equivalents. Moreover it seems that he cherished an
odd, half-defined notion, apparently altogether peculiar to himself,
that he might escape the humiliation of a grant of full independence,
and in place thereof might devise some sort of "federal union." Perhaps
it was out of this strange fancy that there grew at this time a story
that the States were to be reconciled and joined to Great Britain by a
gift of the same measure of autonomy enjoyed by Ireland.

When Oswald and Franklin next met, they made at first little progress;
each seemed desirous to keep himself closed while the other unfolded.
The result was that Franklin wrote, with unusual _naivete_: "On the
whole I was able to draw so little of the sentiments of Lord Shelburne
... that I could not but wonder at his being again sent to me." At the
same time Grenville was offering to de Vergennes to acknowledge the
independence of the United States, provided that in other respects the
treaty of 1763[81] should be reinstated. That is to say, France was to
agree to a complete restoration of the _status quo ante bellum_ in every
respect so far as her own interests were concerned, and to accept as
the entire recompense for all her expenditures of money and blood a
benefit accruing to the American States. This was a humorous assumption
of the ingenuousness of her most disinterested protestations. The French
minister, we are told, "seemed to smile" at this compliment to the
unselfishness of his chivalrous nation,[82] and replied that the
American States were making no request to England for independence. As
Franklin happily expressed it: "This seems to me a proposition of
selling to us a thing that was already our own, and making France pay
the price they [the English] are pleased to ask for it." But the design
of weaning the States from France, in the treating, was obvious.

[Note 81: Made between England and France at the close of the last
war, in which France had lost Canada.]

[Note 82: "The Peace Negotiations of 1782-83," etc., by John Jay; in
Winsor's _Narr. and Crit. Hist. of America_, vol. vii.]

Grenville, thus checked, next tried to see what he could do with
Franklin in the way of separate negotiation. But he only elicited a
statement that the States were under no obligations save those embodied
in the treaties of alliance and commerce with France, and a sort of
intimation, which might be pregnant of much or of little, that if the
purpose of the former were a