As Spain was by this treaty compelled to break with Great Britain, they awaited only the arrival of the galleons from South America in order to provide for the security of their commerce and territory, and that of their distant possessions. Then would be the moment to make known the consummation of this alliance and to begin hostilities against the common enemy. But somehow Britain anticipated the designs of Spain, for the French with their characteristic impatience had divulged the secret in their communications to foreign courts, and a lively correspondence ensued between the countries, soon to be arrayed against each other in the war Carlos III. had so zealously wished to avoid. But there was no doubt in the minds of the Spanish king and his cabinet, that the British policy was one solely of conquest, that Britain recognized no other law than the aggrandizement of her power on land and her universal despotism on the ocean. Nor could it be doubted by any impartial onlooker that Britain had long cast covetous eyes upon the Spanish possessions in America, and had for a long time given Spain sufficient cause for grievance. The audacity of her privateers and pirates in their attacks upon the West Indies had not been forgotten; the colonies especially had reason to remember the numerous and criminal outrages to which they had been subjected at the hands of men openly or covertly breaking treaties that had been made and accepted by the two nations for the mutual protection of their merchantmen at sea. The leniency of Britain in dealing with the most notorious pirate of all, the scoundrel Morgan, whom she allowed to settle under the protection of her flag in Jamaica, to rise to social prominence, to be appointed to public offices of importance, and whom her king had finally distinguished by conferring upon him knighthood, had always been felt as acts of defiance. In the rapid exchange of notes during the period when the rupture between the two powers was daily coming nearer the suavity of diplomatic language was sometimes discarded for rather plain speech. When Britain proposed some regulations of the privileges of the British to cut logwood in Campeche, the king of Spain, through his minister, Wall, replied in a dispatch: "The evacuation of the logwood establishment is offered, if his Catholic majesty will assure to the English the logwood! He who avows that he has entered another man's house to seize his jewels says, 'I will go out of your house, if you will first give me what I am come to seize!'"