness was deliberate. The address was assembled with help and revised repeatedly to avoid committing a successor to anything specific, and it shows most clearly in sentences like this one.

What you might not noticeTwo capital letters appear in the whole passage and neither falls inside a sentence, which is unusual for eighteenth-century political prose where abstract nouns were routinely capitalized. Source

What it trainsAt 240 characters this is one of the shortest passages available here and it contains nothing but letters, four commas and two full stops. No semicolons, no hyphens, no quotation marks, no numbers. Two capitals, both at sentence openings. Two sentences average under nineteen words each. There is genuinely no trap in this passage, which makes it the right one to use when you want a clean number rather than a challenge, and the only long word is institutions.

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