if not before, yet immediately after the conclusion of a peace, and such an one as you mention, solid, honorable, and lasting, may be no very distant event. For, blessed be the only Giver of victory for it, affairs both on your side of the Atlantic and ours wear a face very different from what they did some time ago, and much more pleasing than perhaps the most sanguine of us all could then expect they would at the present time.
At our entrance on the war, we indeed seemed possessed of every advantage and means that could conduce to victory, and thence were willing to conceive hopes of seeing our enemy well nigh crushed, almost before completely prepared for combat. But yet our counsels, we had the mortification to observe, were all frustrate, our enterprises unprosperous, and our arms almost every where disgraced.
Near our own doors, a well-appointed army of disciplined troops fled before a contemptible band of savages and ragamuffins, and stained Monongahela's memorable stream with British blood; and not far from yours, Mahon was wrested from the nation in a manner which will greatly surprise posterity. In short, every attempt to annoy the enemy or secure ourselves miscarried, notwithstanding a great inequality of strength in our favor in those quarters of the world where the war chiefly centered.
None, I believe, but David's fool, and such as he, will deny this to be the Lord's doing. And, although in many cases, his judgments, and the reasons of them are unsearchable and impenetrable by short-sighted mortals, yet here, methinks, they do not seem inexplicable. Had not too many of us, think you, been under the influence of that spirit which prompted Mezentius, in the poet, before combat
