The chief business before the new ministry was to arrange terms of peace. England wished to free the Americans from French influence and to establish good relations with them by a separate negotiation. Vergennes hoped to delay the acknowledgment of independence until a general peace, intending that France should compensate Spain for her disappointment with respect to Gibraltar by securing for her the sole navigation of the Mississippi and that the United States should be enclosed by the Alleghanies. The American commissioners found that France regarded the success of the revolution, the result of her own work, with jealousy, and wished to shut them out from the Newfoundland fishery and from extension on the west and north. On the other hand, England acknowledged American independence on September 27, and showed herself inclined to meet their demands in a friendly spirit. Accordingly, without consulting the French ministers, they signed preliminaries of peace on November 30, the treaty to be concluded when terms were arranged between England and France. England acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States; the Mississippi was recognised as their boundary on the west, and on the north a line passing through the great lakes; and they secured a right to fish on the banks of Newfoundland and in the gulf of St. Lawrence. The American revolution was accomplished. Englishmen of all parties believed that the day of England's greatness was over. Yet the separation, bitter and humiliating as it was, taught her a lesson in colonial government which has rendered her empire strong as well as vast, while in place of discontented colonies with cramped energies, it laid the foundation of a mighty power bound to her by bonds which will grow in strength so long as the affairs of both Great Britain and the United States are wisely directed. It was a happy beginning of the relations between the two powers that it was through England, and not through their foreign allies, that the Americans obtained the gratification of their legitimate ambitions, and that from the peace with the United States England gained some advantage in treating with her continental foes.