there leading the scouts as they threshed a mountain for lurking Delawares; he personally hurried off wagons to endangered outposts with flour and powder, and then listened to and quieted the fears of frantic women and men. Is the splendid lesson of these years clear? By Providential dispensation these colonies were a miniature of the America of 1775, suddenly thrown upon its own resources and in war. The divine hand is not more clearly seen in our national development than in the struggle of the colonies between 1745 and 1763, which prepared a nation for the hour her independence should strike. And now it was that Washington, Gates, Mercer, Gladwin, Lewis, Putnam, Crawford, Gibson, Stephen, St. Clair, and Stewart learned for themselves and then taught their countrymen to fight; now Washington found what it meant to be the commander of bare-foot armies, already a hero of two defeats, he was yet to play the hero in bitter, pitiful extremities, to become a dogged believer in hopeless, last alternatives, a burden-bearer for hundreds of homeless ones--a people's mainstay when other men were faltering. Now, as in 1775, his task was to rouse a people only half awake to the crisis; to demonstrate the superiority of wisely ordered liberty over license, and the inferiority of personal independence compared with a unity made strong through faithful cooeperation, and hallowed by mutual self-sacrifice. And fortunate it was for all the colonies that England compelled them to learn how to carry war's heavy harness now, against the day when they should be assailed by something more disastrously fatal to the cause of liberty than savages fired to murder and pillage by French brandy.