British frigates, like other frigates, could safely fight only their inferiors in force.  What applied to the Guerriere and Macedonian against the Constitution and United States, where the British force was inferior, applied equally to the Frolic against the Wasp, where no inferiority could be shown.  The British newspapers thenceforward admitted what America wished to prove, that, ship for ship, British were no more than the equals of Americans.

Society soon learned to take a more sensible view of the subject; but as the first depression passed away, a consciousness of personal wrong took its place.  The United States were supposed to have stabbed England in the back at the moment when her hands were tied, when her existence was in the most deadly peril and her anxieties were most heavy.  England never could forgive treason so base and cowardice so vile.  That Madison had been from the first a tool and accomplice of Bonaparte was thenceforward so fixed an idea in British history that time could not shake it.  Indeed, so complicated and so historical had the causes of war become that no one even in America could explain or understand them, while Englishmen could see only that America required England as the price of peace to destroy herself by abandoning her naval power, and that England preferred to die fighting rather than to die by her own hand.  The American party in England was extinguished; no further protest was heard against the war; and the British people thought moodily of revenge.

This result was unfortunate for both parties, but was doubly unfortunate for America, because her mode of making the issue told in her enemy’s favor.  The same impressions which silenced in England open sympathy with America, stimulated in America acute sympathy with England.  Argument was useless against people in a passion, convinced of their own injuries.  Neither Englishmen nor Federalists were open to reasoning.  They found their action easy from the moment they classed the United States as an ally of France, like Bavaria or Saxony; and they had no scruples of conscience, for the practical alliance was clear, and the fact proved sufficiently the intent....

The loss of two or three thirty-eight-gun frigates on the ocean was a matter of trifling consequence to the British government, which had a force of four ships-of-the-line and six or eight frigates in Chesapeake Bay alone, and which built every year dozens of ships-of-the-line and frigates to replace those lost or worn out; but although American privateers wrought more injury to British interests than was caused or could be caused by the American navy, the pride of England cared little about mercantile losses, and cared immensely for its fighting reputation.  The theory that the American was a degenerate Englishman—­a theory chiefly due to American teachings—­lay at the bottom of British politics.  Even the late British minister at Washington, Foster, a man of average intelligence,