CANADIAN NOMS-DE-PLUME IDENTIFIED. 337 



aecessary to secure it against the enemy's accumiilating force, which 

 had been even seen by some of our officers in returning from captivity, 

 but whose reports thereon were utterly disregarded. Thus the Camp 

 above-said furnished the means of instruction to the enemy upon the 

 said frontier, by allowing them to practise against our very inferior 

 force ; but of destruction to our troops there employed, who were 

 thereby doomed to combat against fearful odds, as will be seen here- 

 after, which is quite inexcusable, seeing we had the means of pre- 

 vention in our power ; for so infatuated was Sir George that not a 

 man was sent from Lower Canada to their aid until the 12th July, 

 after our first disaster at Chippewa was known. * "* * 



From the end of May, reinforcements from Great Britain, Ireland 

 and the West Indies came in ; but the accursed Camp of Instruction 

 continued ; when to our astonishment, in June and July, such a 

 numerous body of troops arrived from Bordeaux that it became 

 evident Sir George was quite bewildered thereby. Piecemeal rein- 

 forcements were now despatched to Upper Canada, and a very large 

 force kept below to do something — but what it was remained doubt- 

 ful, although a bustle of preparation began across the river, which 

 was continued for months at infinite expense." I add one more 

 passage : an indignant, Junius-like denunciation of certain speeches 

 in the House of Commons, notably one by Mr. Whitbread, on the 

 subject of the destruction of the public buildings at Washington by 

 a British force, in which speeches more feeling was apparently shown 

 for the loss experienced by the United States Government than for 

 the sufferings of British subjects when violently deprived of their 

 homes and property at York and Niagara, a few months previously, 

 by an invading United States army. " Now, is it possible to con- 

 ceive," Veritas asks, " that all these and former acts of conflagration 

 and pillage could have happened without orders from the American 

 Government 1 And yet if we had retaliated upon this principle in 

 the Chesapeake, or elsewhere (which was completely in our power to 

 have done), what an outcry would have been raised by Mr. Madison, 

 and re-echoed by the Opposition in the Imperial Parliament, whoj 

 on finding themselves beat from their grounds of censure against our 

 Government and officers for the destruction of the public buildings 

 at Washington, when proved to have been merely retaliatory, then 

 took up a new position equally untenable, viz., that it would have 

 been magnanimous not to have followed the example of the Ameri- 



