execute.

After the Battle of Princeton, Washington drew his men off to the
Heights of Morristown where he established his winter quarters. The
British had gone still farther toward New York City. Both sides seemed
content to enjoy a comparative truce until spring should come with
better weather; but true to his characteristic of being always
preparing something, Howe had several projects in view, any one of
which might lead to important activity. If ever a war was fought at
long range, that war was the American Revolution. Howe received his
orders from the War Office in London. Every move was laid down; no
allowance was made for the change which unforeseeable contingencies
might render necessary; the young Under-Secretaries who carefully
drew up the instructions in London knew little or nothing about the
American field of operations and simply relied upon the fact that
their callipers showed that it was so many miles between Point X and
Point Y and that the distance should ordinarily be covered in so many
hours.

With Washington himself the case was hardly better. There were few
motions that he could make of his own free will. He had to get
authority from the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. The Congress
was not made up of military experts and in many cases it knew nothing
about the questions he asked. The members of the Congress were
talkers, not doers, and they sometimes lost themselves in endless
debate and sometimes they seemed quite to forget the questions
Washington put to them. We find him writing in December to beg them to
reply to the urgent question which he had first asked in the preceding
October. He was scrupulous not to take any step which might seem
dictatorial. The Congress and the people of the country dreaded
military despotism. That dread made them prefer the evil system
of militia and the short-term enlistments to a properly organized
standing army. To their fearful imagination the standing army would
very quickly be followed by the man on horseback and by hopeless
despotism.

The Olympians in London who controlled the larger issues of war and
peace whispered to the young gentlemen in the War Office to draw up
plans for the invasion, during the summer of 1777, of the lower Hudson
by British troops from Canada. General Burgoyne should march down and
take Ticonderoga and then proceed to Albany. There he could meet a
smaller force under Colonel St. Leger coming from Oswego and following
the