THE recent march of events has given a peculiar importance to this
volume in the Canadian American Series. Never was the old Greek say-
ing that history is philosophy teaching by experience more applicable to
any section of the annals of the New World than to the story which is
unfolded in these pages. The theme is that of the continuing relation
with Great Britain and its colonies of the newly established United
States of America, which had formerly been the most important part of
the overseas empire. The recognition of American sovereignty by the
British government upon which the American commissioners concen-
trated their diplomatic effort in the peace negotiations left many ques-
tions unsettled. There was above all the delimitation of the frontiers
running through untracked wildernesses where the forgotten men of the
negotiations, the American Indians, bitterly fought back against the
advancing settlement. There was the commercial conflict of the mercan-
tile system in which England had so large an initial advantage, and there
was the continued use of the old military system with its mercenary sol-
diers and impressed seamen. More difficult still were the problems of the
North Atlantic fisheries, which had plagued the relations of half a dozen
European and North American communities since the end of the fifteenth
century, and some of which have not yet been satisfactorily settled. The
full story of the international economy thus involved has been set forth in
another volume of this series, The Cod Fisheries, by Professor H. A. Innis
. Finally, there were habits of mind shaped on the one hand by
imperial and commercial needs and on the other hand by the challenge of
the greatest opportunity that had ever opened before any people in his-
tory. Under these circumstances it was perhaps inevitable that the path-
way should be marked by many blunders and that the misunderstandings
thus created should last on in the traditional history of both the United
States and the British Commonwealth of Nations. The application of the
scientific method to the historical research of these issues, which were so
hotly in debate and ultimately provoked another war, is in itself a contri-
bution to statecraft, because with impartial mind it explores the causes of
events in the terms in which they were presented to the actors them-
selves. Its judgments are not misplaced wishful thinking in the light of
the world today but the full statement of how things happened in their
own time, when men had other interests to keep in mind than those
which seem so important to us now.

War always leaves a heritage of misunderstanding; the period which
Professor Burt covers in this volume comprises two wars and deals with

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