Awful and wicked as it now no doubt seems to you, Washington declined this honor. He sent Duche's letter to the wandering congress. It was copied and given a wide publicity. Your ancestor and the men of that time never dodged the question raised by that letter. Washington also sent a copy to Duche's brother-in-law, Francis Hopkinson, and if you want to read a stinging letter I can recommend the letter Hopkinson wrote to his perverted relative. The whole correspondence including Duche's letter is printed in the appendix to the edition of 1846 of Graydon's Memoirs. I shall quote just one passage from Hopkinson's letter: "The whole force of the reasoning," he says to Duche, "contained in your letter tends to this point: that virtue and honor require us to stand by truth, as long as it can be done with safety, but that her cause may be abandoned on the approach of danger; or in other words, that the justice of the American cause ought to be squared by the success of her arms." The moral or principle contained in that passage is repudiated by you and by every one who lives in England; by the Russians also, most of the Germans, many Frenchmen and in fact Europe generally. If you fear numbers you do well, no doubt, in repudiating it. But it was on that moral principle that our revolution was put through. Whoever denies that principle denies the United States, denies our foundation principle and our validity, denies the justice and righteousness of the struggles which created Switzerland, and all the South American republics including Cuba, struggles which are still carried on by the Armenians after seven hundred years of failure and by the Irish for the same period, struggles which in fact, originally created England, France, Germany and all the powers which now affect to despise them, struggles which create nationalities and all that is useful, honorable or valuable in civil or political life. When you deny the right of a naturally separated people to struggle without end for independence, you deny the most fundamental and necessary, the most powerful and far reaching, the most scientific and well settled principle of moral conduct that history has disclosed.