To which I
reply, that our military ability AT THIS TIME, arises from the
experience gained in the last war, and which in forty or fifty years
time, would have been totally extinct. The Continent, would not, by
that time, have had a General, or even a military officer left; and
we, or those who may succeed us, would have been as ignorant of
martial matters as the ancient Indians: And this single position,
closely attended to, will unanswerably prove, that the present time
is preferable to all others. The argument turns thus--at the
conclusion of the last war, we had experience, but wanted numbers;
and forty or fifty years hence, we should have numbers, without
experience; wherefore, the proper point of time, must be some
particular point between the two extremes, in which a sufficiency of
the former remains, and a proper increase of the latter is obtained:
And that point of time is the present time.
The reader will pardon this digression, as it does not properly
come under the head I first set out with, and to which I again return
by the following position, viz.
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