His object seems to have been to avoid " skirmishing, and to bring: on a general action, if that could be effected " under favorable circumstances ; if not, he knew well the approaching " dissolution of the American Army, and calculated, not without reason, " to derive from that event nearly all the advantages of a victory. He " proceeded, therefore, slowly. His marches were in close order ; his " encampments compact, and well guarded with artillery ; and the ut- " most circumspection was used, not to expose any part which might be "vulnerable." -- (Marshall's Life of George Washington, ii., 501.)

2 General Howeto Lord George Germaine, "New-York, 30 November, "1776;" Sauthier's Plan of the Operations, etc.; Gordon's History of the American Bevolulum, ii., 340 ; etc.

ever may have been thought and said of his failure to cross the Bronx and to attack the heavily laden column commanded by General Lee, the maxims of military science, at that time, forbade a movement towards the White Plains, then, leaving his left flank and his rear exposed to the three Divisions commanded, respectively, by Generals Lee, Spencer, and Lincoln. 3 There was a possibility that the separation of those three Divisions from the main body of the Army might have enabled him to attack the Americans, en detail, and to overcome them more completely . than if they had been in one body ; but he had excellent evidence of the vigilance and the enterprise. of those who were nearest to him ; and his ruling principle, to avoid an unnecessary exposure of his men evidently led him to the safe conclusion that, in such a series of undertakings on the divided forces of the Americans, if more than one attack on them were to be made, the last one of the series should be that on that portion of the American Army which, then, occupied the entrenched Camp, at the White Plains, a conclusion in which he would have been entirely sustained by every intelligent soldier, of that period, in Europe or in America.