Chatham's popularity, affected somewhat by his acceptance of a pension, had been greatly diminished when he went to the House of Lords, but now, when the country was in danger, all eyes were turned on him as the only man who could conceivably extract from the situation peace with honour. "If there be a man who has served this nation with honour to himself and glory to his country," said George Grenville the younger in the House of Commons on February 11, 1778, "if there be a man who has carried the arms of Britain triumphant to every quarter of the globe beyond the most sanguine expectations of the people, if there be a man of whom the House of Bourbon stands more particularly in awe; if there be a man in this country who unites the confidence of England and America, is not he the proper person to treat with Americans, and not those who have uniformly deceived and oppressed them? There is not one present who is ignorant of the person to whom I allude. You all know I mean a noble, near relation, Lord Chatham." Many years later an able historian, reviewing the situation, repeated in no uncertain tone the substance of the speech of the promising young statesman. "There was one man to whom, in this hour of panic and consternation, the eyes of all patriotic Englishmen were turned," Lecky has written. "In Chatham England possessed a statesman whose genius in conducting a war was hardly inferior to that of Marlborough in conducting an army. In France his name produced an almost superstitious terror."[171] [171] "I had the fortune [at Paris] to be treated with the sight of what, next to Mr. Pitt, has occasioned most alarm in France, the Beast of the Gévandon."--Walpole to Lady Mary Coke, 1765. In America it was pronounced with the deepest affection and reverence. He had, in the great French war, secured the Anglo-Saxon preponderance in the colonies; he had defended the colonies in every stage of their controversy about the Stamp Act, and had fascinated them by the splendour of his genius. If any statesman could at the last moment conciliate them, dissolve the new alliance, and kindle into flame the loyalist feeling which undoubtedly existed largely in America, it was Chatham. If, on the other hand, conciliation proved impossible, no statesman could for a moment be compared to him in the management of a war.[172] [172] Lecky: _History of England_. The state of affairs at home and abroad called for the strong hand of a great minister. British troops were confined in Philadelphia and New York; the navy had been starved; the commissariat of the troops in America was shamefully mismanaged. America, not slow to follow the example of the mother-country to employ foreign troops, signed a treaty with France, the ratification of which by Congress took place on May 4, 1778.