ton, New Jersey,
whither the Continental Congress had adjourned from Philadelphia in
consequence of a mutiny among the unpaid troops stationed there. On
leaving Princeton the American Commander-in-Chief donated 50 guineas
to the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. The trustees
spent the money on this portrait and had it put in the frame formerly
occupied by a picture of King George III, which was destroyed by a
cannon ball in the Battle of Princeton. This canvas still hangs in the
Princeton Faculty room._

By Courtesy of Princeton University]

From governments accustomed to trust rather to artifice, than to force
or to reason, and influenced by vindictive passions which they have
not strength or courage to gratify, hostility may be expected to exert
itself in a cruel insidious policy, which unfeelingly dooms
individuals to chains, and involves them in ruin, without having a
tendency to effect any national object. But the British character
rather wounds by its pride, and offends by its haughtiness, and open
violence, than injures by the secret indulgence of a malignant, but a
paltry and unprofitable revenge: and, certainly, such unworthy motives
ought not lightly to be imputed to a great and magnanimous nation,
which dares to encounter a world, and risk its existence, for the
preservation of its station in the scale of empires, of its real
independence, and of its liberty.

But, in believing the views of the British cabinet to be unfriendly to
the United States, America was perhaps not entirely mistaken. Indeed,
dispositions of a different nature could not reasonably have been
expected. It may be denied, but can not be disguised, that the
sentiments openly expressed by a great majority of the American
people, warranted the opinion that, notwithstanding the exertions of
the administration, they were about to arrange themselves, in the war,
on the side of France. In a government like that of the United States,
no firmness on the part of the chief magistrate can long resist the
current of popular opinion; and that opinion, without professing it,
unquestionably led to war.

If the character of the British minister at Philadelphia is to be
collected from his intercourse with the executive of the country to
which he was deputed, there is reason to suppose that his
communications to his own government did not diminish the impression
which the evidence furnished on this subject, by the American people
themselv