The War with the United States | Page 8

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 shipbuilding was such an unwelcome truth to the British people that they would not believe it till the American frigates drove it home with shattering broadsides. But it was a very old truth, for all that. Nelson's captains, and those of still earlier wars, had always competed