rchant
ships to every hostile port, except such, few as might be effectively
blockaded in accordance with the accepted principles of International
Law, was the price offered for the preservation of peace, and for
readmission to the American market, closed to British manufacturers
and merchants by the Non-Importation Acts. This extension of British
commerce, now loudly demanded by the British people, was an object to
be accomplished by the same means that should prevent the American
people from constituting themselves virtually the allies of Napoleon
by going to war. Should this dreaded alternative, however, come to
pass, not only would British trade again miss the market, the loss of
which had already caused widespread suffering, but, in common with it,
British navigation, British shipping, the chief handmaid of commerce,
would be exposed in a remote quarter, most difficult to guard, to the
privateering activity of a people whose aptitude for such occupation
had been demonstrated in the fight for independence and the old French
wars. Half a century before, in the years 1756-58, there had been
fitted out in the single port of New York, for war against the French,
forty-eight privateers, carrying six hundred and ninety-five guns and
manned by over five thousand men.[487]

The conditions enumerated constituted the principal important military
possibilities of the sea frontier of the United States, regarded as an
element in the general international situation when the year 1812
opened. Its importance to France was simply that of an additional
weight thrown into the scale against Great Britain. France, being
excluded from the sea, could not be aided or injured by the United
States directly, but only indirectly, through their common enemy; and
the same was substantially true of the Continent at large. But to
Great Britain a hostile seaboard in America meant the possibility of
all that has been stated; and therefore, slowly and unwillingly, but
surely, the apprehension of war with its added burden forced the
Government to a concession which years of intermittent commercial
restrictions by the United States, and of Opposition denunciation at
home, had not been able to extort. The sudden death of Spencer
Perceval, the prime minister identified with the Orders in Council,
possibly facilitated the issue, but it had become inevitable by sheer
pressure of circumstances as they developed. It came to pass, by a
conjuncture most fortu