one thing at least--in condemning and despising the worthlessness of the militia recruited in the southern country.[167] It was the utter cowardice of this militia that lost the battle of Camden and caused the needless sacrifice of the lives of the braver Continentals; and the correspondence of the English general is full of instances that prove that, except for plundering and bushwhacking, there was little use to be made of the loyalists in the South. As to the other questions, why, when the loyalists were so numerous, were they not more successful, and why did the eastern loyalists yield to the violence that was offered them, one question nearly answers the other. They were not successful, because they had no leaders of their own stock and country, and because the British commanders blundered throughout the war with as unerring certainty and unfailing regularity as the various British ministries had done from 1764 to 1776. The game was in the hands of the English, if they had known how to play it, for the first three years of the war. Then English inefficiency, rather than any belief in the ability of the colonists to make good their own independence, brought about the French alliance; and the war assumed from thenceforward a very different aspect. The desertion of their cause and their country by the many Tories who left New England for Great Britain or the loyal provinces, and the supineness of the men of place and position who attempted to preserve an attitude of neutrality instead of siding openly either for or against the king, weakened the king’s cause in America and prevented the numbers of the loyalist population from counting for as much as they were really worth. The clever French diplomatist who collected and translated the correspondence of Lord George Germaine with the British generals and admirals, a remarkably well-informed critic of the military operations in America, states in his Preface his opinion as follows: “Another thing which clearly proves that the affairs of the English have been badly conducted in America, is that the American loyalists alone were superior in number to the rebels. How, then, has it come to pass that troops double in numbers, well paid and wanting nothing, aided besides by a German army, have failed in opposing the partisans of liberty, who, badly paid and badly equipped, often lacked everything? Manifestly it is in the different capacity of the commanders that we must seek for the counterweight which has turned the scale in favor of the latter. If the English had had a Washington at the head of their army there would long since have been no more question of war on the American Continent.... M. Linguet has said somewhere in his annals that the secretaries of the Congress were better than the secretaries of the English generals. The same may be said of the generals themselves.”[168]