Jay was successful in his mission, and early in the following year a treaty was laid before the Senate for ratification. This treaty provided that the posts which the British had retained should be given up to the Americans, and compensation made for illegal captures of American property; and the United States were to secure to the British creditor the proper means of collecting debts which had been contracted before the peace of 1783. It did not, however, prohibit the right of searching merchant vessels, and thus violated the favourite maxim of the Americans, that “free ships make free goods.” The treaty was not all that Washington himself desired; but as no better terms were to be had, he wisely resolved that, if the Senate approved of it, he would not withhold his signature. The country was in a state of angry excitement, and ready to reject rather than accept it, even before they knew the exact terms of the treaty, while the Senate, with closed doors, were discussing it and coming gradually to the decision that it should be ratified. At this moment an imperfect copy appeared in a newspaper, and Washington then ordered it to be published. This was like throwing a lighted brand among combustibles. The partisans of France assailed it with the utmost violence; an outcry was raised against it from one end of the Union to the other, as “a pusillanimous surrender of American rights, and a shameful breach of obligations to France.” City after city protested against it, and the popular feeling was expressing itself in acts of outrage and violence, when Washington, with the prompt decision of a wise governor, after protesting and remonstrating against such clauses of the treaty as he considered injurious to the American interests, settled the question by attaching his signature to the treaty. “As regards this treaty,” says Jared Sparkes in his Life of Washington, “time disappointed its enemies and more than satisfied its friends. It saved the country from a war, improved its commerce, and served in no small degree to lay the foundation of its durable prosperity. The great points which were said to be sacrificed or neglected—the impressment of seamen, neutral rights and colonial trade—have never yet been settled, and are never likely to be settled while England maintains the ascendancy she now holds on the ocean.”