Everybody is familiar with the details of that infamy, which is inexplicable on any other ground than partial insanity.  No matter what may be said in extenuation, Arnold committed the greatest crime known to civilized nations.  He contrived to escape the just doom which awaited him, and, from having become traitor, even proceeded to enter the active service of the enemy and to raise his hand against the country which, but for these crimes, would have held him in honorable remembrance.  The heart of English-speaking nations has ever been moved to compassion for the unfortunate fate of the messenger who conducted the treasonable correspondence between Arnold and Clinton,—­one of the most accomplished officers in the British army, Major Andre.  No influence—­not even his deeply moved sympathy—­could induce Washington to interfere with the decision of the court-martial that Andre should be hanged as a spy, so dangerous did the commander deem the attempted treachery.  The English have erected to the unfortunate officer a monument in Westminster Abbey.

The contemplated surrender of West Point to the enemy suggests the demoralization which the war had already produced, and which was deplored by no one more bitterly than by Washington himself.  “If I were called upon,” he writes, “to draw a picture of the times and of 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 most of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration...; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day; whilst the momentous concerns of an empire, an accumulating debt, ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit ... are but secondary considerations.”

All war produces naturally and logically this demoralization, especially in countries under a republican government.  Profanity, drunkenness, and general recklessness as to money matters were everywhere prevailing vices; and this demoralization was, in the eyes of Washington, more to be dreaded than any external dangers that had thus far caused alarm and distress.  “I have,” wrote he, “seen without despondency even for a moment, the hours which America has styled her gloomy ones; but I have beheld no day since the commencement of hostilities that I have thought her liberties were in such imminent danger as at present.”

“He had faced,” says Henry Cabot Lodge, in his interesting life of Washington, “the enemy, the bleak winters, raw soldiers, and all the difficulties of impecunious government, with a cheerful courage that never failed.  But the spectacle of wide-spread popular demoralization, of selfish scramble for plunder, and of feeble administration at the centre of government, weighed upon him heavily.”  And all this at the period of the French alliance, which it was thought would soon end the war.  Indeed, hostilities were practically over at the North, and hence the public lassitude.  Nearly two years had passed without an important battle.