"To have the clearer understanding of the entries which may follow, it would be proper to recite, in detail, our wants, and our prospects; but this alone would be a work of much time, and great magnitude. It may suffice to give the sum of them, which I shall do in a few words, viz: "Instead of having magazines filled with provisions, we have a scanty pittance scattered here and there in the different states. "Instead of having our arsenals well supplied with military stores, they are poorly provided, and the workmen all leaving them.--Instead of having the various articles of field equipage in readiness to deliver, the quartermaster general is but now applying to the several states (as the dernier ressort) to provide these things for their troops respectively. Instead of having a regular system of transportation established upon credit--or funds in the quartermaster's hands to defray the contingent expenses of it--we have neither the one or the other; and all that business, or a great part of it, being done by military impressment, we are daily and hourly oppressing the people, souring their tempers, and alienating their affections. Instead of having the regiments completed to the new establishments (and which ought to have been so by the ---- of ---- [Transcriber's Note: end parenthesis missing] agreeably to the requisitions of congress, scarce any state in the union has, at this hour, one-eighth part of its quota in the field; and there is little prospect that I can see of ever getting more than half. In a word, instead of having every thing in readiness to take the field, we have nothing. And instead of having the prospect of a glorious offensive campaign before us, we have a bewildered and gloomy prospect of a defensive one; unless we should receive a powerful aid of ships, land troops and money from our generous allies: and these at present are too contingent to build upon." NOTE--No. VI. _See Page 405_ York in Virginia, 17th October, 1781, half past four, P.M.