In the second place, Great Britain was always at a disadvantage in negotiating with the United States, owing to her many vulnerable interests and her complicated foreign relations. The American Government was, so to speak, on the spot, concentrating on each point exclusive attention and undivided strength. The British Government was at a distance, with its eyes on all parts of the world, and remembering only too well how the first great quarrel with the United States had resulted in a world in arms against Great Britain. At each step in the endless chaffering British Ministers had to count the cost more anxiously than those who spoke for a young and strong nation, as a rule untrammeled by relations to other foreign Powers and as a rule, though not always, assured of public support in America in proportion to the firmness of their demands and the extent of their claims. [Sidenote: Canada was not one nation.] Lastly, it has often been said that Canada has grievously suffered through British diplomacy. This is to a large extent true, but one great reason has been that Canada, as it exists to-day, was not in existence when most of the boundary questions came up for settlement. The interests of a Dominion--except in potentiality--were not at stake, and there was no Canadian nation to make its voice heard. For two-thirds of a century after the United States became an independent nation, in the North-West the Hudson’s Bay Company or its rivals in the fur trade, on the Pacific coast the beginnings of a small separate British colony, were nearly all that was in evidence. Boundary questions in North America between Great Britain and the United States could be presented, and were presented, as of unequal value to the two parties. Any given area in dispute was portrayed as of vital importance to the United States, on the ground that it involved the limits of their homeland and their people’s heritage. The same area, it would be plausibly argued, was of little consequence to Great Britain as affecting only a distant corner of some one of the most remote and least known of her many dependencies. This was inevitable while Canada was in the making. Yet in spite of errors in diplomacy, and in spite of what on a review of all the conditions must fairly be judged to have been great and singular difficulties, the net result has been to secure for the Canadian nation a territory which most peoples on the world’s surface would regard as a great and a goodly inheritance. [Sidenote: Provisions in the 1783 treaty which referred to the Loyalists.]