I say this, not to detract from Lafayette or from the many brave Frenchmen who eventually fought for us, but to show why those of us in the Continental Army were filled with a hatred of this vacillating, blundering, wrong-minded Congress—a hatred that grew and grew with each passing month, until it turned into something worse than hatred. We knew at last that in spite of all our strivings and sacrifices to be free, those muddle-headed men, by piling blunder on blunder, were forcing us closer and closer to chaos and to the eager arms of France—closer and closer to the grip of a nation whose rule would be more tyrannical and infinitely more oppressive than that of England.

Our desperation and distrust were shown to be justified at the end of the war, when public and private credit collapsed because of the lack of confidence in Congress. Parts of the army mutinied. The states, yielding to the temptation to issue paper money, became bankrupt. The farmers of western Massachusetts revolted. Tennessee was in insurrection against North Carolina. Vermont, led by that blustering demagogue Ethan Allen, dickered with the Governor of Canada, preparatory to becoming a separate principality under England. Every state, hating its neighbor, was on the verge of raising tariff walls against every other state; and at last Congress, headless, spineless, impotent, utterly baffled and at sea, collapsed.

The French minister reported to the watchful French Government that there was now, in America, no general government—neither Congress, nor President, nor head of any one administrative department. So far as could be seen, the Union of States was dissolved, and our eight years of war had gone for nothing. We were defeated—not by England, but by Congress.

It was by a series of accidents that our stubborn, feeble states, three years later, agreed to a convention for the framing of a constitution that might again bind them together. By the grace of God the delegates, after months of squabbling, miraculously compromised on the form of government advocated by the Connecticut delegates; and by that compromise was created a Senate not elected, as was Congress, by the votes of the people—a Senate that therefore might, God willing, act forever as a brake on the dreadful and criminal follies always perpetrated by legislators whose positions depend on the votes of the masses. Twelve years after we had saved America from the British at Valcour Island, our new constitution took effect, and the states were again united. We elected General Washington President; the Supreme Court, the Senate and the House of Representatives came into existence; we had a government at last.

The danger of being wrecked by an uncontrolled Congress had been foreseen by many men—by Washington, by Franklin, by Arnold, by Silas Deane and scores of other Americans, as well as by Englishmen and Frenchmen. Repeatedly we had been on the verge of military destruction; and that, too, had been admitted by Washington and Deane and Franklin and others. But where so many leaders anticipated defeat and chaos, and the ultimate tyranny of the French, yet felt themselves unable to avert that end, Arnold, on becoming convinced of it, laid plans to avert it, that being his nature.