QUESTIONS.

1. Describe the colonial systems of Europe one hundred years ago.

2. What effect did the independence of the United States have upon their commercial relations with England?

3. What were the difficulties between the two countries in 1793 ?

4. What did Russia and England agree to do in a treaty made in 1793?

5. What was the English provision order?

6. What would submission to it have been equivalent to?
7. Why did France relax her colonial system when she was

engaged in war with England?

8. What was the rule of the war of 1756?

9. Was it just from the European point of view?

10. What order in council did England issue in November, 1793?

11. What was the Republican substitute for war?
12. Why did they object to war?

13. What did Jefferson recommend in his report on commerce?

14. What were Madison's resolutions?

15. What were the noteworthy features in the debate upon them?

16. For what purpose did the Federalists recommend a navy?

17. Why did the Republicans oppose it?
18. What was the foreign enlistment Act?

THE

CHAPTER XIII.

JAY'S TREATY.

Objects of Jay's

HE PRECEDING chapter has told of the injuries inflicted upon the United States by England in detaining ships laden with provisions for France, and in enforcing the rule of the war of 1756. In addition to these, the United States justly mission. complained of the British doctrine of blockade, which England had been enforcing against this country since the outbreak of the war with France. The same day the famous provision order was issued (June 8, 1793), English ships of war and privateers were commanded to capture a ship anywhere on the high seas whose papers showed that she was on the way to a port declared to be blockaded, provided the declaration of the blockade was known in the country from which she sailed before the time of her departure. To obtain redress for these grievances, to prevent their recurrence in the future, to adjust the points of difference growing out of the treaty of peace, were the primary objects of Jay's mission. If he was successful in these, he was to endeavor to negotiate a commercial treaty, but no treaty was to be made which was not consistent with our obligations to France.

He reached England in June, 1794, and succeeded

The treaty.

in negotiating a treaty in November. Of the various American claims, the treaty satisfied but one. The Northwestern posts were to be surrendered on or before June 1, 1796, but no compensation was to be made for their previous detention. Three commissions were provided for: one, to settle the Northeast boundary; another, to fix the amount of debts due to British citizens which the obstruction of justice had made it impossible to collect, and which were to be paid by the United States; a third, to determine the amount due from Great Britian to citizens of the United States, for illegal captures and confiscations.

But Jay was unable to induce Lord Grenville, the English negotiator, to agree that provisions should in no case be regarded as contraband of war. On the contrary, the treaty clearly implied that provisions might in some cases be contraband, but provided that when they were taken as such they should be paid for. Nor was he able to secure an abandonment of the rule of the war of 1756, or of the so-called right of impressment.

It must be acknowledged that there were serious difficulties in the way of yielding the right to impress British sailors when they were found on board of American ships. England owed her greatness to her supremacy on the sea. But if British sailors could evade the duty of serving on British vessels of war by engaging in American vessels,

Impressment.

it seemed to English statesmen that that supremacy was seriously endangered. They were willing to admit that in exercising the right of impressing British seamen, injury had sometimes been inflicted, in that American born sailors had been mistaken for British citizens. But they contended that an abuse of the right was no sufficient reason for abandoning it, least of all when England was engaged in a war in which it was of the utmost importance for her to have command of all her resources. There was indeed, in one point, a fundamental difference between the American and the British view. England contended that a man had no right to renounce his allegiance that a man who was once a citizen could never become an alien, while the United States contended that a man born in any country, could by process of naturalization, become a citizen of the United States. In exercising the so-called right of impressment, then, England might claim the services of a British-born sailor who was a citizen of the United States in accordance with their laws. But whatever the abstract merits of the question, England would not renounce the right of searching American vessels for British sailors, nor would she acknowledge the principle that the goods of an enemy are safe on the vessels of a neutral.

The treaty provided that Americans should not accept commissions from the enemies of England against England, nor English from the enemies of America against America, and that citizens of either country, ac

cepting such commissions were to be regarded as pirates. It also provided that privateers of an enemy of either England or America should not be allowed to arm their ships, or sell their prizes in the ports of the other, but that ships of war of each of the contracting parties should be hospitably received in the ports of the other, and permitted to sell their prizes there. But it provided that none of its articles should be construed contrary to previous treaties of either party with other nations.

The best argument that has ever been made for the treaty was made by Jay when he transmitted it to the department of state. There "was no reason

Defects of the treaty.

to believe or conjecture," he said, "that one more favorable to us was attainable."

A

treaty which implied that provisions might sometimes be contraband of war, which secured no compensation for the negroes carried away at the close of the war, or indemnity for injuries suffered through the wrongful detention of the northwestern posts, which tacitly admitted the right of search, and of impressment, and the right to prevent any trade with the colonies of a nation engaged in war, which that nation did not allow in time of peace, might be preferable to war, but it would be difficult to defend it on any other grounds.

Bad as these features of the treaty were, they were by no means the worst in the eyes of the Republicans. In every disputed point, it rendered the French interpretation of the treaties between France and the United States im