On April 11, 1814, the British army under Wellington fought the last battle of the Peninsular War at Toulouse. Less than a hundred days later—on July 12—the Governor General of Canada reported that the first brigade of this army had readied Montreal, ready to undertake offensive operations against the United States. The rapidity of the transfer demonstrated not merely the flexibility of sea power and the remarkable lechnical ability of the British Admiralty, but also the stoical endurance of the British soldiers, many of whom had been fighting for six years in the Peninsula and who had now been shipped directly from France to Canada without even a glimpse of their native land. The Allied governments who overthrew Hitler in 1945 did not even contemplate in closely similar circumstances an equally rapid transference of force against Japan.
The British government, as well as the British people, was in a dangerous mood. England seethed with resentment against the United States. From the British point of view America was that hypocritical country which, while preaching liberty and democracy, had stabbed England in the back at the moment when she was fighting for her life against the undisguised tyranny and limitless oppression of the Napoleonic Empire. England was the nation which had acted with studied moderation toward her newly emancipated daughter country. England had had, of course, to insist on enforcement of the rules of blockade and of visit and search; she had had to continue to reclaim deserters, for these were matters on which (so she believed) depended her national existence. But in every other way she had been most considerate; under the threat of war she had rescinded the Orders in Council, and yet America had persisted in fighting. England believed America to be a deliberate and dangerous mischief-maker; she believed that America hoped to snatch iniquitous fruits—perhaps to annex Canada—in England’s hour of peril. Now that hour had passed and another hour had struck, and America would receive the treatment she deserved.
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