To withhold commissions, until some proof was given of individual
fitness, involved grave responsibility. He did it. To punish swearing,
gambling, theft, and lewdness, evinced a high sense of the solemnity of
the hour. He did it. To rebuke Protestants for mocking Catholics was to
recognize the dependence of all alike upon the God of battles. He did
it. To repress gossip in camp, because the reputation of the humblest
was sacred; to brand with his displeasure all conflicts between those in
authority, as fatal to discipline and unity of action, and to forbid the
settlement of private wrongs except through established legal methods,
showed a clear conception of the conditions which would make an army
obedient, united, and invincible. These, and corresponding acts in the
line of military police regulations, and touching every social, moral,
and physical habit which assails or enfeebles a soldier's life and
imperils a campaign, run through his papers.

It is in the light of such omnipresent pressure and constraint that we
begin to form some just estimate of the relations which the siege of
Boston sustained to the subsequent operations of the war, and to the
work of Lee, Putnam, Sullivan, Greene, Mifflin, Knox, and others, who
were thus fitted for immediate service at Long Island and elsewhere, as
soon as Boston was evacuated.

It is also through these orders that the careful student can pass that
veil of formal propriety, reticence, and dignity which so often obscured
the inner, the tentative, elements of Washington's military character.

While the slow progress of the siege afforded opportunity to study the
contingencies of other possible fields of conflict, a double campaign
was made into Canada: namely, by Arnold through Maine, and by Montgomery