But it was soon followed by the retention of the lake forts which fell into British hands during the Revolutionary War, and which, by the terms of the treaty, were to be surrendered. Instead of surrendering them according to the stipulations of the treaty, they held them, and not only occupied them for thirteen years, but used them as storehouses and magazines from which the Indians were fed and clothed and armed and encouraged to tomahawk and scalp Americans without regard to age or sex. And then followed a series of orders in council, by which the commerce of the United States was almost swept from the seas, and their sailors forcibly taken from American ships to serve on British. These orders in council were so frequent that it seemed as if the French on one side of the British Channel and the English on the other were hurling decrees and orders at one another for their own amusement while inflicting dire injuries on other nations, and especially the Americans. Had it not been for these hostile acts of the British there would have been no War of 1812. Had they continued to treat the young republic with the justice and liberality to which they agreed in fixing its western boundary in the treaty of 1783, no matter what their motive may have been, there would have been no cause for war between the two countries. The Americans had hardly recovered from the wounds inflicted in the Revolutionary War. They were too few and too weak and too poor to go to war with such a power as England, and moreover wanted a continuance of the peace by which they were adding to the population and wealth of their country. What they had acquired in the quarter of a century since the end of the Revolutionary War was but little in comparison with the accumulations of England during long centuries, and they were not anxious to risk their all in a conflict with such a power; but young and weak and few as they were, they belonged to that order of human beings who hold their rights and their honor in such high regard that they can not continuously be insulted and injured without retaliation. The time came when they resolved to bear the burdens of war rather than submit to unjustice and dishonor.