nd even stooped to connexions with the suttlers to defraud the
public."]

From motives of policy, or of respect for his engagements, Sir Henry
Clinton conferred on Arnold the commission of a brigadier general in
the British service, which he preserved throughout the war. Yet it is
impossible that rank could have rescued him from the contempt and
detestation in which the generous, the honourable, and the brave,
could not cease to hold him. It was impossible for men of this
description to bury the recollection of his being a traitor, a sordid
traitor, first the slave of his rage, then purchased with gold, and
finally secured at the expense of the blood of one of the most
accomplished officers in the British army.

His representations of the discontent of the country and of the army
concurring with reports from other quarters, had excited the hope that
the loyalists and the dissatisfied, allured by British gold, and the
prospect of rank in the British service, would flock to his standard,
and form a corps at whose head he might again display his accustomed
intrepidity. With this hope he published an address to the inhabitants
of America, in which he laboured to palliate his own guilt, and to
increase their dissatisfaction with the existing state of things.

This appeal to the public was followed by a proclamation addressed "To
the officers and soldiers of the continental army, who have the real
interests of their country at heart, and who are determined to be no
longer the tools and dupes of congress or of France."

The object of this proclamation was to induce the officers and
soldiers to desert the cause they had embraced from principle, by
holding up to them the very flattering offers of the British general,
and contrasting the substantial emoluments of the British service with
their present deplorable condition. He attempted to cover this
dishonourable proposition with a decent garb, by representing the base
step he invited them to take, as the only measure which could restore
peace, real liberty, and happiness, to their country.

These inducements did not produce their intended effect. Although the
temper of the army might be irritated by real suffering, and by the
supposed neglect of government, no diminution of patriotism had been
produced. Through all the hardships, irritations, and vicissitudes of
the war, Arnold remains the solitary instance of an American officer
who abandoned the side first embraced in thi