The ultimate responsibility rested with these superiors, the Crown's high advisers, and the King and Parliament they represented.

Their treatment both of the Indians, whom they professed to protect, and of the Americans, with whom they professed to be friendly, forms one of the darkest pages in the annals of the British in America.

Yet they have been much less severely blamed for their behaviour in this matter, than for far more excusable offences.

American historians, for example, usually condemn them without stint because in 1814 the army of Ross and Cockburn burned and looted the public buildings of Washington; but by rights they should keep all their condemnation for their own country, so far as the taking of Washington is concerned; for the sin of burning a few public buildings is as nothing compared with the cowardly infamy of which the politicians of the stripe of Jefferson and Madison, and the people whom they represented, were guilty in not making ready, by sea and land, to protect their Capital and in not exacting full revenge for its destruction.

These facts may with advantage be pondered by those men of the present day who are either so ignorant or of such lukewarm patriotism that they do not wish to see the United States keep prepared for war and show herself willing and able to adopt a vigorous foreign policy whenever there is need of furthering American interests or upholding the honor of the American flag.