gave to France the excuse of
retaliation. There was, however, vast difference in the practical
effect of the British and French decrees. The former wrought serious
injury, falling little short of total destruction, to American
shipping and commerce; the latter were only in a much less degree
hurtful. The immense naval power of England and the channels in which
our trade naturally flowed combined to make her destructive capacity
as towards us very great. It was the outrages inflicted by her which
brought the merchants of the United States face to face with ruin;
they suffered not very greatly at the hands of Napoleon. Neither could
the villainous process of impressment be conducted by Frenchmen. (p. 047)
France gave us cause for war, but England seemed resolved to drive us
into it.

As British aggressions grew steadily and rapidly more intolerable, Mr.
Adams found himself straining farther and farther away from those
Federalist moorings at which, it must be confessed, he had long swung
very precariously. The constituency which he represented was indeed in
a quandary so embarrassing as hardly to be capable of maintaining any
consistent policy. The New England of that day was a trading
community, of which the industry and capital were almost exclusively
centred in ship-owning and commerce. The merchants, almost to a man,
had long been the most Anglican of Federalists in their political
sympathies. Now they found themselves suffering utterly ruinous
treatment at the hands of those whom they had loved overmuch. They
were being ruthlessly destroyed by their friends, to whom they had
been, so to speak, almost disloyally loyal. They saw their business
annihilated, their property seized, and yet could not give utterance
to resentment, or counsel resistance, without such a humiliating
devouring of all their own principles and sentiments as they could by
no possibility bring themselves to endure. There was but one road open
to them, and that was the ignoble one of casting themselves wholly (p. 048)
into the arms of England, of rewarding her blows with caresses, of
submitting to be fairly scourged into a servile alliance with her. It
is not surprising that the independent temper of Mr. Adams revolted at
the position which his party seemed not reluctant to assume at this
juncture. Yet not very much better seemed for a time the policy of the
administration. Jefferson was far from being a man for troubled
seasons, which called for