Jay's Treaty, so-called from John Jay, who acted on behalf of the United States in negotiating the measure, secured a temporary and unsatisfactory adjustment of the differences between the United States and Great Britain. The fact that Washington was willing to approve the treaty, although dissatisfied with it, is its sufficient vindication, and the agreement on the part of England to surrender the western posts was no small advantage for the United States, especially in the impression which it produced on the Indians of the decline of British and the growth of American power. The worst features of the treaty were that it restricted the commerce of the United States, so far as concerned molasses, sugar, coffee, cocoa and cotton, the last-mentioned article being already a product of the United States, and that it failed to protect the seamen on American vessels against seizure and impressment by the British. It was, taken as a whole, a humiliating compact, and in its commercial provisions an abandonment of the principle which inspired the Boston Tea Party, and for which Americans had fought in the war of independence. The mutual freedom of intercourse and internal trading, including common navigation of the Mississippi, was advantageous only to Great Britain, which country, as subsequent events showed, had not given up hope of reconquering the trans-Ohio region, and carrying British dominion from the Lakes to Mobile. The United States had to do something, however, to show that the American Republic was not either secretly or openly an ally of the French Republic against the remainder of Europe, and while the Jay Treaty was not what Washington and the American people desired, it was all that England would agree to. As a _modus vivendi_ with our only dangerous neighbor it enabled the American people to devote to domestic development the energies which would otherwise have been expended in war, and to grasp the neutral carrying trade upon which war would have placed an embargo. England would doubtless have been gratified with any plausible excuse that would have enabled her to destroy American commerce, and to be without a rival on the Atlantic. Jay's Treaty prevented this, and England had to leave to her friends, the Barbary pirates, the work of preying on the American carrying trade in European waters.[2] These depredations were already so serious in 1794 that a bill was introduced in Congress, passed after some opposition, and cordially approved by President Washington, providing for a force of six frigates to protect American commerce from the corsairs. These frigates did splendid service later on, not only against the pirates, but also against the French and British.