The treaty which the British and American commissioners negotiated at Ghent and which they signed on December 24, 1814, is as instructive as it is humiliating to an American patriot. There are eleven articles to this treaty. These provided for a cessation of hostilities; for a boundary line; for public and private property and documents captured, or to be captured before the ratification of the treaty; for the red Indians of the frontier; for the negro slaves and the suppression of the black slave trade on the high seas. It provided for everything needful but one. The American Government had been forced to declare war because of a popular sentiment generated by the friends of the American seamen who had been forced into slavery by British press-gangs: the American naval seamen had fought as no naval seaman had ever fought before because they were fighting for “sailors’ rights”; but when the treaty of peace was written there was not one word in it about those rights--not one. The British ministers stubbornly refused to touch upon or even consider the subject of impressment, and the American commissioners, on the plea that the question was now “purely theoretical,”--that, the war in Europe being over, there would be no longer any occasion for impressment--the American commissioners, be it said, consented to omit the point. The real cause of the war was ignored in the treaty of peace. It is humiliating to a patriot to recall this fact, but it is equally humiliating to remember that the motto on the big burgee flaunted by Yankee cruisers read “_Free trade_ and Sailors’ Rights.” The rights of property were placed ahead of the rights of man. The sneer of the British historian Napier, when he referred to the Americans as “a people who (notwithstanding the curse of black slavery which clings to them, adding the most horrible ferocity _to the peculiar baseness of their mercantile spirit_, and rendering their republican vanity ridiculous) do, in their general government, uphold civil institutions that have startled the crazy despotisms of Europe”--this sneer was justified in its day, by the treaty of Ghent, as by the treatment accorded the unfortunate colored race.