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who had accepted British protections to give them up and take an oath of allegiance to the United States, a delegate from New Jersey, Mr. Abraham Clark, condemned his proclamation as "exceptionable in many things and very improper"; adding, with an air of infinite condescension, "I believe the General is honest, but I think him fallible." Has not the present war given rise to many accusations which history will record with the same wonder and disgust with which she records this?

Another cause of the profuse expenditure and protracted sufferings of the War of Independence, was the neglect to raise an army for the war when popular enthusiasm was so high that the ranks might have been filled with hardly any effort but that of making out the rolls. If I were to copy from Washington's and Greene's letters all the paragraphs against short enlistments and temporary levies, I should fill a volume. Have we not seen the lesson blindly and fatally neglected?

A copy of Washington's letters in every school and district library of the country, to serve as a text-book in clubs and debating societies, and a manual for public men in every department of civil and military administration, would do more for the formation of our national character, would stand us in better stead in difficult emergencies, and furnish us more appropriate examples of that wisdom which we need at all times, than any other source to which we could go for guidance and counsel. A careful study of them by our statesmen at the beginning of the present war would have saved us thousands of lives and millions of treasure.

"Why have the fathers suffered, but to make
The children wisely safe?"

I have not attempted to give my authorities for the statements and opinions contained in these Lectures, for the form of Lectures does not admit of it; and if my purpose in publishing them is reached, they will carry the reader directly to the original sources. But I cannot permit them to go forth into the world without acknowledging my obligations to the able and trustworthy volumes of Mr. Hildreth, to the judicious and accurate Annals of Holmes, and to that admirable series of publications by which Mr. Sparks has connected his name indissolubly with the history of our Revolution. Force's Archives unfortunately cover only the first two years of the war; but for those years they leave nothing to be desired. What a disgrace to the administration of 1853, and its immediate successor, that such a work should have been suspended, and the exhaustive researches and wonderful critical sagacity of such a man lost to historical literature, by the arbitrary violation of a solemn contract.

In using Gordon, I have often felt the want of the critical edition which was promised us some years ago in the name of Mr. George Henry Moore of the New York Historical Society. In using the Journals of Congress, I have constantly had occasion to regret the awkward separation of the secret journals from the main collection, and the want of a new edition based upon an accurate collation of the original manuscript, and completed by the insertion in their proper places of the fragments of debates and speeches that are scattered through the works of Adams, and Jefferson, and Gouverneur Morris, and other members of that body.

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Among the other sources from which I have drawn, I would particularly mention the documents in De Witt's valuable work upon Jefferson, and the elaborate Life of Steuben by Mr. Kapp. Since these Lectures were written, this profound and careful writer has published in German two other works which bear upon my subject, "The Life of DeKalb," and "The Trade of German Princes in Soldiers for America." I will not say with Vertot, mon siége est fait; but I have felt in reading them that, if they had reached me before my own work was written, I might have enriched it by new and important details. I trust that these valuable contributions to our history will soon be made more generally accessible to American readers. Mr. Kapp has proved by his Steuben that he writes English well enough to be his own translator.

GEORGE WASHINGTON GREENE.

GREENESDALE, NEWPORT,

February 2, 1865.

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