“The failure of our business with Spain and the knowledge of the renewal of the negotiation and the manner of it, which were known to every one, were sensibly felt in our concerns with England. She was not willing to yield any portion of what she called her maritime rights, under the light pressure of the non-importation law, to a Power which had no maritime force, not even sufficient to protect any one of its ports against a small squadron, and which had so recently submitted to great injuries and indignities from Powers that had not a single ship at sea. Under such circumstances, it seemed to me to be highly for the interest of our country and to the credit of our government to get out of the general scrape on the best terms we could, and with that view to accommodate our differences with the great maritime Power on what might be called fair and reasonable conditions, if such could be obtained. I had been slighted, as I thought, by the Administration in getting no answers to my letters for an unusual term, and in being subjected to a special mission, nothwithstanding my remonstrance against it on a thorough conviction of its inutility, and by other acts which I could not but feel; yet believing that my service in England would be useful there, and by means thereof give aid to the Administration and to the Republican cause at home, I resolved to stay, and did stay for those purposes. The treaty was an honorable and advantageous adjustment with England. I adopted it in the firm belief that it was so, and nothing has since occurred to change that opinion.” CHAPTER XVIII. MONROE was singularly unfortunate in diplomacy. His disasters came not in any ordinary form of occasional defeat or disappointment, but in waves and torrents of ill-luck. No diplomatist in American history, except Monroe and Pinkney, ever signed a treaty in flagrant contradiction to orders, and at the same time submitted to be told that the opposite party to the contract reserved a right to break it; but if any other man had taken such a step it would have answered for a lifetime, and his mortifications would have ended there. No one could assume that the British ministry would care to do more, pending the ratification of its own treaty. Fox’s successor, one of the most liberal Whig noblemen, having imposed on the United States terms which would have been hard as the result of war, with the addition that even these terms were conditional on a declaration of hostilities between the United States and France, the liberal Whigs might be supposed willing to wait for some new pretext before publicly tearing their own treaty to pieces.