as a young man you read Irving's life of him; but it never occurred to you to think that his "predatory" and guerilla war was wicked. It was on your side; you believed that his desire for the independence of the country was just and right, and being so, could be rightfully supported by predatory as well as regular warfare. Your youthful instinct was sound. You had not then learned to worship mere financeering. You had not then imbibed a passion for that part of the British constitution which declares that any resistance whether in support of independence, home or anything else which interferes with the operations of a financial clique in London is a crime.

But when you see the principles and tactics of Washington and your own great grandfather repeated in a country far off they seem different, and when you see them turned against a country which gradually has come to embody in your mind fashionable society, you think them very dreadful. From your great grandfather's time to yours is a very short distance in history but a long distance, it seems, in political morals.

The proposition for which you contend, or for which you profess to contend, for I decline to believe that anyone of your name really accepts such stuff, is nothing but the old principle of the bully and brute. The little man must yield where his case is shown to be hopeless and save the brute's time and money. After every battle of the revolution the British and the loyalists thought that your ancestor and his friends ought to give it up, and this went on for over seven years in spite of the assistance of France.

I am inclined to think that if you were really put to the test you would not live up to your own principles. I am inclined to think that if I and several others, outnumbering you in the proportion of the English to the Boers, should present revolvers and say that being men of better business capacity we would now kindly take charge of your private affairs and manage them for you to your great advantage, you would not act quite as piously as you preach. The one or two drops of the blood of old John, which are still hidden in your veins, somewhere down in your boots, would suddenly rush to your heart and inflame it. You would duck under those revolver muzzles and come at our stomachs in a way that would keep us moving. We should undoubtedly very soon have your dead body with which to conduct some sort of brutal and stupid British triumph; but we should never be able to say that we had made a political slave of a living Adams.

I have not space here to take you all through the revolution and remind you of every scene in which your ancestor figured. But I shall finish what I was saying about Washington when his army was reduced to 3,300 and he was prepared for a grand trek to the Alleghenies. He did not have to resort to that because General Howe did not press him any further. For political reasons, which we cannot go into here, Howe preferred that Washington should raise another army if he could.

Howe retired to New York and spent the winter there with his large force of 30,000; but at Trenton and Bordentown on the Delaware River some fifty miles away he placed two isolated outposts of about 1,500 Hessians each. Washington collected more men until his 3,300 had become 6,000 and with these raw militia he gobbled up those Hessian outposts just as the Boers have been gobbling up similarly placed British outposts. When a force of 8,000 British came out from New York to reoccupy Trenton, Washington cut in behind them, and at Princeton, finding some more British coming up widely separated and unable to support one another, he beat them in detail.

This was brilliant, irregular Boer warfare on outposts and weak detachments. Washington was able to do it because his whole system was like that of the Boers, an irregular one. If he had had a regularly organized army and it had been reduced down to 3,300 it would never have been brought together again. He would have been done for. But his army was always one of the come and go kind. He had a small nucleus that could be relied upon to stay; but most of his force was composed of men who came from all parts of the colonies to serve three weeks, three months or six months then return home and have others come in their places. It was by this Boer method that all the armies of the rebel party during the revolution were kept going. When seriously defeated or when they had accomplished an object they would scatter as the Boers do and make it very difficult to destroy that which did not exist.

Now that we have settled down and become a great nation all this seems like very foolish business to some of us who cut off coupons or sit at roll top desks endorsing the backs of documents until we have lost the natural feeling of vigorous manhood so characteristic of the Boers and the followers of Washington. We have forgotten our revolution. Our own acts in it now seem too heroic for our stomachs when we see others practicing them. Ireland has been practicing similar methods against England for hundreds of years. It may be a foolish game, but it can be made a very long one. It has lasted some seven hundred years in Ireland without success on either side. It lasted some thirty years in Cuba and was successful and we have set the seal of our approval on that success.

I shall now restore to your recollection the famous Duché letter which was written in the autumn of 1777. Duché was a brilliant young clergyman of the Church of England and was settled in Philadelphia. He was inclined to take sides with the rebel colonists, and would have been very glad to see them attain what they wished if it could have been done peaceably and in the manner of ordinary business negotiations; and he was even willing to go a little farther than this and have the rebel colonists make a certain amount of armed resistance up to a certain point, not beyond the bounds of good taste. In short he was very much of your professed way of thinking, and he represented a large class of people who were of that way of thinking. At the meeting of the first Continental Congress he opened the session with a prayer so eloquent and suitable that it attracted universal attention, and gave him at once a political standing of some little importance.

But after three years of Boer tactics, irregular methods, hopelessness, evident failure, the rise into power of men who were not gentlemen, petty peculation and fraud in the rebel army, apparent deterioration in character of the men in the rebel congress, the undignified runaway, wandering habit of that congress with its papers hauled from one refuge to another in a wagon, and similar things which make a deep impression on men of a certain kind of education and refinement, he saw so clearly the unutterable folly and wickedness of the attempt at independence that he could stand it no longer.

There were many others who thought just as he did; but they usually either went to live in England or Canada or kept quiet in semi-concealment waiting until the power of Britain should restore order and good government to the colonies. But Duché, feeling that he was in somewhat of a public position, argued out the whole subject in a long letter to General Washington, calling on him in the name of God and humanity to put an end to the frightful state of affairs so mutually destructive to the best interests of both the colonies and England.

He was horrified he said to find that rather than give up the idol independence the rebels "would deluge this country in blood." In short he was horrified at the Krugerism of Washington who intended to make England "pay a price that would stagger humanity." As to the rebel army its existence depended on one man. Most of its officers were from "the lowest of the people." "Take away those who surround your