The first news of an important military event confirmed Coleman’s gloomy apprehensions. On Aug. 31 he was able to write a long editorial upon Hull’s surrender at Detroit in that I-told-you-so spirit which is an editor’s subtlest joy. He called it disgraceful: A nation, counting eight millions of souls, deliberating and planning for a whole winter and spring, and part of a summer, the invasion and conquest of a neighboring province, at length making that invasion; and in one month its army retiring--captured--and captured in a fortified place--captured almost without firing a gun! Miserably deficient in practical talent must be the administration which formed the plan of that invasion; or the army which has thus surrendered must be a gang of more cowardly poltroons, than ever disgraced a country.... What! March an army _into_ a country where there were not more than seven or eight hundred soldiers to oppose them, and not make the army large enough! March them _from_ a country, which is the granary of the world, and let them famish on the very frontiers for want of provisions! Issue a gasconading proclamation threatening to exterminate the enemy, and surrender your whole army to them! If there be judgment in this people, they will see the utter unfitness of our rulers for anything beyond management, intrigue, and electioneering.--They have talents enough to influence a misguided populace against their best friends; but they cannot protect the nation from insult and disgrace. Similar attacks upon the Administration’s incompetence followed every other reverse. From the early defeat at Queenstown Heights to the “Bladensburg Races,” when an American force fled ignominiously before Cockburn’s invaders and exposed Washington to capture, the _Evening Post_ missed no opportunity for harsh criticism. “Woe to that nation whose king is a child!” was a favorite quotation of Coleman’s. The journal was far from unpatriotic, and sincerely deplored the several defeats, but it held the government rigidly responsible for them. The editor never changed his opinion that, to use his words in the last year of the war, it was “an unsuccessful war, ... a war declared without just cause and without preparation, for the continuance of which no man can assign a reason, and from the termination of which no man expects an advantage.” And patriotic though Coleman was, he rejoiced in the failure of the successive efforts to invade Canada. He thought conquest in that quarter the most shameless territory-grabbing. In these utterances we catch the first accents of the _Evening Post’s_ century-long campaign against “imperialism.” He wrote late in 1814: