Brunswick and Nova
Scotia to receive similar grants. Others spent their days in England
as unhappy pensioners, forgotten victims of a war which all Englishmen
sought to bury in oblivion. Those who remained in the United States
ultimately regained standing and fared better than the exiles, but not
until new {128} domestic issues had arisen to obliterate the memory of
revolutionary antagonisms.

With the Treaty of 1782, the mother country and the former colonies
definitely started on separate paths, recognizing the fundamental
differences which for fifty years had made harmonious co-operation
impossible. England remained as before, aristocratic in social
structure, oligarchic in government, military and naval in temper--a
land of strongly fixed standards of religious and political life, a
country where society looked to a narrow circle for leadership. Its
commercial and economic ideals, unaltered by defeat, persisted to guide
national policy in peace and war for two more generations. The sole
result of the war for England was to render impossible in future any
such perversion of Cabinet government as that which George III, by
intimidation, fraud, and political management, had succeeded for a
decade in establishing. Never again would the country tolerate royal
dictation of policies and leaders. England became what it had been
before 1770, a country where parliamentary groups and leaders bore the
responsibility and gained the glory or discredit, while the outside
public approved or protested without seeking in any other manner to
control the destinies of the State. While the English thus sullenly
fell back into their {129} accustomed habits, the former Colonies, now
relieved from the old-time subordination, were turned adrift to solve
problems of a wholly different sort.

CHAPTER VII

THE FORMATION OF THE UNITED STATES, 1781-1798

The British colonists, who assumed independent legal existence with the
adoption of Articles of Confederation in 1781, had managed to carry
through a revolution and emerge into the light of peace. They were now
required to learn, in the hard school of experience, those necessary
facts of government which they had hitherto ignored, and which, even in
the agonies of civil war, they had refused to recognize.

Probably with three-quarters of the American people, the prevailing
political sentiment was that of aversion to any governmental control,
coupled with a deep-rooted jealousy