The year 1778 closed, with the Southern campaign opened; but the American Congress had no money; and the loose union of the States constantly evoked sectional jealousies. Any thoughtful reader of this narrative must have noticed with what discriminating judgment enlistments were accommodated to the conditions of each section, and that care was taken to dispose of troops where their local associations were most conducive to their enthusiastic effort. Washington thus forcibly exposed the condition of affairs, when he declared that “the States were too much engaged in their local concerns, when the great business of a nation, the momentous concerns of an empire, were at stake.” Bancroft, the historian, thus fitly refers to Washington at this eventful crisis in American affairs: “He, who in the beginning of the Revolution used to call Virginia his country, from this time never ceased his efforts, by conversation and correspondence, to train the statesmen of America, especially of his beloved State, to the work of consolidation of the Union.” At the close of 1778, General Washington visited Philadelphia; and thus solemnly and pungently addressed Colonel Harrison, Speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses. After urging Virginia to send the best and ablest of her men to Congress, he thus continues: “They must not slumber nor sleep at home, at such a time of pressing danger; content with the enjoyment of places of honor or profit in their own State, while the common interests of America are mouldering and sinking into inevitable ruin.... If I were to draw a picture of the times and men, from what I have seen, heard, and in part know, I should, in one word say: that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance, seem to have laid fast hold of many of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day; ... while a great and accumulating debt, depreciated money, and want of credit, which in its consequences is the want of everything, are but secondary considerations, if our affairs wore the most promising aspect.... An assembly, a concert, a dinner, a supper, will not only take men away from acting in this business, but even from thinking of it; while the great part of the officers of our army, from absolute necessity, are quitting the service; and the more virtuous few, rather than do this, are sinking by sure degrees into beggary and want.” There is a touch of the pathetic, and an almost despondent tone with which the closing paragraph of this utterance of the American Commander-in-Chief closes, when he adds: “Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous and deplorable condition, than they have been since the commencement of the war.”