t of the British Government rapidly waned in affairs American.
True, there still remained the valued establishments in the West Indies,
and the less considered British possessions on the continent to the
north of the United States. Meanwhile, there were occasional frictions
with America arising from uncertain claims drawn from the former
colonial privileges of the new state, or from boundary contentions not
settled in the treaty of peace. Thus the use of the Newfoundland
fisheries furnished ground for an acrimonious controversy lasting even
into the twentieth century, and occasionally rising to the danger point.
Boundary disputes dragged along through official argument, survey
commissions, arbitration, to final settlement, as in the case of the
northern limits of the State of Maine fixed at last by the Treaty of
Washington of 1842, and then on lines fair to both sides at any time in
the forty years of legal bickering. Very early, in 1817, an agreement
creditable to the wisdom and pacific intentions of both countries, was
reached establishing small and equal naval armaments on the Great Lakes.
The British fear of an American attack on Canada proved groundless as
time went on and was definitely set at rest by the strict curb placed by
the American Government upon the restless activities of such of its
citizens as sympathized with the followers of McKenzie and Papineau in
the Canadian rebellion of 1837[4].

None of these governmental contacts affected greatly the British policy
toward America. But the "War of 1812," as it is termed in the United
States, "Mr. Madison's War," as it was derisively named by Tory
contemporaries in Great Britain, arose from serious policies in which
the respective governments were in definite opposition. Briefly, this
was a clash between belligerent and neutral interests. Britain, fighting
at first for the preservation of Europe against the spread of French
revolutionary influence, later against the Napoleonic plan of Empire,
held the seas in her grasp and exercised with vigour all the accustomed
rights of a naval belligerent. Of necessity, from her point of view,
and as always in the case of the dominant naval belligerent, she
stretched principles of international law to their utmost interpretation
to secure her victory in war. America, soon the only maritime neutral of
importance, and profiting greatly by her neutrality, contested point by
point the issue of exceeded belligerent right as establ