After a first loan had been obtained from France and spent, a further one was granted in 1782. So utterly unpatriotic and selfish was known to be the temper of the people that the loan had to be kept secret, in order not to diminish such efforts as might be made by the Americans themselves. On July 10th, of that year, with New York and Charlestown still in British hands, Washington writes: "That spirit of freedom which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has taken its place." But indeed the mere fact that from the date of the battle of Monmouth (July 28, 1778), Washington was never supplied with sufficient means, even with the assistance of the French fleets and troops, to strike one blow at the English in New York--though these were but sparingly reënforced during the period--shows an absence of public spirit, one might almost say of national shame, scarcely conceivable, and in singular contrast with the terrible earnestness exhibited on both sides some eighty years later in the Secession War. Why, then, must we ask on the other side, did England fail at last? The English were prone to attribute their ill-success to the incompetency of their generals. Lord North, with his quaint humor, would say, "I do not know whether our generals will frighten the enemy, but I know they frighten me whenever I think of them." When in 1778, Lord Carlisle came out as commissioner, in a letter speaking of the great scale of all things in America, he says: "We have nothing on a great scale with us but our blunders, our misconduct, our ruin, our losses, our disgraces and misfortunes." Pitt, in a speech of 1781, aptly described the war as having been, on the part of England, "a series of ineffective victories or severe defeats." No doubt it is difficult to account for Gage's early blunders; for Howe's repeated failure to follow up his own success or profit by his enemy's weakness; and Cornwallis' movement, justly censured by Sir Henry Clinton, in transferring the bulk of his army from the far south to Virginia, within marching distance of Washington, opened the way to that crowning disaster at Yorktown, without which it is by no means impossible that Georgia and the Carolinas might have remained British. But no allowance for bad generalship can account for the failure of the British. Washington and Greene appear to have been the only two American generals of marked ability, though they unquestionably derived great advantage from the talents of their foreign allies, Lafayette, Pulaski, Steuben, Rochambeau--and Washington was more than once out-manoeuvred. Gates evidently owed his one signal triumph to enormous superiority of numbers on his own ground, and was as signally defeated, under circumstances infinitely less creditable to him than those of Burgoyne's surrender. Lee's vaunted abilities came to nothing.