In war, as in politics, nice balancing of merit or defect in an enemy would destroy the main purpose which is to defeat him. Each side exaggerates any weak point in the other in order to stimulate the fighting passions. Judgment is distorted. The Baroness Riedesel, the wife of one of Burgoyne's generals, who was in Boston in 1777, says that the people were all dressed alike in a peasant costume with a leather strap round the waist, that they were of very low and insignificant stature, and that only one in ten of them could read or write. She pictures New Englanders as tarring and feathering cultivated English ladies. When educated people believed every evil of the enemy the ignorant had no restraint to their credulity. New England had long regarded the native savages as a pest. In 1776 New Hampshire offered seventy pounds for each scalp of a hostile male Indian and thirty-seven pounds and ten shillings for each scalp of a woman or of a child under twelve years of age. Now it was reported that the British were offering bounties for American scalps. Benjamin Franklin satirized British ignorance when he described whales leaping Niagara Falls and he did not expect to be taken seriously when, at a later date, he pictured George III as gloating over the scalps of his subjects in America. The Seneca Indians alone, wrote Franklin, sent to the King many bales of scalps. Some bales were captured by the Americans and they found the scalps of 43 soldiers, 297 farmers, some of them burned alive, and 67 old people, 88 women, 193 boys, 211 girls, 29 infants, and others unclassified. Exact figures bring conviction. Franklin was not wanting in exactness nor did he fail, albeit it was unwittingly, to intensify burning resentment of which we have echoes still. Burgoyne had to bear the odium of the outrages by Indians. It is amusing to us, though it was hardly so to this kindly man, to find these words put into his mouth by a colonial poet: I will let loose the dogs of Hell, Ten thousand Indians who shall yell, And foam, and tear, and grin, and roar And drench their moccasins in gore:… I swear, by St. George and St. Paul, I will exterminate you all.