being the only one known to the public. When he was censured for his desire of gaining wealth from his office as quartermaster-general, he offered the excuse that, as he made a sacrifice of his command of a division and so of his chances of glory in the field, he had a right to be compensated by large emoluments.

The place of inspector-general fell to Baron Steuben, a Prussian officer, then forty-seven years of age. The high military rank which he assumed without right but without question, the good opinion of Vergennes and Saint-Germain, the recommendation of Franklin, the halo of having served during the seven years' war under the great Frederic, and real merit, secured for him an appointment as major-general. On the twenty-third of February he was welcomed to Valley Forge. He benefited the country of his adoption by "introducing into the army a regular formation and exact discipline, and by establishing a spirit of order and economy in the interior administration of the regiments."

Yet there remained a deeply seated conflict of opinion between congress and the commander-in-chief on questions of principle and policy. Washington would from the first have had men enlisted for the war; congress, from jealousy of standing armies, had insisted upon short enlistments. Washington wished the exchange of prisoners to be conducted on one uniform rule; congress required a respect to the law of treason of each separate state. Washington would have one continental army; congress, an army of thirteen sovereignties. Congress was satisfied with the amount of its power as a helpless committee; Washington wished a union with efficient powers of government. Congress guarded separate independence; the patriotism of Washington took a wider range, and in return the public affection, radiating from every part of the United States, met in him. All this merit, and this popularity, and the undivided attachment of the army, made congress more sensible of their own relative weakness. They felt that their perfect control over the general was due to his own nature, and that nature could not be fully judged of before the end. Nor was it then known how completely the safety

*Hamilton's Works, ii., 229.

of the country against military usurpation lay in the character of the American people.

To allay the jealousy of congress, Washington, on the twenty-first of April, wrote to one of its delegates: "Under proper limitations it is certainly true that standing armies are dangerous to a state. The prejudices of other countries have only gone to them in time of peace, and from their being hirelings. It is our policy to be prejudiced against them in time of war, though they are citizens, having all the ties and interests of citizens, and in most cases property totally unconnected with the military line. The jealousy, impolitic in the extreme, can answer not a single good purpose. It is unjust, because no order of men in the thirteen states has paid a more sacred regard to the proceedings of congress than the army; for, without arrogance or the smallest deviation from truth, it may be said that no history now extant can furnish an instance of an army's suffering such uncommon hardships as ours has done, and bearing them with the same patience and fortitude. Their submitting without a murmur is a proof of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be paralleled. There may have been some remonstrances or applications to congress in the style of complaint from the army, and slaves indeed should we be if this privilege were denied; but these will not authorize nor even excuse a jealousy that they are therefore aiming at unreasonable powers, or making strides subversive of civil authority. There should be none of these distinctions. We should all, congress and army, be considered as one people, embarked in one cause, acting on the same principle and to the same end." In framing an oath of fidelity for all civil and military officers, congress, much as it avoided the expression, made them swear that the "people of the United States" owed no allegiance to the king of Great Britain. The soldiers serving under one common flag, to establish one common independence, and, though in want of food, of shoes, of clothes, of straw for bedding, of pay in a currency of fixed value, of regular pay of any kind, never suffering their just discontent to get the better of their patriotism, still more clearly foreshadowed a great nation.

The troops of Burgoyne remained in the environs of Bos

ton. As if preparing an excuse for a total disengagement from his obligations, Burgoyne, complaining without reason of the quarters provided for his officers, wrote and insisted that the United States had violated the public faith, and refused to congress descriptive lists of the non-commissioned officers and soldiers who were not to serve in America during the war. On these grounds congress suspended the embarkation of the troops under his command till it should receive notice of a ratification of the convention by the court of Great Britain. Burgoyne sailed for England on his parole.

To counteract the arts of the British emissaries among the Indians on the borders of Virginia and the Carolinas, Colonel Nathaniel Gist was commissioned to take into the public service two hundred of the red men and fifty of the white inhabitants of the neighboring counties. Care was taken to preserve the friendship of the Oneidas.

