vindicate the religion of their God, to support the justice of their country. I call upon the bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn,-upon the judges to interpose the purity of their ermine, to save us from this pollution. I call upon the honor of your lordships, to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country, to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble lord frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country.

4. To send forth the merciless Indian, thirsting for blood! against whom? Against your brethren!-to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name by the aid and instrumentality of these ungovernable savages! Spain can no longer boast pre-eminence in barbarity. She armed herself with bloodhounds to extirpate the wretched natives of Mexico; we, more ruthless, loose these brutal warriors against our countrymen in America, endeared to us by every tie that can sanctify humanity. I solemnly call upon your lordships, and upon every order of men in the State, to stamp upon this infamous procedure the indelible stigma of the public abhorrence. More particularly, I call upon the venerable prelates of our religion, to do away this iniquity; let them perform a lustration to purify the country from this deep and deadly sin.

5. My lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and my indignation were too strong to have permitted me to say less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, or have reposed my head on my pillow, without giving vent to my eternal abhorrence of such prepos terous and enormous principles.

[Subsequently, the conduct of the Ministry in making alliances with the Indians, was severely inveighed against by the celebrated Edmund Burke, in a speech of surpassing eloquence and pathos, delivered in Parliament, in support of a motion that copies of the Indian treaties should be laid before the House. The motion was, however, rejected (1778). In this speech, the orator took occasion to refer to the occurrence related in the following extract.]

Murder of Miss McCrea.-Stone.

[In the summer of 1777, an army of British and Indians, under General Burgoyne, invaded the States from Canada. Proceeding by way of Lake Champlain, Burgoyne successively captured Forts Crown Point and Ticonderoga, and then advanced to Fort Edward, near which the dreadful occurrence related in the following extract occurred. The piece is from "The Life of Brant," by William L. Stone.)

1. NOTHING could exceed the terror which these events diffused among the inhabitants, not only in Northern New York, but of the New England States. The consternation was, moreover, increased by the reported murders and cruelties of the savages-since all the efforts of General Burgoyne to dissuade them from the perpetration of their cruel enormities were ineffectual. Restrain them he could not; and it was admitted by the British writers of that day, that the friends of the Royal cause, as well as its enemies, were equally victims to their indiscriminate rage. It was even ascertained that the British officers were deceived by their treacherous allies, into the purchase of the scalps of their own comrades.

2. Among other instances of cruelty, the well-known murder of Miss Jane McCrea, which happened in the early part of the campaign, filled the public mind with horror. Every circumstance of the unnatural and bloody transaction-around which there lingers a melancholy interest to this day-served to heighten alike its interest and its enormity. Many have been the versions of this bloody tale. General Gates, who had at this juncture been most unjustly directed to supersede General Schuyler (skiler) in the command of the Northern Department, assailed General Burgoyne in the newspapers with great virulence upon the subject of these outrages.

3. After charging the British commander with encouraging the murder of prisoners, and the massacre of women and children, by paying the Indians a stipulated price for scalps, Gates, in a letter addressed to General Burgoyne, thus spoke of the case now specially under consideration:-"Miss McCrea, a young lady, lovely to the sight, of virtuous character, and amiable disposition, engaged to an officer of your army, was,

with other women and children, taken out of a house near Fort Edward, carried into the woods, and there scalped and mangled in the most horrible manner. Two parents, with their six children, were treated with the same inhumanity, while quietly resting in their own happy and peaceful dwelling. The miserable fate of Miss McCrea was particularly aggravated, by her being dressed to receive her promised husband; but she met her murderer employed by you. Upward of one hundred men, women, and children, have perished by the hands of the ruffians to whom it is asserted you have paid the price of blood."

4. General Burgoyne replied, and repelled with indignation the charge of encouraging, in any respect, the outrages of the Indians. He asserted that from the first he had refused to pay for scalps, and had so informed the Indians at their council. The only rewards he gave them were for prisoners brought in, and by the adoption of this course he hoped to encourage a more humane mode of warfare on their part. In this letter Burgoyne said: "I would not be conscious of the acts you presume to impute to me, for the whole continent of America, though the wealth of worlds was in its bowels, and a paradise upon its surface."

