which, say they, amount to this--that men in Civil
life have stronger passions and better pretensions to indulge
them, or less virtue and regard for their Country than
us,--otherwise, as we are all contending for the same prize and
equally interested in the attainment of it, why do we not bear the
burthen equally?[1]

[Footnote 1: Ford, X, 203.]

The army was indeed the incubus of the Americans. They could not fight
the war without it, but they had never succeeded in mastering the
difficulties of maintaining and strengthening it. The system of a
standing army was of course not to be thought of, and the uncertain
recruits who took its place were mostly undisciplined and unreliable.
When the exigencies became pressing, a new method was resorted to, and
then the usual erosion of life in the field, the losses by casualties
and sickness, caused the numbers to dwindle. Long ago the paymaster
had ceased to pretend to pay off the men regularly so that there was
now a large amount of back pay due them. Largely through Washington's
patriotic exhortations had they kept fighting to the end; and, with
peace upon them, they did not dare to disband because they feared
that, if they left before they were paid, they would never be paid.
Washington felt that, if thousands of discontented and even angry
soldiers were allowed to go back to their homes without the means of
taking up any work or business, great harm would be done. The love of
country, which he believed to be most important to inculcate, would
not only be checked but perverted. They already had too many reasons
to feel aggrieved. Why should they, the men who risked their lives
in battle and actually had starved or frozen in winter quarters, go
unpaid, whereas every civilian who had a post under the Government
lived at least safely and healthily and was paid with fair
promptitude? They felt now that their best hope for justice lay in
General Washington's interest in their behalf; and that interest of
his seems now one of the noblest and wisest and most patriotic of his
expressions.

Washington had need to be prepared for any emergency. Thus a body
of officers deliberated not only a mutiny of the army, but a _coup
d'etat_, in which they planned to overthrow the flimsy Federation of
the thirteen States and to set up a monarchy. They wrote to Washington
announcing their intention and their belief that he would make an
ideal monarch. He was amazed and chagr