t; that she would not expect to overcome three millions
of fellow-Britons on their own soil with a few battalions, a half-dozen
generals from Bond Street, and a few thousand bravos hired out of
Germany. As if we wanted to insult the thirteen colonies as well as to
subdue them, we must set upon them these hordes of Hessians, and the
murderers out of the Indian wigwams. Was our great quarrel not to be
fought without tali auxilio and istis defensoribus? Ah! 'tis easy, now
we are worsted, to look over the map of the great empire wrested from
us, and show how we ought not to have lost it. Long Island ought to
have exterminated Washington's army; he ought never to have come out of
Valley Forge except as a prisoner. The South was ours after the battle
of Camden, but for the inconceivable meddling of the Commander-in-Chief
at New York, who paralysed the exertions of the only capable British
General who appeared during the war, and sent him into that miserable
cul-de-sac at York Town, whence he could only issue defeated and a
prisoner. Oh, for a week more! a day more, an hour more of darkness
or light! In reading over our American campaigns from their unhappy
commencement to their inglorious end, now that we are able to see the
enemy's movements and conditions as well as our own, I fancy we can see
how an advance, a march, might have put enemies into our power who had
no means to withstand it, and changed the entire issue of the struggle.
But it was ordained by Heaven, and for the good, as we can now have no
doubt, of both empires, that the great Western Republic should separate
from us: and the gallant soldiers who fought on her side, their
indomitable and heroic Chief above all, had the glory of facing and
overcoming, not only veteran soldiers amply provided and inured to war,
but wretchedness, cold, hunger, dissensions, treason within their own
camp, where all must have gone to rack, but for the pure unquenchable
flame of patriotism that was for ever burning in the bosom of the
heroic leader. What a constancy, what a magnanimity, what a surprising
persistence against fortune! Washington before the enemy was no better
nor braver than hundreds that fought with him or against him (who has
not heard the repeated sneers against "Fabius" in which his factious
captains were accustomed to indulge?), but Washington the Chief of a
nation in arms, doing battle with distracted parties; calm in the midst
of conspiracy; serene against the op