ation and persecution because Congress failed to carry out the
pledge guaranteeing protection to the losing side in the Revolution.
Then, because Congress failed to carry out _her_ guarantee, England
delayed turning over the western fur posts to the United States for
almost ten years; and whether true or false, the suspicion became an
open charge that the hostility of the Indians to American frontiersmen
was fomented by the British fur trader.

Here, then, was cause for rankling anger on both sides, and the
bitterness was unwittingly increased by England's policy. It was hard
for the mother country to realize that the raw new nation of the United
States, child of her very flesh and blood, kindred in thought and
speech, was a power to be reckoned with, on even ground, looking on the
level, eye to eye; and not just a bumptious, underling nation, like a
boy at the hobbledehoy age, to be hectored and chaffed and bullied and
badgered and licked into shape, as a sort of protectorate appended to
English interests.

I once asked an Englishman why the English press was so virulently
hostile to one of the most brilliant of her rising men.

"Oh," he answered, "you must be English to understand that. We never
think it hurts a boy to be well ragged when he 's at school."

Something of that spirit was in England's attitude to the new nation of
the United States. England was hard pressed in life-and-death struggle
with Napoleon. To recruit both army and navy, conscription was rigidly
and ruthlessly enforced. Yet more! England claimed the right to
impress British-born subjects in foreign ports, to seize deserters in
either foreign ports or on foreign ships, and, most obnoxious of all,
to search neutral vessels on the ocean highway for deserters from the
British flag. It was an era of great brutality in military discipline.
Desertions were frequent. Also thousands of immigrants were flocking
to the new nation of the United States and taking out naturalization
papers. England ignored these naturalization papers when taken out by
deserters.

Let us see how the thing worked out. A passenger vessel is coming up
New York harbor. An English frigate with cannon pointed swings across
the course, signals the American vessel on American waters to slow up,
sends a young lieutenant with some marines across to the American
vessel, searches her from stem to stern, or compels the American
captain to read the roster of the crew, forcibl