y with Great
Britain. The formation of the Federal Government, 1788-90, gave to the
Union a political stability it had hitherto lacked, removing elements
of weakness and dissensions, and of consequent impotence in foreign
relations; the manifestation of which since the acknowledgment of
independence had justified alike the hopes of enemies and the
forebodings of friends. Settled conditions being thus established at
home, with institutions competent to regulate a national commerce,
internal and external, as well as to bring the people as a whole into
fixed relations with foreign communities, there was laid the
foundations of a swelling prosperity to which the several parts of the
country jointly contributed. The effects of these changes were soon
shown in a growing readiness on the part of other nations to enter
into formal compacts with us. Of this, the treaty negotiated by John
Jay with Great Britain, in 1794, is the most noteworthy instance;
partly because it terminated one long series of bickerings with our
most dangerous neighbor, chiefly because the commercial power of the
state with which it was contracted had reached a greater eminence, and
exercised wider international effect, than any the modern world had
then seen.

Whatever the merits of the treaty otherwise, therefore, the
willingness of Great Britain to enter into it at all gave it an
epochal significance. Since independence, commercial intercourse
between the two peoples had rested on the strong compelling force of
natural conditions and reciprocal convenience, the true foundation,
doubtless, of all useful relations; but its regulation had been by
municipal ordinance of either state, changeable at will, not by
mutual agreement binding on both for a prescribed period. Since the
separation, this condition had seemed preferable to Great Britain,
which, as late as 1790, had evaded overtures towards a commercial
arrangement.[54] Her consenting now to modify her position was an
implicit admission that in trade, as in political existence, the
former mother country recognized at last the independence of her
offspring. The latter, however, was again to learn that independence,
to be actual, must rest on something stronger than words, and surer
than the acquiescence of others. This was to be the lesson of the
years between 1794 and 1815, administered to us not only by the
preponderant navy of Great Britain, but by the petty piratical fleets
of the Barbary powers.