After this "Defence" was first published, it was submitted to Mr. Frederich Kapp, the Prussian American, who had attacked the Elector of Hesse in his books, and his charges were referred to the leading authority on Hessian history, who fully refuted them. To further substantiate the character of the Elector, reference is made to the funeral sermon of the Free Masons' Lodge of Cassel on the death of the noble prince. Kapp's books, especially his "Soldaten-Handel" [Dealing in Soldiers], are full of sneers at him and at his son, and although Kapp disproves and discredits the "Urias"[1] letter, it is on technical and not moral grounds that he relieves the Elector of the disgraceful charge of dealing in the blood and bones of his subjects out of avarice. He does not contradict Mirabeau's appeal to the Hessians, full as it is of party hostility. Kapp repeats the false charge that the Elector made money by false lists, so as to draw pay for more soldiers than were really in service, overlooking the fact that the annual and semi-annual muster-rolls made this impossible. He says the expenses of fitting the soldiers for the field were not paid by the Elector, although the money was taken from their pay. He charges the German princes whose soldiers were in the English army with cheating the contractors for supplies. He accepts the apocryphal story told by Seume of the illegal violence with which men were forced into the service, yet in all of these and many other matters Kapp is altogether wrong. [1] Attributed by Mr. Ford to Franklin. No less an authority than Moser, the historian, long ago pointed out that the Americans, with Franklin at their head, had perjured themselves. The Hessians wrote home their contempt for the leaders and the people of America from actual personal observation. From Washington down the greatest unfairness was shown to the "Loyalists," who were driven into exile, stripped of all their property. He it was who tried to tempt the Hessians to desert, who proposed to burn New York, who ordered the execution of Andre, who wanted Aspill [Asgill], an entirely innocent man, put to death, and connived at the robbery of the Hessian prisoners of their English pay, prevented their exchange, and kept the stores and clothing sent for them. In Schloezer's "Letters" are found the unfavorable opinions of the Americans written home by Captain Wagner, wounded at the side of Count Donop; in Wiederhold's "Diary," Philadelphia is described as a "confluenz canaillorum," as bad as Sodom and Gomorrha, those who had escaped the gallows in Europe being warmly welcomed in the New World. Ewald warned the people of a suburb of Philadelphia that there was no honor among them; and Bauermeister, a British adjutant-general, was equally emphatic. Pfister, in his "History of the American Revolutionary War," gives many details of the bad conduct of the leaders and people of the young republic.