blunders, our misconduct, our ruin, our losses, our disgraces
and misfortunes." Pitt, in a speech of 1781, aptly described the war as
having been, on the part of England, "a series of ineffective victories
or severe defeats." No doubt it is difficult to account for Gage's early
blunders; for Howe's repeated failure to follow up his own success or
profit by his enemy's weakness; and Cornwallis' movement, justly
censured by Sir Henry Clinton, in transferring the bulk of his army from
the far south to Virginia, within marching distance of Washington,
opened the way to that crowning disaster at Yorktown, without which it
is by no means impossible that Georgia and the Carolinas might have
remained British.

But no allowance for bad generalship can account for the failure of the
British. Washington and Greene appear to have been the only two American
generals of marked ability, though they unquestionably derived great
advantage from the talents of their foreign allies, Lafayette, Pulaski,
Steuben, Rochambeau--and Washington was more than once out-manoeuvred.
Gates evidently owed his one signal triumph to enormous superiority of
numbers on his own ground, and was as signally defeated, under
circumstances infinitely less creditable to him than those of Burgoyne's
surrender. Lee's vaunted abilities came to nothing.

Political incapacity was of course charged upon ministers as another
cause of disaster; and no doubt their miscalculation of the severity of
the struggle was almost childish. When Parliament met in the autumn of
1776--_i.e._, after the Declaration of Independence had gone forth to
the world--it was held out in the King's speech that another campaign
would be sufficient to end the war, while in spite of all the warnings
of the Opposition, they persisted in blinding themselves to the force of
the temptations which must inevitably bring down France, if not Spain,
into the lists against them, until the treaties of these powers with
America were actually concluded. The forces sent out were miserably
inadequate for a war on so large a scale--"too many to make peace, too
few to make war," as Lord Chatham told the Ministry. When for once a
really considerable force was sent out under Burgoyne, it failed for
want of timely cooperation by Howe, and this failure is stated, by Lord
Shelburne, to have arisen from Lord George Germain's not having had
patience to wait after signing the despatch to Burgoyne, till that to
Howe had b