Weser, through the territories of Prussia and perhaps half a score of petty princes, one half of them would be lost on the way by desertion." Yet very many went willingly, having been made to believe that in America they would have free license to plunder and to indulge their passions.

Every point in dispute having been yielded to the categorical demands of the landgrave, the treaty was signed on the thirty-first day of January. This would have seemed definitive; but, as the payment of the double subsidy was to begin from the day of the signature of the treaty, the landgrave put back the date of the instrument to January the fifteenth.

His troops were among the best in Europe; their chief commander was Lieutenant-General Heister, a brave old man of nearly sixty, cheerful in disposition, crippled with wounds, of a good understanding, but without genius for war. Next him stood Lieutenant-General Knyphausen, remarkable for taciturnity and reserve; one of the best officers in the landgrave's service.

Of the four major-generals, not one was remarkable for capacity or skill. Of the colonels, every one praised Donop, who commanded the four battalions of grenadiers and the yagers; Rall, Minigerode, Wurmb, Loos, and four or five others had served with distinction.

The excuse of the British ministry for yielding to all the exactions of the landgrave was their eagerness to obtain the troops early in February. "Delay," wrote Suffolk, "will mar the expected advantage." The landgrave consented that thirteen battalions should be prepared to march on the fifteenth of February; but corruption was then so thoroughly a part of the British administration that they were sent in private vessels, that interested people might levy a commission on the contractors, who did not provide transports enough at the time appointed, and even in March could not tell when they would all be ready. The first detachment from Brunswick did not sail from England till the fourth of April, and yet reached Quebec before the first division of the Hessians cleared the British channel.

The transports were very badly fitted up; the bedding was shamefully scanty. The clothing of the Brunswick troops

was old, and only patched up for the present; "the person who executed the commission" for purchasing shoes for them in England sent "fine thin dancing pumps," and of these the greatest number were too small for use.

The treaty with the hereditary prince of Hesse-Cassel, who ruled in Hanau, met with no obstacle. He went in person round the different bailiwicks to choose recruits, and accompanied his regiment as far as Frankfort on their way to Helvoetsluys. Conscious of the merit of this devotion, he pressed for an additional special subsidy. Suffolk granted the demand under an injunction of the most absolute secrecy, and received written promises of a discretion without bounds. "My attachment to the best of kings removes all idea of interest in me," wrote the prince.

It was doubted if the prince of Waldeck could make good his offers, for there were already three Waldeck regiments in the service of the Netherlands; the states of the overtasked principality had complained of the loss of its subjects; but the prince vowed so warm an attachment to the "incomparable monarch" of Britain that, on the twentieth of April, the treaty with him was closed. To raise a regiment needed force and authority, and that "he should not be too tender of his own subjects." To prevent their deserting, a corps of mounted yagers escorted them to Beverungen.

The half-crazed ruling prince of the house of AnhaltZerbst, brother to the empress of Russia, who lived very rarely within his own dominions but kept up sixteen recruitingstations outside of them, wrote directly to George III., offering a regiment of six hundred and twenty-seven men; but the letter was so strange that it was pronounced not fit to be delivered, and during that year nothing came of his proposal.

The elector of Bavaria made an overture to Elliot, the British minister at Ratisbon; but it was not heeded, for "his court was so sold to Austria and France" that he dared not speak of it "to his own ministers."

On the last day of February the treaties with Brunswick and Hesse were considered in the house of commons. Lord North said: "The troops are wanted; the terms on which they are procured are less than we could have expected; the

