And certainly it seemed as if that dark year brought nothing but disaster upon the Americans. It was now more evident than ever that they had no government worthy of the name. The Congress had no more authority now than it had had in 1774, when it was admitted to be nothing but a “Congress of the Committees of Correspondence”; and it was not now made up, as it had then been, of the first characters in America, the men of the greatest force and initiative in the patriotic party. It could advise, but it could not command; and the states, making their own expenditures, which seemed heavy enough, maintaining their own militia, guarding their own interests in the war, following their own leaders, often with open selfishness and indifference to the common cause, paid less and less heed to what it asked them to do. It could not raise money by taxation; it could raise very little by loan, having no legal power to make good its promises of repayment. Beaumarchais found to his heavy cost that it was next to impossible to recover the private moneys advanced through “Roderigue Hortalez et Cie.” The troops upon whom Washington and his generals depended were paid in “continental” paper money, which, by 1780, had grown so worthless that a bushel of wheat could scarcely be had for a month’s pay. Wholesale desertion began. Enlisted men by the score quit the demoralized camps. It was reckoned that as many as a full hundred a month went over to the enemy, if only to get food and shelter and clothing. Those who remained in the depleted ranks took what they needed from the farms about them, and grew sullen and mutinous. Promises of money and supplies proved as fruitless as promises of reinforcements from France. [Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S OATH OF ALLEGIANCE] [Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD] [Illustration: JOHN ANDRÉ] Even deliberate treason was added. Benedict Arnold, whom every soldier in the continental ranks deemed a hero because of the gallant things he had done at Quebec and Saratoga, and whom Washington had specially loved and trusted, entered into correspondence with the enemy, and plotted to give West Point and the posts dependent upon it into the hands of the British. Congress had been deeply unjust to him, promoting his juniors and inferiors and passing him over; a thousand slights had cut him; a thousand subtle forces of discouragement and of social temptation had been at work upon him, and he had yielded,—to pique, to bitter disappointment, to the disorders of a mind unstable, irritable, without nobility. His treason was discovered in time to be foiled, but the heart-breaking fact of it cut Washington to the quick, like a last and wellnigh fatal stroke of bitter dismay. Who could be trusted now? and where was strength to be got wherewith to carry the languishing work to a worthy finish? [Illustration: MAJOR ANDRÉ’S WATCH]