re good than harm in the very matter of public
opinion, for it opened men's eyes, and led to some tardy improvements
and some increased effort.

Worse even than this criticism was the remonstrance of the legislature
of Pennsylvania against the going into winter-quarters. They expected
Washington to keep the open field, and even to attack the British,
with his starving, ragged army, in all the severity of a northern
winter. They had failed him at every point and in every promise, in
men, clothing, and supplies. They were not content that he covered
their State and kept the Revolution alive among the huts of Valley
Forge. They wished the impossible. They asked for the moon, and then
cried out because it was not given to them. It was a stupid, unkind
thing to do, and Washington answered their complaints in a letter to
the president of Congress. After setting forth the shortcomings of the
Pennsylvanians in the very plainest of plain English, he said: "But
what makes this matter still more extraordinary in my eye is that
these very gentlemen should think a winter's campaign, and the
covering of these States from the invasion of an enemy, so easy and
practicable a business. I can answer those gentlemen, that it is a
much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a
comfortable room, by a good fireside, than to occupy a cold, bleak
hill, and sleep under frost and snow, without clothes or blankets.
However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked and
distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them, and from my soul
I pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve or
prevent."

This was not a safe man for the gentlemen of Pennsylvania to cross too
far, nor could they swerve him, with all his sense of public opinion,
one jot from what he meant to do. In the stern rebuke, and in the
deep pathos of these sentences, we catch a glimpse of the silent and
self-controlled man breaking out for a moment as he thinks of his
faithful and suffering men. Whatever happened, he would hold them
together, for in this black time we detect the fear which haunted
him, that the people at large might give way. He was determined on
independence. He felt a keen hatred against England for her whole
conduct toward America, and this hatred was sharpened by the efforts
of the English to injure him personally by forged letters and other
despicable contrivances. He was resolved that England should never