The American militia of the sea were restlessly active. In the night of the twenty-seventh of January a privateer took the fort of New Providence, one of the Bahama isles, made prize of a British vessel of war of sixteen guns, which had gone in for repairs, and recaptured five American vessels. On the seventh of March, Biddle, in the Randolph, a United States frigate of thirty-six guns on a cruise from Charleston, falling in with the Yarmouth, a British ship of sixty-four guns, hoisted the stars and stripes, fired a broadside, and continued the engagement till his ship went down.

The king of England succeeded but poorly in his negotiations for subsidiary troops. The crazy prince of AnhaltZerbst, who ruled over but three hundred square miles with twenty thousand inhabitants, after unceasing importunities, bargained with the king of England to deliver, at his own risk, twelve hundred and twenty-eight men. On their way to the place of embarkation, as they passed near the frontier of Prussia, three hundred and thirty-three of them deserted in ten days, and the number finally delivered was less than half of what was promised. When they arrived at their destination in Quebec, Carleton the governor, having no orders respecting them, would not suffer them to disembark till a messenger brought back orders from England.

To make good the loss of Hessians, the landgrave of HesseCassel impressed men wherever he could do so with impunity. The heartless meanness of the Brunswick princes would pass belief, if it was not officially authenticated. They begged that the Brunswickers, who surrendered at Saratoga, might not find their way back to their homes, where they would spoil the traffic in soldiers by their complaints, but be sent rather to the British West Indies. The princes who first engaged in the trade in soldiers were jealous of competitors, and dropped hints that the states of Würtemberg, where Schiller ran the risk of being assistant surgeon to a regiment of mercenaries, would never suffer a contract by their duke to be consummated; that Protestant England ought not to employ troops of the elector palatine because they were Roman Catholics.

Had officers or men sent over to America uttered complaints, they would have been shot for mutiny; Mirabeau, then a fugitive in Holland, lifted up the voice of the civilization of his day against the trade, and spoke to the peoples of Germany and the soldiers themselves: "What new madness is this? Alas, miserable men, you burn down not the camp of an enemy, but your own hopes! Germans! what brand do you suffer to be put upon your forehead? You war against a people who have never wronged you, who fight for a righteous cause, and set you the noblest pattern. They break their chains. Imitate their example. Have you not the same claim to honor and right as your princes? Yes, without doubt. Men stand higher than princes. Of all rulers, conscience is the highest. You, peoples that are cheated, humbled, and sold, fly to America, but there embrace your brothers. In the spacious places of refuge which they open to suffering humanity, learn to apply social institutions to the advantage of every member of society." Against this tocsin of revolution the landgrave of Hesse defended himself on principles of feudal law and legitimacy; and Mirabeau rejoined: "When power breaks the compact which secured and limited its rights, then resistance becomes a duty. To recover freedom, insurrection becomes just. There is no crime like the crime against the freedom of the people."

When on the twentieth of November the king of England

opened the session of parliament, only three systems were proposed. The king insisted on a continuation of the war, without regard to the waste of life or treasure, till the colonies should be reduced to subordination. Chatham said: "France has insulted you, and our ministers dare not interpose with dignity or effect. My lords! you cannot conquer America. In three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow, traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince: your efforts are forever vain and impotent, doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely, for it irritates to an incurable resentment. If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms; never, never, never." And he denounced the alliance with "the horrible hell-hounds of savage war." His advice, freed from rhetoric, was to conciliate America by a change of ministry, and to make war on France. The third plan, which was that of the Rockingham party, was expressed by the duke of Richmond: "I would sooner give up every claim to America than continue an unjust and cruel civil war." A few days later, Lord Chatham inveighed against a sermon which Markham, the archbishop of York, had preached and published, reflecting on the "ideas of savage liberty" in America, and denounced his teachings as "the doctrines of Atterbury and Sacheverell."

Returning from the fatiguing debate of the second of December on the state of the nation, Lord North received the news of the loss of Burgoyne's army. He was so agitated that he could neither eat nor sleep, and the next day at the levee his distress was visible to the foreign ministers. Concession after defeat was humiliating; but there must be prompt action, or France would interfere. In a debate of the eleventh, the duke of Richmond, from the impossibility of conquest, argued for "a peace on the terms of independence, and an alliance or federal union." Burke in the commons was for an agreement with the Americans at any rate. "The ministers know as little how to make peace as war," said Fox; and privately among his friends, openly in the house of commons, he