, which are still hidden in your veins, somewhere down in your
boots, would suddenly rush to your heart and inflame it. You would duck
under those revolver muzzles and come at our stomachs in a way that
would keep us moving. We should undoubtedly very soon have your dead
body with which to conduct some sort of brutal and stupid British
triumph; but we should never be able to say that we had made a political
slave of a living Adams.

I have not space here to take you all through the revolution and remind
you of every scene in which your ancestor figured. But I shall finish
what I was saying about Washington when his army was reduced to 3,300
and he was prepared for a grand trek to the Alleghenies. He did not have
to resort to that because General Howe did not press him any further.
For political reasons, which we cannot go into here, Howe preferred that
Washington should raise another army if he could.

Howe retired to New York and spent the winter there with his large force
of 30,000; but at Trenton and Bordentown on the Delaware River some
fifty miles away he placed two isolated outposts of about 1,500 Hessians
each. Washington collected more men until his 3,300 had become 6,000 and
with these raw militia he gobbled up those Hessian outposts just as the
Boers have been gobbling up similarly placed British outposts. When a
force of 8,000 British came out from New York to reoccupy Trenton,
Washington cut in behind them, and at Princeton, finding some more
British coming up widely separated and unable to support one another, he
beat them in detail.

This was brilliant, irregular Boer warfare on outposts and weak
detachments. Washington was able to do it because his whole system was
like that of the Boers, an irregular one. If he had had a regularly
organized army and it had been reduced down to 3,300 it would never have
been brought together again. He would have been done for. But his army
was always one of the come and go kind. He had a small nucleus that
could be relied upon to stay; but most of his force was composed of men
who came from all parts of the colonies to serve three weeks, three
months or six months then return home and have others come in their
places. It was by this Boer method that all the armies of the rebel
party during the revolution were kept going. When seriously defeated or
when they had accomplished an object they would scatter as the Boers do
and make it very difficult to destroy that which did