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easures to prevent the people from being contaminated with French ideas. The press was crushed by severe penalties. Every enlightened idea was banished from the schools and expunged from the school-books. Only men for whose extreme reactionary spirit the police could vouch were appointed to the professorships or to other offices. A system of universal spying and secret information caused everybody to be suspected and to suffer from private vindictiveness, while those who dared to avow liberal views were the objects of cruel persecution. FOOTNOTES: [28] From Vambery's _Hungary_, in Story of the Nations Series (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons), by permission. SIEGE AND SURRENDER OF YORKTOWN A.D. 1781 HENRY B. DAWSON LORD CORNWALLIS After almost seven years of struggle, the American colonies, with the aid of France, won by the success of their arms that independence which they declared in 1776. The close of the Yorktown campaign with the surrender of Cornwallis virtually ended the Revolutionary War. While the victory of the Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga (1777) produced a most encouraging effect upon the colonies, their scattered forces still had much arduous work before them. The defeat of Washington at Brandywine and at Germantown (September and October, 1777) left the British, under Howe, in possession of Philadelphia. Being in no condition to keep the field, Washington went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, twenty miles northwest of that city. There, in the most inhospitable surroundings, the army remained from the middle of December, 1777, suffering untold privations, while the British passed a winter of gayety in Philadelphia. The American camp consisted of log huts with windows of oiled paper. The soldiers built the huts in bitter weather, their only food being cakes of flour and water which they baked at the open fires. To the hardships of exposure were added the sufferings of disease; to scarcity of provisions, lack of clothing. The men, said Lafayette, "were in want of everything; they had neither coats, hats, shirts, nor shoes; their feet and their legs froze till they became black, and it was often necessary to amputate them." After such a winter it seems remarkable that Washington could have so strengthened his army as to win
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