But their criticism went deeper than mere hatred of him: it
sprang from an inveterate hatred of England, which dated from before
the Revolution. Since the Treaty of 1783 the English seemed to act
deliberately with studied truculence, as if the Americans would not
and could not retaliate. They were believed to be instigating the
Indians to continuous underhand war. They had reached that dangerous
stage of truculence, when they did not think it mattered whether
they spoke with common diplomatic reticence. Lord Dorchester, the
Governor-General of Canada, and to-day better known as Sir Guy
Carleton, his name before they made him a peer, addressed a gathering
of Indian chiefs at Quebec on the assumption that war would come in a
few weeks. President Washington kept steady watch of every symptom,
and he knew that it would not require a large spark to kindle a
conflagration. "My objects are, to prevent a war," he wrote to Edmund
Randolph, on April 15, 1794, "if justice can be obtained by fair and
strong representations (to be made by a special envoy) of the injuries
which this country has sustained from Great Britain in various ways,
to put it into a complete state of military defence, and to provide
_eventually_ for such measures as seem to be now pending in
Congress for execution, if negotiations in a reasonable time proves
unsuccessful.
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