It is a commonplace to say that a war between Great Britain
and the United States would be unnatural, and that it should be
abhorrent to the people of both countries. The noteworthy thing
is that the same thing was being said over a hundred and forty
years ago, from the very moment that the United States became
independent. David Hartley, one of the British Commissioners,
for making the peace at the end of the War of Independence, wrote
from Paris to the Foreign Office: "Upon this argument I always
make my stand -- that we may proceed to open an intercourse
between our two countries, as nearly as possible, to the point of
as we were." ¹

Hartley recognized that there were many grounds for the con-
tinuance of friction, many unsettled questions, between Great
Britain and the newly freed United States. But he held that these
things could be left to be treated with the anodyne of time -- "until
the national sentiments and dispositions of the two countries
towards each other shall have had sufficient scope of time, in a
pacific season, to develop and to explain themselves."

It is with this process that the present book deals, the process
through which time and mutual forbearance have combined to
clear away all obstacles to peaceful intercourse. One by one
difficulties have been approached, handled, laid down, taken up
again, eventually solved. Hartley was right when he said: "The
Americans are an enlightened people. Every actual interest that
prevails in America depends upon peace and the arts of peace . . .
and above all things a system of war with a British power in America
must be abhorrent to them." The last hundred years and more
have proved this.

Whether the two peoples will ever go farther than the establish-
ment of cordial, good relations, no historian should be rash enough
to predict. George Louis Beer, the first historian to place the
relations of Great Britain and America, before the War of

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