When Lord North at his office in London heard the dismal news, he walked up and down the room, wringing his hands and crying, "O God, it is all over!" Yorktown was indeed decisive. In the course of the winter the British lost Georgia. The embers of Indian warfare still smouldered on the border, but the great War for Independence was really at an end. The king's friends had for some time been losing strength in England, and Yorktown completed their defeat. In March, 1782, Lord North's ministry resigned. A succession of short-lived ministries followed; first, Lord Rockingham's, until July, 1782; then Lord Shelburne's, until February, 1783; then, after five weeks without a government, there came into power the strange Coalition between Fox and North, from April to December. During these two years the king was trying to intrigue with one interest against another so as to maintain his own personal government. With this end in view he tried the bold experiment of dismissing the Coalition and making the young William Pitt prime minister, without a majority in Parliament. After a fierce constitutional struggle, which lasted all winter, Pitt dissolved Parliament, and in the new election in May, 1784, obtained the greatest majority ever given to an English minister. But the victory was Pitt's and the people's, not the king's. This election of 1784 overthrew all the cherished plans of George III. in pursuance of which he had driven the American colonies into rebellion. It established cabinet government more firmly than ever, so that for the next seventeen years the real ruler of Great Britain was William Pitt. CHAPTER VIII. BIRTH OF THE NATION. [Sidenote: The treaty of peace, 1782-83.] The year 1782 was marked by great victories for the British in the West Indies and at Gibraltar. But they did not alter the situation in America. The treaty of peace by which Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States was made under Lord Shelburne's ministry in the autumn of 1782, and adopted and signed by the Coalition on the 3d of September, 1783. The negotiations were carried on at Paris by Franklin, Jay, and John Adams, on the part of the Americans; and they won a diplomatic victory in securing for the United States the country between the Alleghany mountains and the Mississippi river. This was done against the wishes of the French government, which did not wish to see the United States become too powerful. At the same time Spain recovered Minorca and the Floridas. France got very little except the satisfaction of having helped in diminishing the British empire. [Sidenote: Troubles with the army, 1781-83.]