men in their company, and one for being absent from his post when the enemy appeared there and burnt a house just by it.  Besides these I have at this time one colonel, one major, one captain, and two subalterns under arrest for trial.  In short, I spare none, and yet fear it will not all do, as these people seem to be too attentive to everything but their own interests.”  This may be plain and homely in phrase, but it is not stilted, and the quick energy of the words shows how the New England farmers and fishermen were being rapidly brought to discipline.  Bringing the army into order, however, was but a small part of his duties.  It is necessary to run over all his difficulties, great and small, at this time, and count them up, in order to gain a just idea of the force and capacity of the man who overcame them.

Washington, in the first place, was obliged to deal not only with his army, but with the general congress and the congress of the province.  He had to teach them, utterly ignorant as they were of the needs and details of war, how to organize and supply their armies.  There was no commissary department, there were no uniforms, no arrangements for ammunition, no small arms, no cannon, no resources to draw upon for all these necessaries of war.  Little by little he taught Congress to provide after a fashion for these things, little by little he developed what he needed, and by his own ingenuity, and by seizing alertly every suggestion from others, he supplied for better or worse one deficiency after another.  He had to deal with various governors and various colonies, each with its prejudices, jealousies, and shortcomings.  He had to arrange for new levies from a people unused to war, and to settle with infinite anxiety and much wear and tear of mind and body, the conflict as to rank among officers to whom he could apply no test but his own insight.  He had to organize and stimulate the arming of privateers, which, by preying on British commerce, were destined to exercise such a powerful influence on the fate of the war.  It was neither showy nor attractive, such work as this, but it was very vital, and it was done.

By the end of July the army was in a better posture of defense; and then at the beginning of the next month, as the prospect was brightening, it was suddenly discovered that there was no gunpowder.  An undrilled army, imperfectly organized, was facing a disciplined force and had only some nine rounds in the cartridge-boxes.  Yet there is no quivering in the letters from headquarters.  Anxiety and strain of nerve are apparent; but a resolute determination rises over all, supported by a ready fertility of resource.  Couriers flew over the country asking for powder in every town and in every village.  A vessel was even dispatched to the Bermudas to seize there a supply of powder, of which the general, always listening, had heard.  Thus the immediate and grinding pressure was presently relieved, but the staple of war still remained pitifully and perilously meagre all through the winter.