At this very moment, indeed, when Washington was calling for troops, he was struggling with the utmost tenacity to hold control of the Delaware.  He made every arrangement possible to maintain the forts, and the first assaults upon them were repulsed with great slaughter, the British in the attack on Fort Mercer losing Count Donop, the leader, and four hundred men.  Then came a breathing space, and then the attacks were renewed, supported by vessels, and both forts were abandoned after the works had been leveled to the ground by the enemy’s fire.  Meanwhile Hamilton, sent to the north, had done his work; Gates had been stirred, and Putnam, well-meaning but stubborn, had been sharply brought to his bearings.  Reinforcements had come, and Washington meditated an attack on Philadelphia.  There was a good deal of clamor for something brilliant and decisive, for both the army and the public were a little dizzy from the effects of Saratoga, and with sublime blindness to different conditions, could not see why the same performance should not be repeated to order everywhere else.  To oppose this wish was trying, doubly trying to a man eager to fight, and with his full share of the very human desire to be as successful as his neighbor.  It required great nerve to say No; but Washington did not lack that quality, and as general and statesman he reconnoitred the enemy’s works, weighed the chances, said No decisively, and took up an almost impregnable position at White Marsh.  Thereupon Howe announced that he would drive Washington beyond the mountains, and on December 4 he approached the American lines with this highly proper purpose.  There was some skirmishing along the foot of the hills of an unimportant character, and on the third day Washington, in high spirits, thought an attack would be made, and rode among the soldiers directing and encouraging them.  Nothing came of it, however, but more skirmishing, and the next day Howe marched back to Philadelphia.  He had offered battle in all ways, he had invited action; but again, with the same pressure both from his own spirit and from public opinion, Washington had said No.  On his own ground he was more than ready to fight Howe, but despite the terrible temptation he would fight on no other.  Not the least brilliant exploit of Wellington was the retreat to the shrewdly prepared lines of Torres Vedras, and one of the most difficult successes of Washington was his double refusal to fight as the year 1777 drew to a close.

Like most right and wise things, Washington’s action looks now, a century later, so plainly sensible that it is hard to imagine how any one could have questioned it; and one cannot, without a great effort, realize the awful strain upon will and temper involved in thus refusing battle.  If the proposed attack on Philadelphia had failed, or if our army had come down from the hills and been beaten in the fields below, no American army would have remained.  The army of the north, of which men were talking so proudly,