“Certainly not. It gave us a semicircular line, running round the fort, but not including what we had possessed before. And besides, we had rejected the Dutch line, and the whole point now clearly belonged to England. It was all within the British territory. “I was saying that a vessel might pass between Windmill Point and Stony Point, and be without the range of both, till her broadside could be brought to bear upon either of them. The forts would be entirely independent of each other, and, having no communication, could not render each other the least assistance in case of attack. But the military men told us there was no sort of question that Rouse’s Point was extremely desirable as a point of military defence. This is plain enough, and I need not spend time to prove it. Of one thing I am certain, that the true road to Canada is by the way of Lake Champlain. That is the old path. I take to myself the credit of having said here, thirty years ago, speaking of the mode of taking Canada, that, when an American woodsman undertakes to fell a tree, he does not begin by lopping off the branches, but strikes his axe at once into the trunk. The trunk, in relation to Canada, is Montreal, and the River St. Lawrence down to Quebec; and so we found in the last war. It is not my purpose to scan the propriety of military measures then adopted, but I suppose it to have been rather accidental and unfortunate that we began the attack in Upper Canada. It would have been better military policy, as I suppose, to have pushed our whole force by the way of Lake Champlain, and made a direct movement on Montreal; and though we might thereby have lost the glories of the battles of the Thames and of Lundy’s Lane, and of the sortie from Port Erie, yet we should have won other laurels of equal, and perhaps greater value, at Montreal. Once successful in this movement, the whole country above would have fallen into our power. Is not this evident to every gentleman?