n the issues of the Revolution, such
utterances, instead of being understood as passing expressions of party
bitterness, were taken as the calm judgments of men held in reverence
and awe. Posterity has agreed that there is nothing to be said for the
coercing of the colonies so resolutely pressed by George III and his
ministers. Posterity can also, however, understand that the struggle was
not between undiluted virtue on the one side and undiluted vice on the
other. Some eighty years after the American Revolution the Republic
created by the Revolution endured the horrors of civil war rather than
accept its own disruption. In 1776 even the most liberal Englishmen felt
a similar passion for the continued unity of the British Empire. Time
has reconciled all schools of thought to the unity lost in the case of
the Empire and to the unity preserved in the case of the Republic, but
on the losing side in each case good men fought with deep conviction.

CHAPTER II. BOSTON AND QUEBEC

Washington was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the
realities of war and had moved in military society. Perhaps it was an
advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a regular, for
he faced conditions which required an elastic mind. The force besieging
Boston consisted at first chiefly of New England militia, with companies
of minute-men, so called because of their supposed readiness to fight at
a minute's notice. Washington had been told that he should find 20,000
men under his command; he found, in fact, a nominal army of 17,000,
with probably not more than 14,000 effective, and the number tended
to decline as the men went away to their homes after the first vivid
interest gave way to the humdrum of military life.

The extensive camp before Boston, as Washington now saw it, expressed
the varied character of his strange command. Cambridge, the seat of
Harvard College, was still only a village with a few large houses and
park-like grounds set among fields of grain, now trodden down by the
soldiers. Here was placed in haphazard style the motley housing of a
military camp. The occupants had followed their own taste in building.
One could see structures covered with turf, looking like lumps of mother
earth, tents made of sail cloth, huts of bare boards, huts of brick and
stone, some having doors and windows of wattled basketwork. There were
not enough huts to house the army nor camp-kettles for cooking. Blankets
were so