Although the chief American depot escaped destruction, the disgrace and discouragement remained, that after two years of war the Americans, though enjoying every advantage, were weaker than ever on Lake Ontario, and could not defend even so important a point as Oswego from the attack of barely a thousand men. Their coastwise supply of stores to Sackett’s Harbor became a difficult and dangerous undertaking, to be performed mostly by night.[35] Chauncey remained practically blockaded in Sackett’s Harbor; and without his fleet in control of the Lake the army could do nothing effectual against Kingston. In this helplessness, Armstrong was obliged to seek some other line on which the army could be employed against Upper Canada; and the idea occurred to him that although he had no fleet on Lake Ontario he had one on Lake Erie, which by a little ingenuity might enable the army to approach the heart of Upper Canada at the extreme western end of Lake Ontario. “Eight or even six thousand men,” Armstrong wrote[36] to the President, April 30, “landed in the bay between Point Abino and Fort Erie, and operating either on the line of the Niagara, or more directly if a more direct route is found, against the British post at the head of Burlington Bay, cannot be resisted with effect without compelling the enemy so to weaken his more eastern posts as to bring them within reach of our means at Sackett’s Harbor and Plattsburg.” Armstrong’s suggestion was made to the President April 30. Already time was short. The allies had entered Paris March 31; the citadel of Bayonne capitulated to Wellington April 28. In a confidential despatch dated June 3, Lord Bathurst notified the governor-general of Canada that ten thousand men had been ordered to be shipped immediately for Quebec.[37] July 5, Major-General Torrens at the Horse-guards informed Prevost that four brigades,--Brisbane’s, Kempt’s, Power’s, and Robinson’s; fourteen regiments of Wellington’s best troops,--had sailed from Bordeaux for Canada.[38] Prevost could afford in July to send westward every regular soldier in Lower Canada, sure of replacing them at Montreal by the month of August. “A discrepancy in the opinions of the Cabinet,” according to Armstrong,[39] delayed adoption of a plan till June, when a compromise scheme was accepted,[40] but not carried out. “Two causes prevented its being acted upon _in extenso_,” Armstrong afterward explained,[41]--“the one, a total failure in getting together by militia calls and volunteer overtures a force deemed competent to a campaign of demonstration and manœuvre on the peninsula; the other, an apprehension that the fleet, which had been long inactive, would not yet be found in condition to sustain projects requiring from it a vigorous co-operation with the army.”