alted. With only seven
hundred men General Ross and Admiral Cockburn were in the capital of a
republic numbering eight millions of inhabitants, and proud of having
in arms the inconsiderable number of eight hundred thousand men, to do
with it as Commodore Chantey and General Dearborn had done to York, the
capital of a territory containing ninety-five thousand inhabitants,
man, woman, and child! half an hour afterwards, or pay a ransom. The
ransom was refused and the torch was applied to arsenals, store-houses,
senate house, house of representatives, dockyard, treasury, war office,
president's palace, rope walk, and the great bridge across the Potomac.
In the arsenal 20,000 stand of arms were consumed. A frigate and a
sloop of war, afloat, were burnt, 206 cannon and 100,000 rounds of ball
cartridge were taken and destroyed, and General Ross and Admiral
Cockburn went back at their leisure to Benedict. In connection with
this most extraordinarily successful enterprise reflecting the highest
credit on General Ross, there had been some outcry about extending the
ravages of war to pacific public buildings. Indeed the barbarity of
destroying the legislative buildings, the White House and the public
libraries of Washington has been harped upon most sentimentally and
injudiciously. The destruction of some books, scraped together by a new
country and, therefore, of no very great intrinsic value, is looked
upon by the literati of this and of a past age, as a crime, and one of
greater magnitude than the destruction of a village in Canada, on the
20th of December, with the thermometer at zero, and the snow two feet
in depth upon the ground, women and children even being left to gather
food and gather warmth where best they might. It is not considered that
a palace or even a church or parliament building may be converted into
a barrack or that, in some cases, even the destruction of a city may be
necessary. The Americans had burglariously entered upon a war with the
view of stealing Canada from its lawful owner, and being caught and
stayed in the act, were fined, but refusing to pay, were distressed by
the loss of public goods. The Americans, who were the sufferers, very
naturally represented an act, which had so humiliated them, as
barbarous, but how any other person could object to such a proceeding
on the score that it was only worthy of a Goth, is difficult of
conjecture. It is certainly a pity that fine edifices should be
destroy