fore the yearning eyes of the
oppressed Americans, so that the English colonists would arise and cast
off their fetters. Once the colonies had freed themselves from England's
protecting arm, it would be a simple matter for the Bourbons to
gather them in like so many little lost chicks from a rainy yard. The
intrigants of autocratic systems have never been able to understand that
the urge of the spirit of independence in men is not primarily to break
shackles but to STAND ALONE and that the breaking of bonds is incidental
to the true demonstration of freedom. The Bourbons and their agents were
no more nor less blind to the great principle stirring the hearts of men
in their day than were the Prussianized hosts over a hundred years later
who, having themselves no acquaintance with the law of liberty, could
not foresee that half a world would rise in arms to maintain that law.

When the War of Independence had ended, the French Minister, Vergennes,
and the Spanish Minister, Floridablanca, secretly worked in unison to
prevent England's recognition of the new republic; and Floridablanca in
1782 even offered to assist England if she would make further efforts
to subdue her "rebel subjects." Both Latin powers had their own axes
to grind, and America was to tend the grindstone. France looked for
recovery of her old prestige in Europe and expected to supersede England
in commerce. She would do this, in the beginning, chiefly through
control of America and of America's commerce. Vergennes therefore sought
not only to dictate the final terms of peace but also to say what the
American commissioners should and should not demand. Of the latter
gentlemen he said that they possessed "caracteres peu maniables!" In
writing to Luzerne, the French Ambassador in Philadelphia, on October
14, 1782, Vergennes said: "it behooves us to leave them [the American
commissioners] to their illusions, to do everything that can make them
fancy that we share them, and undertake only to defeat any attempts to
which those illusions might carry them if our cooperation is required."
Among these "illusions" were America's desires in regard to the
fisheries and to the western territory. Concerning the West, Vergennes
had written to Luzerne, as early as July 18, 1780: "At the moment when
the revolution broke out, the limits of the Thirteen States did not
reach the River [Mississippi] and it would be absurd for them to claim
the rights of England, a power whose r