no announced the edict of April, 1811,
revoking the Berlin and Milan decrees, though so far only as they
concerned American vessels. The declaration of war of June 18 had not
reached England, and there was still a chance for peace. Foster, the
late English minister to the United States, learned at Halifax--where he
had stopped on his way home--that the orders in council were repealed,
and he took immediate steps to bring about an armistice between the
naval commanders on the coast of Nova Scotia, and between the governor
of Canada and the American general, Dearborn, in command of the
frontier. The government at Washington, however, refused to ratify any
suspension of hostilities. Some negotiations followed, but, decrees and
orders being out of the way, there was nothing left to negotiate about
except the question of impressment. Upon that question the two
governments were as wide apart as ever, and not in the least likely to
come together. Mr. Madison determined that on that ground alone the war
should go on. It had been as good and sufficient ground for such a war
any time for the past dozen years; but whether it could be settled by an
appeal to arms was a question of possibilities and probabilities by
which both Jefferson and Madison had hitherto been ruled. Was that still
the essential question? With the result came the answer. Two years later
the administration was glad to accept a treaty of peace in which
impressment was not even alluded to. Great Britain did not relinquish by
a syllable her assumed right to board American ships in search of
British seamen; and the administration instructed its peace
commissioners not even to ask that she should.

CHAPTER XX

CONCLUSION

Early in the war Mr. Madison said to a friend, in a letter "altogether
_private_ and written in confidence," that the way to make the conflict
both "short and successful would be to convince the enemy that he was to
contend with the whole and not part of the nation." That it was a war of
a party, and not of the people, was a discouragement to himself, however
the enemy may have regarded it, which he could never see any way of
overcoming. He could not listen to an opponent nor learn anything from
disaster. "If the war must continue," said Webster within a year of its
end, "go to the ocean. Let it no longer be said that not one ship of
force, built by your hands since the war, yet floats. If you are
seriously contending for maritime rights