214 Benjamin Franklin 1777 
pay me as killed for all who die from disease, and I 
don’t get a farthing for runaways. My trip to Italy, 
which has cost me enormously, makes it desirable 
that there should be a great mortality among them. 
You will therefore promise promotion to all who ex- 
pose themselves; you will exhort them to seek glory 
in the midst of dangers; you will say to Major Maun- 
dorff that I am not at all content with his saving 
the 345 men who escaped the massacre at Trenton. 
Through the whole campaign he has not had ten 
men killed in consequence of his orders. Finally, 
let it be your principal object to prolong the war 
and avoid a decisive engagement on either side, for 
I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, 
and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up. Mean- 
time I pray God, my dear Baron de Hohendorf, to 
have you in his holy and gracious keeping. 
European states, including Cassel, that hired out their subjects to 
resist American independence, have lost their own. Not one of them 
is any longer a sovereign power. In the war of 1866, the last Elector 
of Cassel committed the folly of taking sides with Austria, and one of 
the consequences was that his enchanting castle of Wilhelmshohe 
became the property of his conqueror. Thus one after the other all 
the states that made merchandise of their subjects to aid England in 
keeping her American colonies in thrall were swallowed up by Prussia. 
This palace of Wilhelmshohe was destined subsequently to become 
at once the prison and the asylum of another sovereign, who, unfaith- 
ful to the traditions of his people, allowed himself to countenance a 
conspiracy which, to be successful, must have involved the destruction 
of the republic which had proved so fatal to those of his order who 
had tried to strangle it in its cradle. With Louis Napoleon’s project 
to re-establish imperial institutions upon the ruins of a republic in 
Mexico, began the decline of his fortunes. It is a curious vindication 
of the ways of God to man that this castle of Wilhelmshéhe, built 
with the bones of America’s enemies, should be destined to afford the 
welcome shelter of a prison to one who lost his crown in attempting 
to erect armed barriers against the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race in 
America. 
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