It is refreshing to read these righteously angry words, still ringing as sharply as when they were written. They clear away all the myths--the priggish, the cold, the statuesque, the dull myths--as the strong gusts of the northwest wind in autumn sweep off the heavy mists of lingering August. They are the hot words of a warm-blooded man, a good hater, who loathed meanness and treachery, and who would have hanged those who battened upon the country's distress. When he went to Philadelphia, a few weeks later, and saw the state of things with nearer view, he felt the wretchedness and outrage of such doings more than ever. He wrote to Harrison: "If I were to be called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men, from what I have seen, heard, and in part know, I should in one word say, that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance seem to have laid fast hold of most of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration, and almost of every order of men; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day; whilst the momentous concerns of an empire, a great and accumulating debt, ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit, which, in its consequences, is the want of everything, are but secondary considerations, and postponed from day to day, from week to week, as if our affairs wore the most promising aspect." Other men talked about empire, but he alone grasped the great conception, and felt it in his soul. To see not only immediate success imperiled, but the future paltered with by small, mean, and dishonest men, cut him to the quick. He set himself doggedly to fight it, as he always fought every enemy, using both speech and pen in all quarters. Much, no doubt, he ultimately effected, but he was contending with the usual results of civil war, which are demoralizing always, and especially so among a young people in a new country. At first, therefore, all seemed vain. The selfishness, "peculation, and speculation" seemed to get worse, and the tone of Congress and the people lower, as he struggled against them. In March, 1779, he wrote to James Warren of Massachusetts: "Nothing, I am convinced, but the depreciation of our currency, aided by stock-jobbing and party dissensions, has fed the hopes of the enemy, and kept the British arms in America to this day. They do not scruple to declare this themselves, and add that we shall be our own conquerors. Can not our common country, America, possess virtue enough to disappoint them? Is the paltry consideration of a little pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation, and of millions yet unborn? Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing, at the expense of so much time, blood, and treasure? And shall we at last become the victims