If the campaign should close at this period, (and if it does, it will be for want of clothes and blankets, for both of which we are in great distress, having received very few) the enemy will have little to boast of. They began it with two armies, one of which has been repeatedly beaten, and at length compelled to lay down its arms and surrender on terms. The other, after various chances, in which fortune more than any thing else has been its protection, has at length possessed itself of Philadelphia. We say fortune has protected the army of General Howe, and we have good reason for saying so, when the fact is, that at the battle of Germantown the enemy were actually defeated,[46] and accident alone prevented a total and irreparable overthrow. It would have been otherwise had our young troops possessed that calmness of discipline and self recollection, which is habitual to veteran armies. The acquisition of Philadelphia, which Mr Howe holds at present by a very precarious tenure, cannot have cost him in the whole fewer than four thousand men, since they landed at the head of Elk; and we know they have lost two ships of war before Fort Mifflin, one a sixtyfour gun ship, the other a frigate. General Washington's army, about eighteen thousand strong, is now about fourteen miles from Philadelphia, and the enemy have fortified themselves in the best manner they can, in and near the city, by double lines from Delaware to Schuylkill, across the common. The manoeuvres about New York exhibit proofs of apprehension for the safety of that place, because the enemy have evacuated and destroyed their post at Fort Independence above King's Bridge, and have drawn in all their outposts to concentrate their strength, and secure, if they can, their hold of the city of New York. We hope before the opening of the next campaign, to put Hudson's River into a state inaccessible to the enemy's ships of war, and thereby to render their enterprises on that quarter extremely difficult and dangerous to them.