st be carried on
systematically, and to do it you must have good officers, there
are in my judgment no other possible means to obtain them but by
establishing your army upon a permanent footing and giving your
officers good pay. This will induce gentlemen and men of character
to engage; and, till the bulk of your officers is composed of such
persons as are actuated by principles of honor and a spirit of
enterprise, you have little to expect from them.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ford, IV, 440.]

Washington proceeds to argue that the soldiers ought not to be engaged
for a shorter time than the duration of the war, that they ought to
have better pay and the offer of a hundred or a hundred and fifty
acres of land. Officers' pay should be increased in proportion. "Why
a captain in the Continental service should receive no more than five
shillings currency per day for performing the same duties that an
officer of the same rank in the British service receives ten shillings
for, I never could conceive." He further speaks strongly against the
employment of militia--"to place any dependence upon [it] is assuredly
resting upon a broken staff."

Washington wrote thus frankly to the Congress which seems to have read
his doleful reports without really being stimulated, as it ought to
have been, by a determination to remove their causes. Probably the
delegates came to regard the jeremiads as a matter of course and
assumed that Washington would pull through somehow. Very remarkable is
it that the Commander-in-Chief of any army in such a struggle should
have expressed himself as he did, bluntly, in regard to its glaring
imperfections. Doing this, however, he managed to hold the loyalty and
spirit of his men. In the American Civil War, McClellan contrived to
infatuate his troops with the belief that his plans were perfect, and
that only the annoying fact that the Confederate generals planned
better caused him to be defeated; and yet to his obsessed soldiers
defeat under McClellan was more glorious than victory under Lee or
Stonewall Jackson. I take it that Washington's frankness simply
reflected his passion for veracity, which was the cornerstone of his
character. The strangest fact of all was that it did not lessen his
popularity or discourage his troops.

To his intimates Washington wrote with even more unreserve. Thus he
says to Lund Washington (30th September):

In short, such is my situation that if I wer