I have learned this about a man whose works command attention. Whatever he does follows a certain pattern; and there is an unmistakable similarity in all his acts. The artist so wields his brush that his canvas needs no signature. An author has a style that sets it apart from other writings. Given two statesmen, a man of judgment knows that each must act differently toward a given problem, and according to the established workings of his brain. A thief, in his robberies, displays a similarity that in the end betrays him. Even seamen have styles of sailing that distinguish one from another. Because of this I say that Arnold’s act, which we call treason, was inspired by his patriotism.

Above all else, Arnold despised the traits that forever threatened to nullify the labors and sufferings of brave and patriotic men. Those traits were pettiness, timidity, inefficiency, futility and hesitation; and it was exactly those traits that were the principal assets of the American Congress in the days when we fought England. Eventually the inefficiency and the cowardice of Congress came to be a more dangerous enemy than England; and Arnold had cause to know it better than any of us.

That fumbling, muddle-headed Congress was our only government. There was no President to assist it: no Senate to control it: no Supreme Court to guard and direct it: no Cabinet to inform it. It grew daily weaker and more witless. Each year it was composed of men of smaller calibre—pettifogging lawyers from benighted homes: blatherskites in fustian, whispering knowingly in corners; exchanging fears that the army, in righteous rage, might turn and rend them for their shortcomings: dwarf-brained creatures, shallow, bigoted, opinionated, contrary, unreasonable, hidebound, time-serving: strong only in their unyielding ignorance: in their determined avoidance of intellectual integrity. They forced Schuyler from the army. They demanded the resignation of Knox and Sullivan and Greene for questioning Congress’s appointment of a Frenchman, DuCoudray, over their heads. They would have banished Washington to Virginia if he had not eternally deferred to them with the endless patience of a saint. By their persistence in wasting bounties on the militia, they wrecked our finances. They were pigmies whose every act was contrary to common sense, to courage and to the welfare of the nation.

This wretched Congress had no power to tax—no control, in short, over the different states, which did as they pleased most of the time. Yet it exercised control over our army, and so it was our government, even though the states would not admit its authority. Since it could raise no money from the states, and since the currency which it printed had no value, it was obliged to turn somewhere for money, and so it turned to France; and by so doing it put a sort of desperation into the hearts of those of us who knew France and the French.