"Under so many discouraging circumstances, can virtue, can honor, can the love of your country prompt you to persevere. Humanity itself (and sure I am humanity is no stranger to your breast) calls upon you to desist. Your army must perish for want of common necessaries, or thousands of innocent families must perish to support them. Wherever they encamp the country must be impoverished. Wherever they march the troops of Britain will pursue and must complete the devastation which America herself has begun." "Perhaps it may be said, 'it is better to die than to be slaves.' This indeed is a splendid maxim in theory: and perhaps in some instances, may be found experimentally true. But where there is the least probability of a happy accommodation surely wisdom and humanity call for some sacrifices to be made to prevent inevitable destruction." It reads almost as if you had written it yourself, does it not? It raised the whole question fairly and squarely, the whole question of the moral right of a naturally separated people to struggle for independence to the bitter end, the last ditch, extermination or whatever name you choose to give it, or as in the case of Ireland, the Armenians and the Poles without end. I do not mean to say that that was the only time that Washington had had the question brought squarely before him. It was a question that came up all over the country every day for seven years down to within a few months of the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781; for the year 1780 was as you know the darkest hour in our revolution. Every individual in those seven years had that question before him every day and hour, and as individuals settled it for themselves one way or the other they dropped in and out of the two sides of the contest. How did Washington settle it with Duche? The young clergyman made a powerful appeal to him. He said that the whole solution of the war rested with Washington alone. He alone could stop the fighting. He alone could persuade the other leaders in the name of God and humanity to give up a hopeless contest. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. The war was deeper than Washington just as the Boer war is deeper than Kruger. But never mind that. Duche's idea was that Washington should at the head of his army negotiate for some settlement short of independence. Independence, England would never grant.