The British Empire and the United States Author:William Archibald Dunning Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BRITISH EMPIRE THE UNITED STATES CHAPTER I READJUSTMENT AFTER WAR In the late afternoon of December 24, 1814, the commissioners who had agreed upon... more » the Treaty of Ghent signed their handiwork and exchanged conventional expressions of satisfaction at the conclusion of their labors. John Quincy Adams, as he tells us in his diary, assured Lord Gambier of his hope that it would be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States. Two weeks later, at a banquet given by the citizens in honor of the commissioners, Mr. Adams, proposing the culminating toast of the occasion, worded it thus: "Ghent, the city of Peace; may the gates of the temple of Janus, here closed, not be opened again for a century!"It is not likely that a conscientious search of his heart, such as Mr. Adams was wont to engage in at times, would have revealed any very large measure of the confidence that his formal words had implied. Neither in the course of the negotiations nor in their result could the most sanguine observer have found assurance of even the lesser degree of permanence that had been piously suggested. Actual war between English-speaking peoples the treaty did indeed bring to an end; the causes of the war it did not make the subject of even a remote allusion. By all the canons of judgment that were warranted by history and by the conditions of the times, the peace made at Ghent could be merely a truce. Great Britain in 1815 stood on the pinnacle of fame as the mightiest political power on earth. Her population of 19,000,000 was not large, relatively speaking, but it was compact. Included in it were some 5,000,000 Irishmen, who, though perpetually troublesome in 5Qrneresgects, could always be depended upon to furnish a goodly quota of both brains and brawn in war. Her n...« less