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."[1] [Footnote 1: Ford, XIII, 4-9.] The year 1794 marked the sleepless anxiety of the Silent President.
Day and night his thoughts were in London, with Jay.

He said little; he had few letters from Jay--it then required from eight to ten weeks for the mail clippers to make a voyage across the Atlantic.