Page:Anglo-American relations during the Spanish-American war (IA abz5883.0001.001.umich.edu).pdf/18

2 United States and Great Britain apart is essential in order to appreciate the force of their friendship engendered in the nineties and brought to fruition by the Spanish-American war.

The beginning of this anti-British antipathy is found in the inherent character of the early colonial settlers who, to a very marked degree, were composed of people too radical either in religion or politics or both to live peaceably in their original home. This characteristic of temperament, added to the facts that the colonists possessed almost exclusive control both in their local government and religion and that they were three thousand miles distant from the homeland, created an intense feeling of colonial authority and self-sufficiency. The result was the development of a new theory of colonial rights and privileges which led the colonists eventually into the Revolution. Great Britain thus became recognized by the Americans not as the most lenient and beneficent colonizing nation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as a tyrant and an oppressor of subject states. This interpretation, due to the force of tradition and faulty methods of instruction, has tended to continue among the mass of the American people ever since.

With the establishment of peace in 1783 the Americans found that their relations to their former mother country had changed in a significant, and not altogether favourable way. The same war which had brought them independence had also deprived them of the special rights and privileges of trade which they had enjoyed as members of the British empire. Besides this, the British still held the western forts;