"
What was the response to these fair and sensible suggestions? On the
first point the assent was ready enough; but on the other two, which
looked to the carrying out of the treaty and the making of a treaty of
commerce, there was no satisfaction. Morris, who was as high-spirited
as he was able, was irritated by the indifference and hardly concealed
insolence shown to him and his business. It was the fit beginning of
the conduct by which England for nearly a century has succeeded in
alienating the good-will of the people of the United States. Such a
policy was neither generous nor intelligent, and politically
it was a gross blunder. Washington, however, was too great
a man to be disturbed by the bad temper and narrow ideas
of English ministers. After his fashion he persevered in
what he knew to be right and for his country's interest, and in due
time a diplomatic representation was established, while later still,
in the midst of difficulties of which he little dreamed at the outset,
he carried through a treaty that removed the existing grievances. In a
word, he kept the peace, and it lasted long enough to give the United
States the breathing space they so much needed at the beginning of
their history.
The greatest perils in our foreign relations came, as it happened,
from another quarter, where peace seemed most secure, and where no man
looked for trouble. The government of the United States and the French
revolution began almost together, and it is one of the strangest facts
of history that the nation which helped so powerfully to give freedom
to America brought the results of that freedom into the gravest peril
by its own struggle for liberty.
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