The situation was, indeed, distressing. "What a wretched piece of work do we seem to be making of it in America!" Gibbon wrote on April 13, 1777. "The greatest force which any European power ever ventured to transport into that continent is not strong enough ever to attack the enemy: the naval strength of Great Britain is not sufficient to prevent the Americans (they have almost lost the appellation of rebels) from receiving every assistance that they wanted; and in the meantime you are obliged to call out the militia to defend your own coast against their privateers. You possibly may expect from me some account of the designs and policy of the French Court. I shall only say that I am not under any immediate apprehension of a war with France. It is much more pleasant as well as profitable to view in safety the raging of the tempest, occasionally to pick up some pieces of wreck, and to improve their trade, their agriculture and their finances while the two countries are '_lento collisa duella_.' Far from taking any step to put an end to this astonishing dispute, I should not be surprised if next summer they were to lend their cordial assistance to England as the weaker party."[169] [169] Walpole: _Last Journals_. It is beyond the scope of this work to trace the progress of the war, and it is for the military historian to criticise its conduct; but it was patent that the purchase of Hessian troops was a great diplomatic blunder. To invoke the aid of hired mercenaries was to make the breach irrevocable, as well as to set against the country employing them the sympathy of other nations. Frederick the Great said he "should make all the Hessian troops, marching through his dominions to America, pay the usual cattle tax, because though human beings they had been sold as beasts." The case has been well put by Lord Mahon. "If any men were needed, was there any lack of them in England?" he asked, "was it wise to inform foreign states that we deemed ourselves thus dependent on foreign aid. Was it wise to hold forth to America the first example of obtaining assistance from abroad? Above all, if conciliation was the object full as much as conquest, how signal the imprudence thus in the midst of a civil strife, to thrust forward aliens to both parties, in blood, in language, and in manners."[170] Chatham inveighed against "the traffic and barter driven with every pitiful German prince that sells his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country. This mercenary aid on which you rely irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies. To overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while there was a foreign troop in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!" [170] Mahon: _History of England_.