its results here were salutary and important. It put an immediate stop
to any further espousing of British interests, especially among men of
property, while, within the astonishingly short space of fifteen days,
it brought a regiment of men into the field, well armed and prepared
for instant service,--thus securing those advantages to the defenders
of liberty, in the peculiar posture of their affairs in which it was
introduced, and giving that impetus to their military operations,
without which the brilliant successes that marked the ensuing campaign
in Vermont could never have been obtained. Of this there can scarcely
be a doubt. And scarcely less doubt can there be, that the important
measure in question would not have been brought forward and adopted at
the crisis, in which alone the advantages it then secured could have
been denied from us but for its sole projector, the sagacious,
scheming, and fearless Ira Allen.

Speculative writers have often amused themselves in tracing great
events to small causes. And in this they have oftentimes so
wonderfully succeeded, as to show, beyond the power of man to refute,
some of the most trivial circumstances of life, considered by
themselves, to have caused the revolutions of empires. Were we to make
out an instance of this character, to be added to the many other
remarkable ones which have been noted by the curious, it should be
done by tracing the independence of America to the measure which Allen
so boldly projected, as he walked his lonely chamber, on the eventful
night we have described. The independence of the colonies was, at that
dark crisis, balancing, as on a pivot; and the success of Burgoyne
must seemingly have turned the scale against us. The success of
Burgoyne, at the same time, hung on a pivot also; and the victory of
Bennington, with all its numberless direct and indirect consequences,
as now seems generally conceded, turned the scale of his fortunes when