5. In regard to the hapless fate of Miss McCrea, General Burgoyne remarked:-" Her fall wanted not the tragic display you have labored to give it, to make it as sincerely abhorred and lamented by me as it can be by the tenderest of her friends. The act was no premeditated barbarity. On the contrary, two chiefs, who had brought her off for the purpose of security, not of violence to her person, disputed which should be her guard, and in a fit of savage passion in one, from whose hands she was snatched, the unhappy woman became the victim.

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6. Upon the first intelligence of this event, I obliged the Indians to deliver the murderer into my hands; and though to have punished him by our laws or principles of justice would have been perhaps unprecedented, he certainly should have suffered an ignominious death had I not been convinced, from my circumstances and observations, beyond the possibility

of a doubt, that a pardon under the terms which I presented and they accepted, would be more efficacious than an execution to prevent similar mischiefs. The above instance excepted, your intelligence respecting the cruelty of the Indians is false." 7. The British commander, doubtless, labored to make the best of his case; and, in respect to Miss McCrea, his statement was much nearer to the truth than that of General Gates. The actual circumstances of the case, stripped of its romance, were these:-Miss McCrea belonged to a family of loyalists, and had engaged her hand in marriage to a young refugee named Jones, a subordinate officer in the British service, who was advancing with Burgoyne. Anxious to possess himself of his bride, he dispatched a small party of Indians to bring her to the British camp. Her family and friends were strongly opposed to her going with such an escort; but her affection overcame her prudence, and she determined upon the hazardous adventure.

8. She set forward with her dusky attendants on horseback. The family resided at the village of Fort Edward, from whence they had not proceeded more than half a mile before her conductors stopped to drink at a spring. Meantime, the impatient lover, who deserved not her embrace for confiding her protection to such hands, instead of going himself, had dispatched a second party of Indians upon the same errand. The Indians met at the spring; and before the march was resumed, they were attacked by a party of the Provincials. At the close of the skirmish, the body of Miss McCrea was found among the slain-tomahawked, scalped, and tied to a pine-tree, yet standing by the side of the spring, as a monument of the bloody transaction.

9. The name of the young lady is inscribed on the tree, the trunk of which is thickly scarred with the bullets it received in the skirmish. It also bears the date 1777. "Tradition reports that the Indians divided the scalp, and that each party carried half of it to the agonized lover."* The ascertained

According to the statements of others, her lover denied that he knew anything of the affair until he saw her scalp.

cause of her murder was this. The promised reward for bringing her in safety to her betrothed was a barrel of rum. The chiefs of the two parties sent for her by Mr. Jones, quarrelled respecting the anticipated compensation. Each claimed it; and, in a moment of passion, to end the controversy, one of them struck her down with his hatchet. The tale was suffi

ciently painful according to the simple facts of the case, and its recital produced a thrill of horror wherever it came,enlarged and embellished, as it was sure to be in its progress, by every writer who could add to the eloquence of the narrative or the pathos of its catastrophe.

[The progress of Burgoyne was checked by the battle of Bemis Heights (Sept. 19), which in a few weeks was followed by the battle of Saratoga (Oct. 7). The result of this conflict was a decided victory for the Americans, and ten days afterward, Burgoyne surrendered his whole army to General Gates.]

Treason of Arnold.-Pennsylvania Packet, etc.

[In the first part of the War of the Revolution, Benedict Arnold greatly distinguished himself by his courage and military skill, particularly in the battles fought against General Burgoyne in 1777. Subsequently he fell into disgrace, being adjudged, after a trial by court-martial, to be reprimanded by Washington. In 1780, he was in command of West Point, then the strongest and most important fortress in America. His treason in relation to this trust is described in the following extracts from the Pennsylvania Packet, and other journals of the time, selected from Moore's "Diary of the American Revolution."]

1. [September 26, 1780.] TREASON of the blackest dye was yesterday discovered. General Arnold, who commanded at West Point, lost to every sentiment of honor, of public and private obligation, was about to deliver up that important fort into the hands of the enemy. Such an event must have given the American cause a deadly wound, if not a fatal stab. Happily, the scheme was timely discovered to prevent the fatal misfortune. The providential train of circumstances which led to it affords the most convincing proofs that the liberties of America are the objects of divine protection. At the same time, the treason is so regretted, the general cannot help congratulating the army on the happy discovery.

2. Our enemies, despairing of carrying their point by force, are practicing every base art to effect, by bribery and corrup