double corner for
ourselves, we can always prevent a total defeat. You cannot be so
insensible as not to see that we have two to one the advantage of you,
because we conquer by a drawn game, and you lose by it. Burgoyne might
have taught your lordship this knowledge; he has been long a student in
the doctrine of chances.

I have no other idea of conquering countries than by subduing the armies
which defend them: have you done this, or can you do it? If you have
not, it would be civil in you to let your proclamations alone for the
present; otherwise, you will ruin more Tories by your grace and favor,
than you will Whigs by your arms.

Were you to obtain possession of this city, you would not know what to
do with it more than to plunder it. To hold it in the manner you hold
New York, would be an additional dead weight upon your hands; and if a
general conquest is your object, you had better be without the city than
with it. When you have defeated all our armies, the cities will fall
into your hands of themselves; but to creep into them in the manner you
got into Princeton, Trenton, &c. is like robbing an orchard in the
night before the fruit be ripe, and running away in the morning. Your
experiment in the Jerseys is sufficient to teach you that you have
something more to do than barely to get into other people's houses; and
your new converts, to whom you promised all manner of protection, and
seduced into new guilt by pardoning them from their former virtues, must
begin to have a very contemptible opinion both of your power and your
policy. Your authority in the Jerseys is now reduced to the small circle
which your army occupies, and your proclamation is no where else seen
unless it be to be laughed at. The mighty subduers of the continent have
retreated into a nutshell, and the proud forgivers of our sins are fled
from those they came to pardon; and all this at a time when they were
despatching vessel after vessel to England with the great news of
every day. In short, you have managed your Jersey expedition so very
dexterously, that the dead only are conquerors, because none will
dispute the ground with them.

In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in you had only
armies to contend with; in this case you have both an army and a country
to combat with. In former wars, the countries followed the fate of their
capitals; Canada fell with Quebec, and Minorca with Port Mahon or St.
Phillips; by subduing tho