ways, he had invited action; but again, with
the same pressure both from his own spirit and from public opinion,
Washington had said No. On his own ground he was more than ready to
fight Howe, but despite the terrible temptation he would fight on no
other. Not the least brilliant exploit of Wellington was the retreat
to the shrewdly prepared lines of Torres Vedras, and one of the most
difficult successes of Washington was his double refusal to fight as
the year 1777 drew to a close.

Like most right and wise things, Washington's action looks now, a
century later, so plainly sensible that it is hard to imagine how any
one could have questioned it; and one cannot, without a great effort,
realize the awful strain upon will and temper involved in thus
refusing battle. If the proposed attack on Philadelphia had failed, or
if our army had come down from the hills and been beaten in the fields
below, no American army would have remained. The army of the north, of
which men were talking so proudly, had done its work and dispersed.
The fate of the Revolution rested where it had been from the
beginning, with Washington and his soldiers. Drive them beyond the
mountains and there was no other army to fall back upon. On their
existence everything hinged, and when Howe got back to Philadelphia,
there they were still existent, still coherent, hovering on his flank,
cooping him up in his lines, and leaving him master of little more
than the ground his men encamped upon, and the streets his sentinels
patrolled. When Franklin was told in Paris that Howe had taken
Philadelphia, his reply was, "Philadelphia has taken Howe."

But, with the exception of Franklin, contemporary opinion in the month
of December, 1777, was very different from that of to-day, and the
cabal had been at work ever since the commander-in-chief had stepped
between Conway and the exorbitant rank he coveted. Washington, indeed,
was perfectly aware of what was going on. He was quiet and dignified,
impassive and silent, but he knew when men, whether great or small,
were plotting against him, and he watched them with the same keenness
as he did Howe and the British.

In the midst of his struggle to hold the Delaware forts, and of his
efforts to get back his troops from the north, a story came to him
that arrested his attention. Wilkinson, of Gates's staff, had come to
Congress with the news of the surrender. He had been fifteen days on
the road and three days getting hi