The War with the United States | Page 8

even among the regulars, and then in
a most haphazard way. Among the militia these indispensable branches
of the service were never really organized at all.
Such disastrous shortcomings were not caused by any lack of national
resources. The population o the United States was about eight millions,
as against eighteen millions in the British Isles. Prosperity was general;

at all events, up to the time that it was checked by Jefferson's Embargo
Act. The finances were also thought to be most satisfactory. On the
very eve of war the Secretary of the Treasury reported that the national
debt had been reduced by forty-six million dollars since his party had
come into power. Had this 'war party' spent those millions on its Army
and Navy, the war itself might have had an ending more satisfactory to
the United States.
Let us now review the forces on the British side.
The eighteen million people in the British Isles were naturally anxious
to avoid war with the eight millions in the United States. They had
enough on their hands as it was. The British Navy was being kept at a
greater strength than ever before; though it was none too strong for the
vast amount of work it had to do. The British Army was waging its
greatest Peninsular campaign. All the other naval and military services
of what was already a world-wide empire had to be maintained. One of
the most momentous crises in the world's history was fast approaching;
for Napoleon, arch-enemy of England and mightiest of modern
conquerors, was marching on Russia with five hundred thousand men.
Nor was this all. There were troubles at home as well as dangers abroad.
The king had gone mad the year before. The prime minister had
recently been assassinated. The strain of nearly twenty years of war
was telling severely on the nation. It was no time to take on a new
enemy, eight millions strong, especially one who supplied so many
staple products during peace and threatened both the sea flank of the
mother country and the land flank of Canada during war.
Canada was then little more than a long, weak line of settlements on the
northern frontier of the United States. Counting in the Maritime
Provinces, the population hardly exceeded five hundred thousand--as
many people, altogether, as there were soldiers in one of Napoleon's
armies, or Americans enlisted for service in this very war. Nearly
two-thirds of this half-million were French Canadians in Lower Canada,
now the province of Quebec. They were loyal to the British cause,
knowing they could not live a French-Canadian life except within the
British Empire. The population of Upper Canada, now Ontario, was

less than a hundred thousand. The Anglo-Canadians in it were of two
kinds: British immigrants and United Empire Loyalists, with sons and
grandsons of each. Both kinds were loyal. But the 'U.E.L.'s' were
anti-American through and through, especially in regard to the
war-and-Democratic party then in power. They could therefore be
depended on to fight to the last against an enemy who, having driven
them into exile once, was now coming to wrest their second
New-World home from its allegiance to the British crown. They and
their descendants in all parts of Canada numbered more than half the
Anglo-Canadian population in 1812. The few thousand Indians near the
scene of action naturally sided with the British, who treated them better
and dispossessed them less than the Americans did. The only
detrimental part of the population was the twenty-five thousand
Americans, who simply used Canada as a good ground for exploitation,
and who would have preferred to see it under the Stars and Stripes,
provided that the change put no restriction on their business
opportunities.
The British Navy. About thirty thousand men of the British Navy, only
a fifth of the whole service, appeared within the American theatre of
war from first to last. This oldest and greatest of all navies had recently
emerged triumphant from an age-long struggle for the command of the
sea. But, partly because of its very numbers and vast heritage of fame,
it was suffering acutely from several forms of weakness. Almost twenty
years of continuous war, with dull blockades during the last seven, was
enough to make any service 'go stale.' Owing to the enormous losses
recruiting had become exceedingly and increasingly difficult, even
compulsory recruiting by press-gang. At the same time, Nelson's
victories had filled the ordinary run of naval men with an over-weening
confidence in their own invincibility; and this over-confidence had
become more than usually dangerous because of neglected gunnery and
defective shipbuilding. The Admiralty had cut down the supply of
practice ammunition and had allowed British ships to lag far behind
those of other nations in material and design. The general inferiority of
British