hand would hold New England under the guns of her warships, and by quick
occupation of Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and their tributary streams,
her left hand would cut off the South.

If the views of Lord Dartmouth had prevailed, in 1775, there would have
been no siege of Boston; but New York would have had a garrison fully
equal to its defence, while sparing troops for operations outside. But
the prompt occupation of New York, as the headquarters of revolution,
was a clear declaration to the world, and to the scattered people of the
colonies, that a new nation was asserting life, and that its soil was
free from a hostile garrison. The occupation of New York centralized, at
the social, commercial, and natural capital of the Republic, all
interests and resources, and gave to the struggle real force,
inspiration, and dignity.

Just as the men at Bunker Hill fought so long as powder and ball held
out, but could not have been led to assail, in open field, the veterans
whom they did, in fact, so effectively resist; and, as very often, a
patriotic band has bravely defended, when unequal to aggressive
action,--so the possession, defence, and even the loss, of New York, as
an incident of a campaign, were very different from an effort to wrest
the city from the grasp of a British garrison, under cover of yawning
broadsides.

History is replete with facts to show how hopefully men will seek to
regain lost positions, when an original capture would have been deemed
utterly hopeless. Poland wellnigh regained a smothered nationality
through an inspiration, which never could have been evoked, in a plan to
seize from the Russian domain a grand estate, upon which to establish an
original Poland.