upon loading and firing several times a minute, often, after the first discharge, loaded badly and fired as awkwardly as their enemy. Therefore, without neglecting platoon fire, he put it in its true place as a thing of secondary importance. Never before had an American army been trained like this army of Valley Forge. "Never," said Hamilton, when at Monmouth he saw a division in full retreat halt at Steuben's command, and form as coolly under a close and heavy fire as they would have formed on parade, "never did I know or conceive the value of military discipline before."

The same happy results attended his reforms in other departments. Returns were made according to prescribed forms, and with close attention to minute and accurate specifications. By a glance at the foot of a column, Washington could at once see how many men he might count upon for actual service, how many were sick or disabled, how many of each State were enlisted for the war, and how many were to leave him at the end of the campaign. A regular and rigorous inspection brought, at stated times, the whole army under the supervision of officers eager to show their zeal in the performance of a difficult duty. Till then, as I have already said, there had been an annual loss of more than five thousand muskets, and the War Office, in making out its estimates for the year, had regularly made allowance for that number. In the returns, under Steuben's inspectorship, only

three muskets were missing in one year, and those three were accounted for.

But it was not in dollars and cents that Steuben's services should be estimated, although the sums which this man, who saved nothing for himself, annually saved to his adopted country, might be counted by thousands. Like Lafayette, he brought us what none but he could have brought; and in looking at the condition in which he found us, it is difficult to conceive how we could have held out through two more campaigns without the aid which we derived from his scientific knowledge and practical skill.

And what was his reward? An eight years' struggle with poverty and its bitter humiliations; to be publicly insulted as living upon national bounty, when a tardy justice had compelled Congress to acknowledge his claims and buy them off with an annuity of $2500 a year; a grave so little respected, that a public road was run over it, laying its sacred contents bare to the rains of heaven, and the eye, and even the hand, of vulgar curiosity, till individual reverence, performing the part of national gratitude, removed the desecrated bones. to a surer resting-place; and a name in American history overshadowed and almost forgotten, till a countryman of his own,* making himself, as

* Frederick Kapp, now a member of the New York bar, and whose important contributions to American history have been already alluded to in the Preface.

Steuben had done, an American in heart and feeling, without sacrificing the instincts of his nativity, gathered together, with German industry and German zeal, the scattered records of his services, and portrayed, in faithful and enduring colors, his achievements in war, his virtues in peace, his rare endowments of mind, and the still nobler qualities of his heart.

LECTURE X.

THE MARTYES OF THE REVOLUTION.

I speaking of the martyrs of the Revolution, I

io not undertake, as you will readily conceive, u gesa ful who, in that day of trial, suffered ir e ria's sake. A mere catalogue would Save the peenar merits of the sufferer

thirty are known in the general history of the United States, scarce six in the general history of the world. We had twenty-nine major-generals. How many of them find a place even in the school histories which we put into the hands of our children in order to familiarize them betimes with the characters and the services of their fathers? It seems sad that so many of our benefactors should be forgotten; for it seems like wilfully rejecting the aid which society might derive from that instinctive desire to be remembered by posterity, which nature has implanted in the human heart as one of its strongest incentives to virtue. Here it is that history most needs the aid of her sister arts,

of sculpture, and painting, and poetry; which in their appeals to the imagination, not confined as she is by the rigorous laws of evidence, give a life to our conceptions of the past, which, wisely cherished and judiciously directed, seldom fails to exert an important influence upon the future. A noble act embalmed in verse, the form and features of a great man preserved in marble, the characteristic circumstances of a great event illustrated by a skilful pencil, are among the most powerful instruments which God has intrusted to our hands for the direction of individual aspirations, and the moulding of national character.

If this truth had been felt in the United States as it was felt in the republics of antiquity, the public squares of Boston would not still have been