Moreover, the outcome of the American Civil War tended to revise the attitudes of the British Isles and America toward each other. Up to this time, their attention had been fixed on the conditions of their separation. Hostility seized on various acts performed or permitted by the British government which, rightly or wrongly, the American people considered acts of unfriendliness. These, as the Americans realized, they were hardly in a position to resent while the Civil War was in progress, although at one time war was very nearly declared against the British Isles.[169-2] When the Civil War was over, retaliation might have been undertaken. The American government had at its disposal a navy of over seven hundred vessels, of which over seventy were ironclads. It had an army of over one million seasoned men. The opportunity suggested itself as a proper time to payoff American grudges against the British Isles by annexing Canada. This would have been holding Canada blamable for the doings of another nation. To the credit of the Pan-Angles, President Grant successfully opposed the scheme.[169-3] Not only did the decade 1860-1870 mark the rise of the converging movement in the United States and in Canada, but the same decade saw the culmination and abatement of separating tendencies between {170} the two great powers of the Pan-Angle group, the British Isles and America. Since those days Pan-Angles have made progress in understanding the balance necessary between the separating and the converging impulses. Men have erred by emphasizing too strongly one side or the other. In America they cried out blindly for "centralization," or "states rights "--in ignorance that only by the complementary strengths of both central and local governments can our sort of people be governed in great masses. Among the Britannic peoples men favoured either British Isles ascendency, or colonial independence--ignorant that the first would as quickly destroy them as would the second. Either course would produce the independence of the younger nations and, through lack of strength to maintain that independence, the loss of it, possibly to some nation outside the Pan-Angle group. These American and Britannic extremists are now a diminishing minority.