force will enable us to compel America to submission, perhaps without further effusion of blood." He was answered by Lord John Cavendish: "The measure disgraces Britain, humiliates the king, and, by its extravagance, impoverishes the country.” "Our business will be effected within the year," replied Cornwall; "so that the troops are all had on lower terms than ever before." Lord Irnham took a broader view: "The landgrave of Hesse and the duke of Brunswick render Germany vile and dishonored in the eyes of all Europe, as a nursery of men for those who have most money, making them destroy much better and nobler beings than themselves. The landgrave of Hesse has his prototype in Sancho Panza, who said that, if he were a prince, he should wish all his subjects to be blackamoors, so that he could turn them into ready money by selling them." A warning voice was raised by Hartley: "You set the American congress the example of applying to foreign powers; when they intervene, the possibility of reconciliation is totally cut off." "The measures of ministers," said James Luttrell who had served in America, "are death-warrants to thousands of British subjects, not steps toward regaining the colonies." George Grenville, afterward marquis of Buckingham, stated this as the alternative: "Shall we abandon America, or shall we recover our sovereignty over that country? We had better make one effort more." Lord George Germain defended the treaties on the ground of necessity; this Lord Barrington confirmed, saying British recruits could not be procured on any terms, and the bargain was the best that could be made. The ministers were sustained by their usual majority.

Five days later they were equally well supported in the house of lords; but not without a rebuke from the duke of Cumberland, one of the king's brothers, who said: "I lament to see Brunswickers, who once to their great honor were employed in the defence of the liberties of the subject, now sent to subjugate his constitutional liberties in another part of this vast empire."

The whole number of men furnished in the war by Brunswick was equal to one twenty-seventh part of its collective population; by the landgrave of Hesse, to one out of every

twenty of his subjects, or one in four of the able-bodied men ; a proportionate conscription in 1776 would have shipped to America from England and Wales alone an army of more than four hundred thousand men. Soldiers were impressed from the plough, the workshop, the highway; no man was safe from the inferior agents of the princes, who kidnapped without scruple. Almost every family in Hesse mourned for one of its members.

In a letter to Voltaire, the landgrave, announcing his contribution of troops, expressed his zeal to learn "the difficult principles of the art of governing men, and of making them perceive that all which their ruler does is for their special good." He wrote a catechism for princes, in which Voltaire professed to find traces of a pupil of the king of Prussia. "Do not attribute his education to me," answered the great Frederic; 66 were he a graduate of my school, he would never have turned Catholic, and would never have sold his subjects to the English as they drive cattle to the shambles. He a preceptor of sovereigns! The sordid passion for gain is the only motive of his vile procedure."

From avarice he sold the flesh of his own people while they were yet alive, depriving many of existence and himself of honor. In the land of free cities and free thought, an empire which spoke the language of Luther, where Kant by profound analysis was compelling skepticism itself to bear witness to the eternal law of duty, where Lessing inculcated faith in an ever-improving education of the race, where the heart of the best palpitated with hope for the American cause-the landgrave forced his state to act against that liberty which was the child of the German forests, and the moral life of the Germanic nation. And did judgment slumber? Were the eyes of the Most High turned elsewhere? Or, in the abyss of the divine counsels, were there in preparation for a land so divided and so full of tyrants a regeneration and union after the example of America?

CHAPTER XXIII.

AMERICA SEEKS FOREIGN AID.

1775-1776.

FRANCE and the thirteen American colonies were attracted toward each other, and it is not easy to decide which of them made the first overture. "Chatham as the conciliator of America, that is the man to fear," wrote the Count De Guines* from London, in June 1775.

Vergennes, with wonderful powers of penetration, analyzed the character of the British ministers and their acts, and as a courtier contrasted the seeming anarchy of England with the happiness of the French in "living peacefully under a good and virtuous king." The British secretary of state desired to draw from the French ambassador at London a written denial of Lee's assertion that the Americans had a certainty of receiving support from France and Spain; but "the king of France would not suffer himself to be used as an instrument to bend the resistance of the Americans." "The principles of moderation and of justice which constantly animate the councils of the king ought," said Vergennes, "to reassure his Britannic majesty against disquiet as to our views. Far from wishing to take advantage of the embarrassments in which England is involved by American affairs, we would rather seek to give our aid in disengaging her from them. The spirit of revolt, wherever it breaks out, is always a troublesome example. Moral maladies become contagious; so that we ought to be on our guard that the spirit of independence, so terrible in North America, may not be communicated to points which interest us in both hemispheres.

* Letter of De Guines to Vergennes, 16 June 1775. MS.