"....You are told that a regiment of Yorkers behaved ill, and it may be true; but I can tell you that several regiments of Massachusetts men behaved ill, too. The spirit of venality you mention is the most dreadful and alarming enemy America has to oppose. It is as rapacious and insatiable as the grave. This predominant avarice will ruin America. If God Almighty does not interfere by His grace to control this universal idolatry to the mammon of unrighteousness, we shall be given up to the chastisement of His judgments. I am ashamed of the age I live in."[68] [68] Letter of John Adams to His Wife, Vol. I., p. 171. Nor was the public life of the country at that time more creditable. In the course of the war, persons of small claims to notice or regard obtained seats in Congress. By force of party disruptions, as was bitterly remarked by one of the leaders, men were brought into the management of affairs "who might have lived till the millennium in silent obscurity had they depended upon their mental qualifications." Gouverneur Morris was, no doubt, one of the shrewdest observers of current events in his day, and the purity of the patriotism of John Jay entitled him to stand by the side of Washington. One day, in a conversation, thirty years after the second Continental Congress had passed away, Morris exclaimed: "Jay, what a set of damned scoundrels we had in that second Congress!" And Jay, as he knocked the ashes from his pipe, replied: "Yes, we had." Near the close of 1779, Congress, trying to dispel the fear that the continental currency would not be redeemed, passed a resolution declaring: "A bankrupt, faithless republic would be a novelty in the political world. The pride of America revolts at the idea. Her citizens know for what purpose these emissions were made, and have repeatedly pledged their faith for the redemption of them." The rest of the resolution is too coarse for quotation, even for the sake of emphasis. In a little more than three months from the passage of that resolution a bill was passed to refund the continental currency by issuing one dollar of new paper money for forty of the old, and the new issue soon became as worthless as the former emission. Indeed, the patriots repudiated obligations to the amount of two hundred million dollars, and did it so effectually that we still use the expression, "not worth a continental" as a synonym for worthlessness.