All who were concerned in the passage of the treaty were the subjects of the popular wrath. Jay was declared to be an "arch traitor," a "Judas who had betrayed his country with a kiss," and was burned in effigy in a dozen cities. Hamilton was stoned; the name of Washington was hooted, and the British flag dragged in the mud. Edmund Quincy, in the life of his father, says, "The fall of Bonaparte, although it occasioned as genuine joy to New England as to the mother country herself, did not bring with it absolutely unalloyed satisfaction." There was reason to apprehend that the English administration, triumphant over its gigantic foe, its army and navy released from the incessant service of so many years, might concentrate the whole of the empire upon the power which it regarded as a volunteer ally of its mighty enemy, and administer an exemplary chastisement. No doubt many Englishmen felt, with Sir Walter Scott, that "it was their business to give the Americans a fearful memento, that the babe unborn should have remembered," and there is as little question that infinite damage might have been done to our cities and seacoast and to the banks of our great rivers, had Great Britain employed her entire naval and military forces for that purpose. But happily the English people wisely refrained from an expenditure of blood and gold which could have no permanent good result, and which would only serve to exasperate passions and to prolong animosities which it was far wiser to permit to die out. It is not unlikely that the attention of English people had been so absorbed by the mighty conflict going on at their very doors that they had not much to spare for the distant and comparatively obscure fields across the Atlantic, and indeed the sentiments of the English people and the policy of English governments have never exhibited a spirit of revengefulness. The American war was but a slight episode in the great epic of the age. At any rate the English ministry were content to treat with the American commissioners at Ghent and to make a peace which left untouched the pretended occasion for the war, over in expressive silence, and peace was concluded, leaving "sailors' rights" the great watchword of the war party, substantially as they stood before hostilities began, except that our fishermen were deprived of the valuable privilege they enjoyed of catching and curing fish on the shores of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.[94] [94] Life of Josiah Quincy, p. 358.