wrong took
its place. The United States were supposed to have stabbed England in
the back at the moment when her hands were tied, when her existence was
in the most deadly peril and her anxieties were most heavy. England
never could forgive treason so base and cowardice so vile. That Madison
had been from the first a tool and accomplice of Bonaparte was
thenceforward so fixed an idea in British history that time could not
shake it. Indeed, so complicated and so historical had the causes of
war become that no one even in America could explain or understand them,
while Englishmen could see only that America required England as the
price of peace to destroy herself by abandoning her naval power, and
that England preferred to die fighting rather than to die by her own
hand. The American party in England was extinguished; no further protest
was heard against the war; and the British people thought moodily
of revenge.

This result was unfortunate for both parties, but was doubly unfortunate
for America, because her mode of making the issue told in her enemy's
favor. The same impressions which silenced in England open sympathy with
America, stimulated in America acute sympathy with England. Argument was
useless against people in a passion, convinced of their own injuries.
Neither Englishmen nor Federalists were open to reasoning. They found
their action easy from the moment they classed the United States as an
ally of France, like Bavaria or Saxony; and they had no scruples of
conscience, for the practical alliance was clear, and the fact proved
sufficiently the intent....

The loss of two or three thirty-eight-gun frigates on the ocean was a
matter of trifling consequence to the British government, which had a
force of four ships-of-the-line and six or eight frigates in Chesapeake
Bay alone, and which built every year dozens of ships-of-the-line and
frigates to replace those lost or worn out; but although American
privateers wrought more injury to British interests than was caused or
could be caused by the American navy, the pride of England cared little
about mercantile losses, and cared immensely for its fighting
reputation. The theory that the American was a degenerate Englishman--a
theory chiefly due to American teachings--lay at the bottom of British
politics. Even the late British minister at Washington, Foster, a man of
average intelligence, thought it manifest good taste and good sense to
say of the Americans in his