The colonist would fight with the heroism he displayed in Indian warfare, but when the enemy was driven away from his neighborhood, it was the duty of the next neighborhood to take care of itself. Besides, the New Englander with a home had the same idea as the Virginian soldier twenty years before, and this was that, when he wanted to go home, why shouldn’t he! He was not a deserter, and in no sense a coward, but the discipline of army service was mere enslavement and any compulsion was despotism. To understand the making up of an efficient army under such circumstances is the only measure to estimate the greatness of Washington and the debt to him of the liberty-loving world. Curtis, in his history of American Commonwealth, says, “Washington overcame these difficulties by dint of a patience and a selflessness almost without parallel in history, which gradually communicated itself to his fellow countrymen. In seven years he created a continental army which ended the war at Yorktown.” III. SELECTING THE LEADER OF LIBERTY FOR AMERICA Washington had to write many letters, endeavoring to spur up the really patriotic leaders to consistent work for the cause. In his letter to Joseph Reed he was almost in despair over the indifference of people from whom he expected the most patriotic service. “It grieves me,” he wrote, “to see so little of that patriotic spirit which I was taught to believe characteristic of this people.” But this did not mean that the so-called “spirit of ’76” was not strong among them. Washington needed so much of the patriotic spirit that a little would not be any, and, to half-heal the wounds of a friend, was not very friendly to the cause, nor a sufficient friendship toward the needs of Washington’s work for America. Ten years later, when Washington had matured, through the mind-making experiences of revolutionary times, he wrote to John Jay, saying, “Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of coercive power.” This meant that human society requires law, and the right of law is devoid of appreciation or application unless it is clothed with the might to keep its forms and values true. Lecky says, “The common saying that you cannot make people virtuous by law is a dangerous half-truth. The virtue innate in a people may be utterly destroyed by bad institutions, for ‘the virtue,’ as Jay wrote to Washington, ‘like the other resources of a country, can only be drawn to a point by strong circumstances ably managed, or strong governments ably administered.’”