As early as November, 1775, Washington wrote, speaking of military arrangements, "Such a dearth of public spirit, and such want of virtue, such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another, I never saw before, and pray God's mercy that I may never be witness to again." Such "a mercenary spirit" pervaded the whole of the troops, that he should not have been "at all surprised at any disaster." At the same date, besides desertions of thirty or forty soldiers at a time, he speaks of the practice of plundering as so rife that "no man is secure in his effects, and scarcely in his person." People "were frightened out of their houses under pretence of those houses being ordered to be burnt, with a view of seizing the goods"; and to conceal the villainy more effectually some houses were actually burnt down. On February 28, 1777, "the scandalous loss, waste, and private appropriation of public arms during the last campaign" had been "beyond all conception." Officers drew "large sums under pretence of paying their men," and appropriated them. In one case an officer led his men to robbery, offered resistance to a brigade-major who ordered him to return the goods, and was only with difficulty cashiered. "Can we carry on the war much longer?" Washington asks in 1778--after the treaty with France and the appearance of a French fleet off the coast. "Certainly not, unless some measures can be devised and speedily executed to restore the credit of our currency, restrain extortion, and punish forestallers." A few days later, "To make and extort money in every shape that can be devised, and at the same time to decry its value, seem to have become a mere business and an epidemical disease." On December 30, 1778, "speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration, and almost of every order of men; party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day; whilst the momentous concerns of an empire, a great and accumulating debt, ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit, which in its consequences is the want of everything, are but secondary considerations."