d by Adams when
he arrived, but it was hard to persuade Franklin to accept this point
of view, for he was unwilling to believe anything so unworthy of his
admiring and admired French. Nevertheless, with his cautious shrewdness,
he finally yielded so far as to agree to see what might come out of
direct negotiations.

The rest was relatively easy. Of course there were difficulties and such
sharp differences of opinion that, even after long negotiation, some
matters had to be compromised. Some problems, too, were found insoluble
and were finally left without a settlement. But such difficulties as
did exist were slight in comparison with the previous hopelessness of
reconciling American and Spanish ambitions, especially when the latter
were supported by France. On the one hand, the Americans were the
proteges of the French and were expected to give way before the claims
of their patron's friends to an extent which threatened to limit
seriously their growth and development. On the other hand, they were
the younger sons of England, uncivilized by their wilderness life,
ungrateful and rebellious, but still to be treated by England as
children of the blood. In the all-important question of extent of
territory, where Spain and France would have limited the United States
to the east of the Alleghany Mountains, Great Britain was persuaded
without great difficulty, having once conceded independence to the
United States, to yield the boundaries which she herself had formerly
claimed--from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Mississippi River
on the west, and from Canada on the north to the southern boundary
of Georgia. Unfortunately the northern line, through ignorance and
carelessness rather than through malice, was left uncertain at various
points and became the subject of almost continuous controversy until the
last bit of it was settled in 1911.*

* See Lord Bryce's Introduction (p. xxiv) to W. A. Dunning.
"The British Empire and the United States" (1914).

The fisheries of the North Atlantic, for which Newfoundland served as
the chief entrepot, had been one of the great assets of North America
from the time of its discovery. They had been one of the chief prizes
at stake in the struggle between the French and the British for the
possession of the continent, and they had been of so much value that
a British statute of 1775 which cut off the New England fisheries was
regarded, even after the "intolerable acts"