rous shortcomings were not caused by any lack
of national resources. The population o the United States
was about eight millions, as against eighteen millions
in the British Isles. Prosperity was general; at all
events, up to the time that it was checked by Jefferson's
Embargo Act. The finances were also thought to be most
satisfactory. On the very eve of war the Secretary of
the Treasury reported that the national debt had been
reduced by forty-six million dollars since his party had
come into power. Had this 'war party' spent those millions
on its Army and Navy, the war itself might have had an
ending more satisfactory to the United States.

Let us now review the forces on the British side.

The eighteen million people in the British Isles were
naturally anxious to avoid war with the eight millions
in the United States. They had enough on their hands as
it was. The British Navy was being kept at a greater
strength than ever before; though it was none too strong
for the vast amount of work it had to do. The British
Army was waging its greatest Peninsular campaign. All
the other naval and military services of what was already
a world-wide empire had to be maintained. One of the most
momentous crises in the world's history was fast
approaching; for Napoleon, arch-enemy of England and
mightiest of modern conquerors, was marching on Russia
with five hundred thousand men. Nor was this all. There
were troubles at home as well as dangers abroad. The king
had gone mad the year before. The prime minister had
recently been assassinated. The strain of nearly twenty
years of war was telling severely on the nation. It was
no time to take on a new enemy, eight millions strong,
especially one who supplied so many staple products during
peace and threatened both the sea flank of the mother
country and the land flank of Canada during war.

Canada was then little more than a long, weak line of
settlements on the northern frontier of the United States.
Counting in the Maritime Provinces, the population hardly
exceeded five hundred thousand--as many people, altogether,
as there were soldiers in one of Napoleon's armies, or
Americans enlisted for service in this very war. Nearly
two-thirds of this half-million were French Canadians in
Lower Canada, now the province of Quebec. They were loyal
to the British cause, knowing they could not live a
French-Canadian life except within the British Empire.
The population of Upper Canada, n