the
coast. "Certainly not, unless some measures can be devised and speedily
executed to restore the credit of our currency, restrain extortion, and
punish forestallers." A few days later, "To make and extort money in
every shape that can be devised, and at the same time to decry its
value, seem to have become a mere business and an epidemical disease."
On December 30, 1778, "speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst
for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration, and
almost of every order of men; party disputes and personal quarrels are
the great business of the day; whilst the momentous concerns of an
empire, a great and accumulating debt, ruined finances, depreciated
money, and want of credit, which in its consequences is the want of
everything, are but secondary considerations."

After a first loan had been obtained from France and spent, a further
one was granted in 1782. So utterly unpatriotic and selfish was known to
be the temper of the people that the loan had to be kept secret, in
order not to diminish such efforts as might be made by the Americans
themselves. On July 10th, of that year, with New York and Charlestown
still in British hands, Washington writes: "That spirit of freedom
which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed
everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and
every selfish passion has taken its place." But indeed the mere fact
that from the date of the battle of Monmouth (July 28, 1778), Washington
was never supplied with sufficient means, even with the assistance of
the French fleets and troops, to strike one blow at the English in New
York--though these were but sparingly reenforced during the
period--shows an absence of public spirit, one might almost say of
national shame, scarcely conceivable, and in singular contrast with the
terrible earnestness exhibited on both sides some eighty years later in
the Secession War.

Why, then, must we ask on the other side, did England fail at last? The
English were prone to attribute their ill-success to the incompetency of
their generals. Lord North, with his quaint humor, would say, "I do not
know whether our generals will frighten the enemy, but I know they
frighten me whenever I think of them." When in 1778, Lord Carlisle came
out as commissioner, in a letter speaking of the great scale of all
things in America, he says: "We have nothing on a great scale with us
but our