While Washington expressed himself in these modest terms to a personal friend, he assumed a much bolder and higher tone to the dastardly enemies who were continually thwarting his designs and injuring the public service by their malignity and incapacity. These were public enemies to be publicly arraigned. Seizing the occasion to which we have already referred, when the army was unable to march against the enemy for want of provisions, he sent to the President of Congress the following letter which, of course, like the rest of his correspondence, was to be read to the whole house. It is severer than any he had ever written: "Full as I was in my representation of the matters in the commissary's department yesterday, fresh and more powerful reasons oblige me to add that I am now convinced beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that line this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things--to starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence. Rest assured, sir, that this is not an exaggerated picture, and that I have abundant reason to suppose what I say. "Saturday afternoon receiving information that the enemy in force had left the city and were advancing toward Darby with apparent design to forage and draw subsistence from that part of the country, I ordered the troops to be in readiness that I might give every opposition in my power, when, to my great mortification, I was not only informed but convinced that the men were unable to stir on account of a want of provisions, and that a dangerous mutiny begun the night before, and which with difficulty was suppressed by the spirited exertions of some officers, was still much to be apprehended from the want this article. "This brought forth the only commissary in the purchasing line in this camp and with him this melancholy and alarming truth, that he had not a single hoof of any kind to slaughter and not more than twenty-five barrels of flour! From hence form an opinion of our situation when I add that he could not tell when to expect any.