mong the States,
prohibiting embargoes or commercial warfare, or the election of
successive Presidents from the same State, and requiring a two-thirds
vote of Congress to admit new States or declare war. This was meant
for an ultimatum; and it was generally understood that, if the Federal
government did not submit to these terms, the New England States would
secede to {235} rid themselves of what they considered the intolerable
oppression of Virginian misgovernment.

Such was the state of things in the winter of 1815. The administration
of Madison had utterly failed to secure any of the ends of the war, to
inflict punishment on Great Britain, or to conquer Canada. It had also
utterly failed to maintain financial solvency, to enlist an army, to
create a navy capable of keeping the sea, or to prevent a movement in
New England which seemed to be on the verge of breaking the country
into pieces. But to lay this miserable failure--for such only can it
be called--to the personal discredit of Jefferson and Madison is
unfair, for it was only the repetition under new governmental
conditions of the old traditional colonial method of carrying on war as
a local matter. The French and Indian War, the Revolution, and the War
of 1812, repeated in different generations the same tale of amateur
warfare, of the occasional success and usual worthlessness of the
militia, the same administrative inefficiency, and the same financial
breakdown. Without authority and obedience, there can be carried on no
real war; and authority and obedience were no more known and no better
appreciated in 1812 than they had been in the days of Washington.
Jefferson, Madison, {236} and their party had gone with the current of
American tradition; that was their only fault.

CHAPTER XII

END OF THE ANTAGONISM: A CENTURY OF PEACE

When the American war began, the English showed a tendency to blame the
Tory administration for permitting it to take place; but the chief
feeling, after all, was one of annoyance at Madison and his party for
having decided to give their assistance to Napoleon at the crisis of
his career. The intercourse between Englishmen and New England
Federalists had given British society its understanding of American
politics and coloured its natural irritation toward the Republican
administration with something of the deeper venom of the outraged New
Englanders, who saw in Jefferson and his successors a race of
half-Jacobins. Dur