In an effort to reproduce that period and so balance the opposing factors that the siege of Boston and the deliverance of Washington at Brooklyn and New York shall have fair co-relation and full bearing upon the resulting struggle for National Independence, there must be some exact standard for the test j and this will be found by grouping such data as illustrate the governing laws of military art.

It has never been claimed that the siege of Boston was not the legitimate result of British blunder and American pluck.  In a previous paper, the siege itself has been presented as that opportunity and training-school exercise which projected its experience into the entire war, and assured final triumph.  It has not been as generally accepted, as both philosophical and necessary, that the fortification and defence of Brooklyn became the wise and inevitable sequence to that siege.

Let us drop a century and handle the old records.

If Great Britain had not called continental auxiliaries to her aid in 1776, her disposable force for colonial service would have been less than half of the army of Washington.

Until the fortification of Brooklyn and New York had been well advanced, the British ministry had not been able to assign even fifteen thousand men for that service.  General Clinton did, indeed, anchor at the New York Narrows, just when General Charles Lee reached that city for its defence, but did not risk a landing, and sailed for South Carolina, only to be repulsed.

The British Crown had no alternative but to seek foreign aid.  The appeal to Catharine of Russia for twenty thousand men was met by the laconic response, “There are other ways of settling this dispute than by resort to arms.”  The Duke of Richmond prophetically declared, “The colonies themselves, after our example, will apply to strangers for assistance.”  The opposition to hiring foreign troops was so intense, that, for many weeks, there was no practical advance in preparations for a really effective blow at the rebels, while the rebellion itself was daily gaining head and spirit.

The British army, just before the battle of Long Island, including Hessians, Brunswickers, and Waldeckers, was but a little larger than that which the American Congress, as early as October 4, 1775, had officially assigned to the siege operations before Boston.  That force was fixed at twenty-three thousand, three hundred and seventy-two men.  General Howe landed about twenty thousand men.  With the sick, the reserves on Staten Island, all officers and supernumeraries included, his entire force exhibited a paper strength of thirty-one thousand, six hundred and twenty-five men.  It is true that General Howe claimed, after the battle of Long Island, that his entire force (Hessians included) was only twenty four thousand men, and that Washington opposed the advance of his division with twenty thousand men.  The British muster rolls, as exhibited before the British Parliament, accord