her Peninsula veterans with heavy slaughter at New Orleans.  Impressment was not mentioned in the treaty which concluded that war, but it ended at that time.  The English are a brave and combative people, but rather than get into wars with nations that will fight, and fight hard, they will desist from wanton and illegal aggressions, in which they do not differ greatly from the rest of mankind; and so the practical abandonment of impressment came with the war of 1812.  The fact was officially stated by Webster, not many years later, when he announced that the flag covered and protected all those who lived or traded under it.

But in 1794 impressment was a negotiable question, because we were not ready to go to war about it then and there.  So Jay, wisely enough, allowed this especial from of bullying to drift aside, along with the exclusion from the West India trade, and addressed himself to the two points which it was essential to have settled at that particular moment.  These questions were:  the retention of the western posts, and neutral rights at sea.  In return for the agreement on our part to pay the British debts, as determined by arbitration, England agreed to surrender the posts on June 1, 1796.  There was to be mutual reciprocity in inland trade on the North American continent; but coastwise, while we opened all our harbors and rivers to the British, they shut us out from theirs in the colonies and the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company.  In the eighteen articles, limited in duration to two years after the conclusion of the existing war, a treaty of commerce was practically formed and neutral rights dealt with.  We were to be admitted to British ports in Europe and the East Indies on terms of equality with British vessels, but we were refused admission to the East Indian coasting trade, and to that between East India and Europe.  We gained the right to trade to the West Indies, but only on condition that we should give up the transportation from America to Europe of any of the principal products of the colonies.  These were enumerated, and besides sugar, molasses, coffee, and cocoa, included cotton, which had just become an export from the southern States, and which already promised to assume the importance that it afterwards reached.  The vexed questions of privateers, prizes, and contraband of war were also settled and determined.

The treaty as a whole was not a very brilliant one for the United States, but its treatment was far worse than its deserts, and it was received with such a universal outburst of indignation that even to this day it has never freed itself from the bad name it then acquired.  Nobody, not even its supporters, liked it, and yet it may be doubted whether anything materially better was possible at the time.  The admirers of Hamilton, from that day to this, have believed that if he had been sent, his boldness, ability, and force would have wrung better terms from England.  This is not at all improbable; but that they would