t he alone grasped the great
conception, and felt it in his soul. To see not only immediate success
imperiled, but the future paltered with by small, mean, and dishonest
men, cut him to the quick. He set himself doggedly to fight it, as he
always fought every enemy, using both speech and pen in all quarters.
Much, no doubt, he ultimately effected, but he was contending with
the usual results of civil war, which are demoralizing always, and
especially so among a young people in a new country. At first,
therefore, all seemed vain. The selfishness, "peculation, and
speculation" seemed to get worse, and the tone of Congress and the
people lower, as he struggled against them. In March, 1779, he wrote
to James Warren of Massachusetts: "Nothing, I am convinced, but
the depreciation of our currency, aided by stock-jobbing and party
dissensions, has fed the hopes of the enemy, and kept the British
arms in America to this day. They do not scruple to declare this
themselves, and add that we shall be our own conquerors. Can not our
common country, America, possess virtue enough to disappoint them? Is
the paltry consideration of a little pelf to individuals to be placed
in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present
generation, and of millions yet unborn? Shall a few designing men, for
their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset
the goodly fabric we have been rearing, at the expense of so much
time, blood, and treasure? And shall we at last become the victims
of our own lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven! Forbid it, all and every
State in the Union, by enacting and enforcing efficacious laws for
checking the growth of these monstrous evils, and restoring matters,
in some degree, to the state they were in at the commencement of the
war."

"Our cause is noble. It is the cause of mankind, and the danger to it
is to be apprehended from ourselves. Shall we slumber and sleep, then,
while we should be punishing those miscreants who have brought these
troubles upon us, and who are aiming to continue us in them; while we
should be striving to fill our battalions, and devising ways and means
to raise the value of the currency, on the credit of which everything
depends?" Again we see the prevailing idea of the future, which
haunted him continually. Evidently, he had some imagination, and
also a power of terse and eloquent expression which we have heard of
before, and shall note again.

Still the a