A division of the enemy's fleet, consisting of eight vessels, ascended the Potomac to attack the city of Alexandria. Fort Warburton, a small work intended for its defence, was destroyed by the garrison at the approach of the ships, and with no opposition they passed up and laid the town under their guns. A parley was had, the result of which was that the dwellings were left unmolested, the condition being, "the immediate delivery [to the enemy] of all public and private naval and ordnance stores; of all shipping, and the furniture necessary to their equipment then in port; of all the merchandise of every description, whether in the town or removed from it since the 19th of the month; that such merchandise should be put on board the shipping at the expense of the owners; and that all vessels which might have been sunk upon the approach of {284}the fleet should be raised by the merchants and delivered up with all their apparatus." These conditions, hard as they were, were complied with, and on the 6th of September the fleet, loaded with booty, returned down the river. Two batteries on the shore--at White House and Indian Head, commanded by Captains Porter and Perry, of the navy--damaged it considerably as it passed, but were not able to stop it. If the importance of General Ross's exploit was overrated by the Americans, who naturally felt chagrined that so small an invading force should have destroyed their capital and momentarily dispersed their Government, it was enormously exaggerated by the English journals. By confounding the capital of the country with its metropolis, they led their readers to believe that the chief city of the United States had been laid in ashes; whereas Washington was but a straggling place of eight thousand inhabitants, which had been made the seat of the Federal Government but a dozen years before. Taking it for granted that what would have befallen England or France with London or Paris in the possession of a foreign enemy, had actually befallen the United States, the London _Times_ proceeded to say: "The ill-organized association is on the eve of dissolution, and the world is speed{285}ily to be delivered of the mischievous example of the existence of a government founded on democratic rebellion." In another issue, October 9th, 1814, it said: "Next to the annihilation of the late military despotism in Europe, the subversion of that system of fraud and malignity which constitutes the whole policy of the Jeffersonian school, was an event to be devoutly wished by every man in either hemisphere who regards rational liberty or the honorable intercourse of nations. It was an event to which we should have bent, and yet must bend, all our energies. The American Government must be displaced, or it will sooner or later plant its poisoned dagger in the heart of the parent state." In a speech in Parliament, Sir Gilbert Heathcote naively said, "it appeared to him